“If Lichen speaks for you, you’ll get it,” said Val; “and I know Harry wants boys. You’re a good boy, ain’t you?” he added, looking at him closely—“you look it. And mind, if we recommend you, and you’re found out to be rowdy or bad after, and disgrace us, Lichen will give you such a licking! Or for that matter, I’ll do it myself.”
“I’m not afraid,” said Dick. “I ain’t rowdy; and if I get a fixed place and a chance of making a home, you just try me, and see if I’ll lose my work for the sake of pleasure. I ain’t that sort.”
“I don’t believe you are,” said Val; “only it’s right I should warn you; for Lichen ain’t a fellow to stand any nonsense, and no more am I. Do you think that’s pretty? I’m doing it, but I haven’t the time.”
This was said in respect to a piece of wood-carving, which Valentine had begun in the beginning of the year, and which lay there, like many another enterprise commenced, gathering dust, but approaching no nearer to completion. Dick surveyed it with glowing eyes.
“I saw some like it in a shop as I came down. Oh, how I should like to try! I’ve cut things myself out of a bit of wood with an old knife, and sold them at the fair.”
“And you think you could do this without any lessons?” said Val, laughing; “just take and try it. I wonder what old Fullady would say? there are the saws and things. But look here, you’ll have to go, for it’s time for eleven o’clock school. Take the whole concern with you, quick, and I’ll give you five bob if you can finish it. Remember after six, at the rafts to-night.”
Thus saying, the young patron pushed his protégé before him out of the room, laden with the wood-carving, and rushed off himself with a pile of books under his arm. All the boys in the house seemed flooding out, and all the boys in Eton to be pouring in different directions, one stream intersecting another, as Dick issued forth filled with delight and hope. He had not a corner to which he could take the precious bit of work he had been intrusted with—nothing but the common room of the tramps’ lodging-house. Oh for a “home,” not so grand as Val’s little palace, but anything that would afford protection and quiet—a place to decorate and pet like a child! This feeling grew tenfold stronger in Dick’s heart as he sat wistfully on the river’s bank, and looked across at the rafts, in which were sublime possibilities of work and wages. How he longed for the evening! How he counted the moments as the day glowed through its mid hours, and the sun descended the western sky, and the hour known in these regions as “after six” began to come down softly on Eton and the world!
CHAPTER XVII.
Dick’s mother sat upon the bank where he had left her, with her hands clasping her knees, and her abstract eyes gazing across the river into the distance, seeing scarcely anything before her, but seeing much which was not before her nor could be. A tramp has no room to sit in, no domestic duties to do, even were she disposed to do them; and to sit thus in a silent musing, or without even musing at all, in mere empty leisure, beaten upon by wind and sun, was as characteristic of her wandering life as were the long fatigues of the road along which at other times she would plod for hours, or the noisy tumult of racecourse or fair through which she often carried her serious face and abstract eyes—a figure always remarkable and never having any visible connection with the scene in which she was. But this day she was as she had not been for years. The heart which fulfilled its ordinary pulsations in her breast calmly and dully on most occasions, like something far off and scarcely belonging to her, was now throbbing high with an emotion which influenced every nerve and fibre of her frame. It had never stilled since last night when she heard Val’s name sounding clear through the sunny air, and saw the tall well-formed boy, with his wet jersey clinging to his shoulders, moving swiftly away from her, a vision, but more substantial than any other vision. Her old heart, the heart of her youth, had leaped back into life at that moment; and instead of the muffled beating of the familiar machine which had simply kept her alive all these years, a something full of independent life, full of passion, and eagerness, and quick-coming fancies, and hope, and fear, had suddenly come to life within her bosom. I don’t know if her thoughts were very articulate. They could scarcely have been so, uneducated, untrained, undisciplined soul as she was—a creature ruled by impulses, and with no hand to control her; but as she sat there and saw her placid Dick go happily off, to meet the other lad who was to him “a young swell,” able to advance and help him, one to whom he had taken a sudden fancy, he could not tell why,—the strangeness of the situation roused her to an excitement which she was incapable of subduing. “It mayn’t be him after all—it mayn’t be him after all,” she said to herself, watching Dick till he disappeared into the distance. She would have given all she had (it was not much) to go with him, and look face to face upon the other. It seemed to her that she must know at the first glance whether it was him or not. But, indeed, she had no doubt that it was him. For I do not attempt to make any pretence at deceiving the well-informed and quick-sighted reader, who knows as well as I do who this woman was. She had carried on her wandering life, the life which she had chosen, for the last eight years, exposed to all the vicissitudes of people in her condition, sometimes in want, often miserable, pursuing in her wild freedom a routine as mechanically fixed as that of the most rigid conventional life, and bound, had she known it, by as unyielding a lacework of custom as any that could have affected the life of the Honourable Mrs Richard Ross, the wife of the Secretary of Legation. But she did not know this, poor soul; and besides, all possibility of that other existence, all hold upon it or thought of it, had disappeared out of her horizon for sixteen years.
Sixteen years! a large slice out of a woman’s life who had not yet done more than pass the half-way milestone of human existence. She had never possessed so much even of the merest rudimentary education as to know what the position of Richard Ross’s wife meant, except that it involved living in a house, wearing good clothes, and being surrounded by people of whom she was frightened, who did not understand her, and whom she could not understand. Since her flight back into her natural condition, the slow years had brought to her maturing mind thoughts which she understood as little. She was not more educated, more clever, nor indeed more clear in her confused fancies, than when she gave back one of her boys, driven thereto by a wild sense of justice, into his father’s keeping; but many strange things had seemed to pass before her dreamy eyes since then,—things she could not fathom, vague visions of what might have been right, of what was wrong. These had come to little practical result, except in so far that she had carefully preserved her boy Dick from contact with the evil around—had trained him in her way to truth and goodness and some strange sense of honour—had got him even a little education, the faculties of reading and writing, which were to herself a huge distinction among her tribe; and by keeping him in her own dreamy and silent but pure companionship, had preserved the lad from moral harm.