Upon which a sudden warmth of patronage and lordly benevolence came to Valentine’s bosom. “If you stay here I’ll give you what odd jobs I can. What’s your name? I like the looks of you,” said lordly Val.
“Dick Brown, sir; thank you, sir,” said the lad, with grateful kindliness. He had no pride to be wounded by this brusque address, but took it in perfectly good part, and was gratified by the good impression he had made. He had tied a piece of string, which he brought from his own pocket, to the sharp prow of the boat, and was preparing to tow it down stream. But he stopped as Val stopped, still dripping, his wet shirt fitting to his fine well-developed form like a glove. The other had none of Val’s physical advantages of education, any more than the mental. He was as ignorant of how to hold himself as how to make Latin verses; and had he got into the outrigger, as he at first proposed, would have been by this time at the bottom of the river. He admired his handsome young patron with an innocent open-hearted pleasure in the sight of him, feeling him a hundred miles removed from and above himself.
“Very well,” said Val; “you come to me to-morrow at Grinder’s. If you stay we’ll find you plenty to do.”
Then he turned, bethinking himself of his wet clothes, which began to get chilly, and, with an amicable wave of his hand, stepped out along the road; but even then he paused again, and turned back to call out, “Remember Ross, at Grinder’s,” and with another nod disappeared. The woman behind had not been attending to the colloquy. She roused up suddenly at these last words, and looked after the boy, with her eyes lighting up strangely. “What did he say?” she asked, in a half whisper, rising quickly and coming to her son’s side; “what was that name he said?”
“His own name, mother,” said the smiling lad. “I am to go to him at ten to-morrow. He’s one of the college gentlemen. He says he likes the looks of me, and I shouldn’t wonder if he’d help me to a job.”
“What was his name?” repeated the woman, grasping her son’s arm impatiently. He took it with perfect calm, being accustomed to her moods.
“Come along, mother, I’ve to take the boat down to the raft; Ross, at Grinder’s. I wonder where’s Grinder’s? He’s Ross, I suppose?”
The woman stood with her hand on his arm, looking after the other figure which withdrew into the distance through the soft air, still tinted with all the rosy lights of sunset. The young athlete, all dripping in his scanty clothing, was joined by an admiring train as he went on; he was popular and well known, and his loyal followers worshipped him as much in this momentary eclipse as if he had done something famous. The tramp-woman was roused out of all the abstraction with which she had sat, oblivious of Valentine’s closer presence, gazing vaguely at the sky and the river. Her eyes followed him with a hungry eagerness, devouring the space between; a slight nervous trembling ran through her frame.
“I wish I had seen him nigh at hand,” she said, with a sigh; “it’s my luck, always my luck.”
“Come along and you’ll see him still if you want to,” said the lad, “I know what them swells do. They go down to the rafts and takes off their wet things, and puts on their coats and chimney-pots. He’s a good un to look at, I can tell you; but you never see nothing that’s under your nose, mother. You get curious-like when anything’s past.”