‘I can see no reason,’ he said, ‘why I could not do all that, and yet live where I am.’
‘That is because you love the streets,’ said his mother. ‘I know: oh, I did not require that you should tell me. You like the movement and the noise and the amusement.’
‘It is quite true,’ said John, ‘and is there any harm?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘did not I tell you, Susie—he is his father’s son.’
CHAPTER VII.
A MAN GROWN.
After this there ensues a gap in John’s life:—no real gap, indeed, but a steady, quiet continuance of work and training of which the record might be interesting enough to those who are pursuing the same path, but not perhaps to anyone else. He was transferred to lodgings nearer his work, almost without any will of his own, his mother acting for him with a steady authority against which he chafed, but which it was impossible to resist. The lodgings might have been the same as those from which he was transferred, a little parlour, a little bed-room, a red and blue cover on the table, a horse-hair sofa, the same features were in both. And here John settled down. He knew nobody to lead him into the ordinary haunts of young men in London; and perhaps the fixed prepossession against him that he was sure to like what was wrong, had as strong an influence as the fixed certainty that nothing but right and honest things could come from him, which does so much for some favourites of nature. Human nature is very contradictory, and no two specimens can be guided in the same way. His mother’s stern observation of every possible indication of weakness, and Susie’s wistful watch, enlisted perhaps the evil as well as the good of John’s nature in the cause of virtue. His temper, and that perversity which is more or less in every natural character, rose in arms against the imputation that was upon him. He said to himself that, whatever happened, their prognostics should not be permitted to be right: and thus aided, so to speak, by his demons as well as by his angels, with his head held high against all the solicitations of the lower nature which would have proved that injurious foregone conclusion to be a just one, he made his way through the loneliness of those early years—going back evening after evening to spend the dull hours in his little sitting-room, with a determination which virtue alone might not have been equal to, without the aid of those forces of pride, and opposition, and resistance to injustice.
This austere self-restraint told upon his work, as it always does. Temperance and purity give wings to the mind, as they give force to the body. He read in self-defence, to quench all youthful longings after gaiety and brightness, and when he had exhausted poetry and fiction, which naturally he felt to be the best indemnifications and solaces for his loneliness, he began to read for work and for ambition, and soon found in those books that dealt either directly or indirectly with his profession, an interest more ardent, more exciting, than even that of story. From seventeen to twenty-one, a youth, with this inclination for work and few distractions, can get through an enormous amount of reading: and John’s mind gradually filled with stores such as no student need have been ashamed of. They were not perhaps so classical as they might have been had he gone to the University, but, in all probability, even in that respect they were fully as extensive as they would have been had John without the stimulus of his resolution and his solitude ‘gone up’ with Dick and Percy Spencer into the midst of the noisy young life of their college. He would not have resisted these cheerful influences; he would have done what the others did, and read as little as was necessary. But in the unlovely quiet of his little parlour in a little London street, with pride and angry self-defence keeping his door, along with more celestial guardians, he read with enthusiasm, with passion: and as his books, after the first juvenile frenzy for the lovelier and lighter portions of literature, were practical and serious, engaged with the present rather than the past, he became by degrees a mine of information, thoroughly equipped for all the chances of his work, and every region that these might lead him to. He read travels and books upon new and little known countries with devotion. He studied every scheme for the new development of the untrodden portions of the earth. He had the stories of all great industrial undertakings at his fingers’ end. In short, John got to know so very much more than the narrator of his story, that I give up the attempt to follow him, simply adding that though it had been done rather with the intention of making that austere life possible, than from any other reason, it had the most admirable effects both on his mind and his work. Such stores are like the miraculous gifts of the Gospel, they cannot be hid. It soon became apparent, both to those who were over him and to his fellow-pupils, that for the settling of a disputed question, or for the geography of any new piece of work undertaken by the firm, or for those most essential questions about native workmen and local government which tell so much on enterprises like theirs, there was no such referee as John. He was sent for before Messrs. Barrett would settle about that railway in Hungary. He was consulted as to the South American business, which eventually, young Sandford’s knowledge having been overborne by the apparent advantage of the undertaking, was a source of so much trouble to the firm. And, by the time he was twenty-one, John was recognised by everybody as the most valuable of all the young men trained in the office. He had already been sent ‘abroad,’ a word which means anything from Calais to Africa, several times. He had been in America. He was altogether an accomplished and fully-trained engineer, capable to tackle even the lighthouses of Elly’s fancy, but perhaps not so earnest about lighthouses as, under Elly’s inspiration, he had been in his seventeenth year.
All this time his correspondence with Elly had never dropped: but it had become intermittent. They had not met during these years which tell for so much in a young man’s life, and probably even tell for more in the experience of a girl. How she had grown up, or whether she had grown up at all, was a question which John did not discuss with himself. He was very fond of Elly, no one had ever taken her place in his mind. He still thought of her under the pear-tree with her algebra, as if during all this time there had been no further development either of herself or her studies. Elly probably formed a clearer apprehension of the changes that had occurred in him: but to John she was still in short frocks, with all that beautiful hair about her shoulders. He thought sometimes of the serious kiss which had passed between them in token of everlasting friendship, of brotherhood and sisterhood, a seal of youthful affection untinged by any of the agitations or uneasy appropriations of love. It had brought a little colour to Elly’s cheek, but none to that of John, who had asked for it so seriously. The thought brought a little stir now, a little pleasurable movement of his blood. A sister, but not like Susie; a friend, but holding a place apart which no other friend could come near. And, to tell the truth, John had not very many friends; his early life had been against it, and those guardian demons of whom we have spoken—demons without discrimination, who kept out good as well as evil. He was friendly with most of the people about him, but he had not many intimates. The place in which Elly lived supreme, and that in which even Dick and Percy were still recognised as ‘the other boys,’ was kept sacred to that early circle which had been the closest and the warmest John had ever known—all the more so from its contrast with what followed, from the severe mother amid all the cares and business of the hospital, and Susie with her wistful, watchful eyes.
He had not paid very much attention to the fact that his birthday was his twenty-first, and that he was attaining his majority, though that is so important a point in the career of many young men. It was not particularly important to John. He had no joyful tenantry to celebrate it; no happy father and mother to wish him joy. He was already in some things much older than his age, experienced by long encounter with the practical, and by the habits of self-dependence which the nature of his occupations had forced upon him. He was rather, if anything, disposed to smile at the importance of twenty-one, not seeing what difference it could make. His little property he had long ceased to think of. At seventeen it had seemed important; at twenty, nothing. What could it matter? It was better, even more just, he thought, that his mother should have it, who was after all the natural heir of her parents: and if it could purchase a little ease, a little relaxation for her, John was not only generously willing, but had a less amiable, half scornful feeling, that to throw it back at her feet was the only thing that he could desire to do. He was astonished accordingly when he went by her invitation on the evening of his birthday to visit his mother, to find her table covered with papers and she herself awaiting his arrival with a number of accounts and note-books.
‘I have to render an account of my stewardship,’ she said, with her usual gravity. He did not always recognise the change in her manner of speaking to him and regarding him, but nevertheless there was a great change.