The mention of Matthew Kelvin's name by Miss Bellamy touched a chord of recollection in the mind of Gerald Warburton, but some time elapsed before he could trace back in his memory to the particular occasion on which he had heard it last. He had been groping about for some time, when suddenly a single flash revealed to him everything that he was looking for. It showed him a country inn in the Lake district, and two men, weather-bound by the unceasing rain, perforce dependent on each other for companionship and the practice of those minor social virtues which such an occasion should undoubtedly call forth. They meet as strangers meet under such circumstances, but by the end of the third day they seem to have known each other for years. Glad as they are on the fourth morning to find that the clouds have dispersed and that the hill-tops can be seen again, they do not part without a certain feeling of regret, or without a cordial grip of the hand and a hope that, unlikely as such a thing seems, they may one day meet again. One of those men is Matthew Kelvin, the other is Gerald Warburton. Kelvin, at parting, had given Gerald his address, and had begged of him that, should he ever find himself in the neighbourhood of Pembridge, he would not fail to look him up. Gerald, at the time, had no address to give. In fact, it was not as Gerald Warburton, but under the name of "Jack Pomeroy," that he had made Kelvin's acquaintance.
A year or two previously, in the course of one of his rare interviews with his father, the latter had said to Gerald: "You are a disgrace to the name of Warburton!"
"If that is the case, sir," said Gerald, bitterly, "it shall be disgraced no longer."
When he next went out into the world, it was as John Pomeroy. His full name was Gerald John Warburton. So he took the John and tacked it to a name that had been common in his mother's family for generations; and it was as Jack Pomeroy, a vagabondising young artist, rather out at elbows, as clever young men often are, but a decidedly amusing companion for a wet day, that he had made Kelvin's acquaintance.
"I wonder whether he will know me again," muttered Gerald to himself, as he walked down the main street of Pembridge on his way to Mr. Kelvin's office. "There was a little about him that I liked, and a great deal that I didn't like. His joviality was merely on the surface; it had no foundation in his disposition. It was a mere will-o'-the-wisp, flickering fitfully over the darker depths of his character. Me he tolerated as one tolerates a droll when tired of one's own company, and with nothing more serious to do. For the time being he even made believe to be a Bohemian himself. It was a phase of character that he had rarely encountered before, and for forty-eight hours it fascinated him; forty-eight hours later he would have turned his back on it and me with a sneer.
"It is indeed a strange chance that has brought us together again after so long a time! I will tell him neither my name nor my errand for a little while. I will go to him as the Jack Pomeroy in whose society he once spent three days of bad weather. I will even pretend to be hard up, and to stand in need of a helping-hand. Probably he will order me out of the office; perchance he will ask me to dinner and put a sovereign into my hand at parting. It will be time enough to tell him my real business after I have put him to the test. Besides which, by concealing my identity for a little while, I may perhaps be able to glean some information as to his reason for keeping back for so long a time the contents of the sealed packet from Eleanor." It was in pursuance of this idea that Gerald had put on for the nonce an older suit of clothes than common, and had locked up in his portmanteau at the hotel his watch and chain and scarf-pin. He found Kelvin's office in due course, and made his way into the entrance-hall, and was there received by Mr. Piper.
That young gentleman was what he himself would have called "down in the dumps." The obligations of gentility extend from the highest stratum of society to the lowest, and Mr. Piper felt that this morning he had lost caste in the eyes of Mr. Hammond--his guide, philosopher, and--in a far-off, Olympian kind of way--his friend. Mr. Hammond, walking down a by-street on his way to business, had come suddenly on Pod, who, in company with several other youths, was scraping with a knife the sweet interstices of an empty sugar-cask that was standing on the pavement in front of a grocer's shop. Unseen till he laid his gloved hand on Pod's shoulder, Mr. Hammond had said to him: "Here's a penny for you, Piper, to buy some sweetmeats with, but do, for goodness' sake, leave the sugar-cask alone." And so, with a smile and a sneer, had gone daintily on his way. Pod felt as if he could have bitten his head off, had such an anatomical feat been at all possible. He would not have cared half so much had he been seen by anyone else--even by Kelvin himself. But to have been seen thus ignominiously engaged by the elegant, the scented, the fastidious Mr. Hammond! Besides which, this was not the first occasion on which Mr. Hammond had found him engaged in a pursuit derogatory to that assumption of manhood and gentility which it was the secret ambition of his life to maintain in the eyes of his patron. On his way home, one evening, Pod had been overtaken by a temptation which he found it impossible to resist. The temptation on this occasion took the shape of marbles. Pod had fallen in with three or four of his old schoolmates engaged in a game of knuckle-down, and, fired by the recollection of his prowess in olden days, had for once flung gentility to the winds.
Carefully depositing in a corner his chimney-pot hat, for the next ten minutes he was a boy again. This time, also, it was Mr. Hammond's voice which recalled him to a consideration of how far he had forgotten himself. "Well done, Piper," he said, as he came suddenly round the corner. "With practice and perseverance you will make a tolerable player. By-the-by, I promised to buy you something on your birthday. What shall it be? A hoop, or a kite, or a pretty coloured ball that you and the baby can amuse yourselves with in wet weather?"
This had been very galling to Pod, especially when said before his schoolmates; and now, to-day, he had given Mr. Hammond an opportunity of sneering at him for the second time. This Mr. Hammond was Matthew Kelvin's one articled pupil. Attracted by Pod's shrewdness, and keen common sense, he had "taken him in hand," as he himself phrased it; although whether such taking in hand would ultimately prove beneficial to Pod, seemed somewhat doubtful at present. Mr. Hammond found Pod useful as a go-between in his love-affairs. He was engaged to a young lady against the wishes of her friends. Any letters sent by him through the post were intercepted, and it was only by trusting to Pod's skill and diplomacy as a messenger that he could contrive to communicate with her at all. In such a case as this, Pod might be trusted implicitly, and Hammond knew it. He was rewarded chiefly with cigars, and now and then with an odd half-crown, or a pair of soiled lavender kid gloves; which latter articles, when cleaned, looked almost as good as new, and although somewhat large, created quite a sensation among Pod's friends and acquaintances, when worn by him on his evening stroll along the Ladies' Walk. Then Mr. Hammond had made Pod a present of an old silver-mounted meerschaum, which, although he found it somewhat full-flavoured at present, he would doubtless be able to smoke with comfort when he should have practised on it for five or six months longer.
But far beyond any pecuniary reward was to be counted the happiness of being in Mr. Hammond's confidence, and the inestimable boon of his society. Since Mr. Hammond had taken him by the hand, Pod felt himself to be quite a different sort of person--he had, as it were, emerged from the grub into the butterfly. The world and he were on altogether different terms from what they had been on twelve months ago. A year ago, for instance, he would not have thought of wearing a chimney-pot hat, or of wearing stand-up paper collars of the same shape as Mr. Hammond's, or of carrying a slim silk umbrella to and from business. To be sure, the umbrella, however elegant and even useful it might seem when folded tightly up, was in reality so worn and dilapidated as to be quite incapable of being opened; but as this was a secret known to Pod alone, it did not matter greatly. Then it was surely a brilliant stroke of inventiveness to allow himself to be seldom seen in the town without a Times newspaper under his arm--generally three or four days old; but that was of no consequence. To be so seen seemed to add a foot to his stature, and it is impossible to say how much to his consequence.