The Three Furlongers

by Sheila Kaye-Smith

The cry was not a prayer so much as the cry of his great hunger, finding voice at last—"I want to be free! I want to be free!"

His mind dropped hastily to practical details. He had seen von Gleichroeder's address on his card, and that tough memory of his, which was sometimes a curse to him, held it fast. He would write and tell him he had changed his mind. It would be humiliating, but it must be done. Then he would go to London, and work—and work. It was not only the topmost pinnacle that could lift him out of his old life, the name he would make for himself need not be a great name—as long as it was a fair name. That was what he wanted, and would struggle for—a fair name. Hard work, an honest livelihood, self-denial, constant communion with the beautiful and inspired, would purge his soul of its defilement. The hideous stain of his crime would be wiped off. When he had lived for years in poverty and honesty, when he had brought by his music a little sunshine into poor lives like those he had smitten, when the fields of three counties had ceased to reproach him for his treachery, and the name of Furlonger had some faint lustre from his bearing it—then he would be free. And when he was free he would allow himself—not to claim Tony's friendship or anything else beyond him, but just to think of her—think of her with hope.

Oh, Tony, little Tony! his little love!

For weeks now he had known that he loved her. Though he had never dared think of her as a woman, he wanted her. He had wanted women before, he had had his adventures with them—though not perhaps as many as the average man—but they had all been stale and ordinary, the stock line, the job lot, which eager, extravagant youth pays high for as a novelty. Now he had something new. He loved a little girl, scarcely more than a child, parted from him by a dozen barriers of his own erecting. He loved her because she was good and innocent, and had given him perfect comradeship; most of all he loved her because of the barriers between them, because she lived utterly apart from him, in a foreign land of liberty and hope and uprightness, towards which he must strive hourly if he were to gain even the frontiers.

He scowled a little. He was not blind, and he knew that he would have to go into slavery, perhaps for a long time, before this new freedom was won. Even in an hour he had been able to see that von Gleichroeder was a technique-fiend, and would make matters hot for his clumsy pupil. He also realized that though the German had borne good humouredly with his insolence, he would not be so patient when he became his master. Yes—he would have a master—he would have to practise scales and exercises—he would be reprimanded, lectured, ordered about. Herr von Gleichroeder would be his master, and the tacit sympathy between them would but make their relations more galling.

There would be other sacrifices too. He would have to say good-bye to Sparrow Hall, and to Len and Janey. He caught his breath—God! how he loved Len and Janey! He had been brutal and heartless to them again and again, but he loved them with a love that was half pain in its intensity. He would have to be away from them perhaps for years. Yet when he came back he would bring them a gift—the same gift that he would bring Tony—a fair name. That was what he owed every one—the world, his brother and sister, his little love.

The very fact that he was taking his "stinking past" with him into the future would to some extent remove its offensiveness. It was all very well to talk of "starting afresh under another name." What he wanted was to raise his old name—the name of Furlonger—out of the dust. The convict should not just quietly disappear, he should be transfigured into the artist, publicly, before the whole world. As his degradation had been public, the comment of cheap newspapers, so should his exaltation.

A thundering knock at the door broke into his dreams.

"Nigel, in the devil's name, get up!—breakfast's waiting."