“Oh, there’s no want here in that way,” said Archie. He took out a card case from his pocket, and took a piece of paper from it. “Here is something my father gave me this morning, for extra expenses he said. I told him I had no extra expenses, but it was no use. And I don’t know what to do with it,” Archie said; “you can’t buy anything at Rosmore. I’ll pay it into my bank, which is his bank too, and there it will lie.”
“Good life, Rowland! No use!” cried Eddy, with eager eyes fixed upon the cheque. He took it out of his companion’s hand, and examined it, gloating over every line. “One hundred pounds, James Rowland,” he cried. “I wish I had a few signatures like that. I wish he’d take a few pieces of paper out of his pocket of this description and offer them to me.”
“I dare say he would,” said Archie, calmly, “if he knew you were in such great need of them; but you are just romancing on that score.”
“Romancing!” cried Eddy. “I romancing! It shows how little you know. You can’t think, Rowland, what temptations a young fellow is subjected to. And then all sorts of harpies about, thirsting for your blood. Before you know where you are, they’ve got you hard and fast, and after that you never dare call your soul your own. Why this fellow John——, I mean a man in London, has got his horrid thumb on me!—Romancing!” cried Eddy, “I’d give my little finger for a bit of paper like that—and one a day as long as they lasted for ever and ever.”
To see Archie’s countenance while his companion was speaking was an experience in its way. He raised himself erect the first minute out of his habitual lounging and careless attitude. His brow cleared more and more. He pushed his hat back, revealing it with the heavy ruddy hair, pushed back too, and standing up in a thick crest: his eyes so often overcast, or gleaming out in sudden gleams, half-timorous half-defiant, were bent steadily upon Eddy’s face with something celestial in their blueness—his mother’s eyes. He had never looked out upon the world so openly, so free, with so little self-consciousness, since the first day when his father’s heart had risen at the first look of him in the humble parlour at Sauchiehall Road; and there was something of a new-developed soul, something higher, something deeper in that look now.
“Would ye that?” he said, in his native tone and accent. He took up the paper where Eddy had laid it down, spread out upon the ling for admiration. “Your little finger would be of no use to me,” he said; “but if ye want this so much, and I don’t want it at all, take it, Saumarez. You are very welcome to it, and it’s little use to me.”
Eddy raised his eyes suddenly, with a gleam of eager covetousness, to the other’s face. They were hazel eyes, with a peculiar reddish gleam, and flashed out like lanterns on the steadfast blue of Archie’s look. Then a flush came over his face, and his eyelids, which were full and in many folds, went over these two lamps like curtains drawn. “Rowland, you cover me with shame,” he said, in a voice only half audible, trembling in the air.
“What for?” said Archie: as his countenance brightened, his tone went back more and more to that obnoxious Glasgow, which his father so disliked to hear. But though it was Glasgow, there was the very soul of music in Archie’s voice. It became soft and round and dewy and liquid, with the qualities of all melting things in one. “What for? when you want it so much, and me not at all. I have nothing to do with it; and you——”
“I have a hundred things to do with it,” cried Eddy, “if I could only tell you!—if you would only understand! But you wouldn’t—an honest fellow like you, that never had a thought you were ashamed of. Oh, yes, it’s life or death, that is about what it is! I could perhaps grapple on, and struggle out. Perhaps—I don’t know if it would be enough—— Oh, I say, Rowland, it’s too great a temptation. Put it away, back in your pocket. What does it matter what becomes of a wretched fellow like me!”
There was just enough reality in this struggle against himself to give to Eddy what was generally absent from his best endeavours—an air of truth. He did try to work himself up to the point of refusing this sudden windfall which had dropped into his very hand.