The glorious tinman was Tom's worthy father, the head of a great plating firm at Sheffield. Being perpetually involved in law-suits concerning trade-marks and patents, and finding silver and gold enough for a month's heavy plating sink into the long robe, this gentleman had said to his wife, "Why not keep it in the family?" And she had replied, "Oh, how clever our Tom is! None of those councillors understand the trade." Therefore was Tom at the Temple now.
When my friend once began upon his own affairs, and the ignorance of his examiners, he was ready to go on for ever; and so I cut him short with the question which had chiefly induced me to unburden my mind to him.
"The point is this, my dear boy. Ought I to feel ashamed, do you feel ashamed of me, for acting the spy upon a young lady who had no idea I was looking at her? Speak plainly, I won't be offended."
"If I ever get through, I am sure to be a judge," Tom Erricker replied, with a glance of deprecation at his rather "loud" suit of red-and-white plaid "Dittoes;" "my aunt Gertrude has said so fifty times; and I feel the making of it in me, though it takes a long time in development. And I sum up the merits thus, George Cranleigh. You had no right to begin; but when you had begun, I am blowed if I can see how you could help going on. And I should like to go on a lot further with it."
My mind (which was larger then than now, for nothing loses more by wear and tear) was relieved, much more than it would be now by even some valid pronouncement.
"Tom Erricker, you are a brick," I said; "and I don't mind showing you the place. There is plenty of time before dinner yet. Only you must give me your word of honour—not a syllable about it to any one."
"Hands up. That's what we say in our corps,"—for he was a member of the "Devil's Own," and a very zealous one, for such a lazy fellow,—"but I could not walk so far without a gun."
This difficulty did not last long; for I ran to the door, and asked my sister to lend her pony Amabel to my friend Tom for an hour or two. Grace was the most obliging girl that was ever too good to be married, and although she felt some kind disdain, as it seemed to me sometimes, for Tom, her pony was heartily at his service, if he would promise not to whip her. Tom came out of our little hole, when this stipulation reached his ears, and he put on his hat for the pleasure and glory of taking it off again to my sister. Among his many tendernesses, the sweetest and biggest of all perhaps was one with our Grace at the end of it. But he knew, as we know such things by instinct, that she never would come in to share it; and though he fetched many a sigh, they were shallow, because hope had never been beneath them.
Off we set in the summer afternoon, for the month was come to June already, with everything going on as if we were nothing. Because I have not said much about it,—as behoves an average young Englishman,—if anybody reads this, he may think that nothing to dwell upon had come home to me, by reason of what I had seen that day when the millers made light of my samples. But this I can declare, and would have done so long ago except for some sense that it was my affair alone, the whole world had been quite a different thing to me, ever since I set eyes upon—well, there is but one to any man worth anything; and does he ever get her?