The hint was taken; the levity was never more obtruded on the father’s notice, and Norris was inexorably launched upon a backward voyage. He went abroad to study foreign languages, which he learned, at a very expensive rate; and a fresh crop of debts fell soon to be paid, with similar lamentations, which were in this case perfectly justified, and to which Norris paid no regard. He had been unfairly treated over the Oxford affair; and with a spice of malice very surprising in one so placable, and an obstinacy remarkable in one so weak, refused from that day forward to exercise the least captaincy on his expenses. He wasted what he would; he allowed his servants to despoil him at their pleasure; he sowed insolvency; and, when the crop was ripe, notified his father with exasperating calm. His own capital was put in his hands, he was planted in the diplomatic service, and told he must depend upon himself.
He did so till he was twenty-five, by which time he had spent his money, laid in a handsome choice of debts and acquired (like so many other melancholic and uninterested persons) a habit of gambling. An Austrian colonel—the same who afterwards hanged himself at Monte Carlo—gave him a lesson which lasted two-and-twenty hours, and left him wrecked and helpless. Old Singleton once more repurchased the honour of his name, this time at a fancy figure; and Norris was set afloat again on stern conditions. An allowance of three hundred pounds in the year was to be paid to him quarterly by a lawyer in Sydney, New South Wales. He was not to write. Should he fail on any quarter-day to be in Sydney, he was to be held for dead, and the allowance tacitly withdrawn. Should he return to Europe, an advertisement publicly disowning him was to appear in every paper of repute.
It was one of his most annoying features as a son that he was always polite, always just, and in whatever whirlwind of domestic anger always calm. He expected trouble; when trouble came he was unmoved; he might have said with Singleton, “I told you so”: he was content with thinking, “Just as I expected.” On the fall of these last thunderbolts he bore himself like a person only distantly interested in the event, pocketed the money and the reproaches, obeyed orders punctually; took ship and came to Sydney. Some men are still lads at twenty-five; and so it was with Norris. Eighteen days after he landed his quarter’s allowance was all gone, and with the light-hearted hopefulness of strangers in what is called a new country he began to besiege offices and apply for all manner of incongruous situations. Everywhere, and last of all from his lodgings, he was bowed out; and found himself reduced, in a very elegant suit of summer tweeds, to herd and camp with the degraded outcasts of the city.
In this strait he had recourse to the lawyer who paid him his allowance.
“Try to remember that my time is valuable, Mr. Carthew,” said the lawyer. “It is quite unnecessary you should enlarge on the peculiar position in which you stand. Remittance men, as we call them here, are not so rare in my experience; and in such cases I act upon a system. I make you a present of a sovereign—here it is. Every day you choose to call my clerk will advance you a shilling; on Saturday, since my office is closed on Sunday, he will advance you half-a-crown. My conditions are these. That you do not come to me, but to my clerk, that you do not come here the worse of liquor; and you go away the moment you are paid and have signed a receipt.—I wish you a good morning.”
“I have to thank you, I suppose,” said Carthew. “My position is so wretched that I cannot even refuse this starvation allowance.”
“Starvation!” said the lawyer, smiling. “No man will starve here on a shilling a day. I had on my hands another young gentleman who remained continuously intoxicated for six years on the same allowance.” And he once more busied himself with his papers.
In the time that followed, the image of the smiling lawyer haunted Carthew’s memory. “That three minutes’ talk was all the education I ever had worth talking of,” says he. “It was all life in a nutshell. Confound it,” I thought, “have I got to the point of envying that ancient fossil?”
Every morning for the next two or three weeks the stroke of ten found Norris, unkempt and haggard, at the lawyer’s door. The long day and longer night he spent in the Domain, now on a bench, now on the grass under a Norfolk Island pine, the companion of perhaps the lowest class on earth, the Larrikins of Sydney. Morning after morning, the dawn behind the lighthouse recalled him from slumber; and he would stand and gaze upon the changing east, the fading lenses, the smokeless city, and the many-armed and many-masted harbour growing slowly clear under his eyes. His bed-fellows (so to call them) were less active; they lay sprawled upon the grass and benches, the dingy men, the frowsy women, prolonging their late repose; and Carthew wandered among the sleeping bodies alone, and cursed the incurable stupidity of his behaviour. Day brought a new society of nurserymaids and children, and fresh-dressed and (I am sorry to say) tight-laced maidens, and gay people in rich traps; upon the skirts of which Carthew and “the other black-guards”—his own bitter phrase—skulked, and chewed grass, and looked on. Day passed, the light died, the green and leafy precinct sparkled with lamps or lay in shadow, and the round of the night began again—the loitering women, the lurking men, the sudden outburst of screams, the sound of flying feet. “You mayn’t believe it,” says Carthew, “but I got to that pitch that I didn’t care a hang. I have been wakened out of my sleep to hear a woman screaming, and I have only turned upon my other side. Yes, it’s a queer place, where the dowagers and the kids walk all day, and at night you can hear people bawling for help as if it was the Forest of Bondy, with the lights of a great town all round, and parties spinning through in cabs from Government House and dinner with my lord!”
It was Norris’s diversion, having none other, to scrape acquaintance, where, how, and with whom he could. Many a long, dull talk he held upon the benches or the grass; many a strange waif he came to know; many strange things he heard, and saw some that were abominable. It was to one of these last that he owed his deliverance from the Domain. For some time the rain had been merciless; one night after another he had been obliged to squander fourpence on a bed and reduce his board to the remaining eightpence: and he sat one morning near the Macquarrie Street entrance, hungry, for he had gone without breakfast, and wet, as he had already been for several days, when the cries of an animal in distress attracted his attention. Some fifty yards away, in the extreme angle of the grass, a party of the chronically unemployed had got hold of a dog, whom they were torturing in a manner not to be described. The heart of Norris, which had grown indifferent to the cries of human anger or distress, woke at the appeal of the dumb creature. He ran amongst the Larrikins, scattered them, rescued the dog, and stood at bay. They were six in number, shambling gallows-birds; but for once the proverb was right, cruelty was coupled with cowardice, and the wretches cursed him and made off. It chanced that this act of prowess had not passed unwitnessed. On a bench near by there was seated a shopkeeper’s assistant out of employ, a diminutive, cheerful, red-headed creature by the name of Hemstead. He was the last man to have interfered himself, for his discretion more than equalled his valour: but he made haste to congratulate Carthew, and to warn him that he might not always be so fortunate.