“Poor Edward has had great disadvantages,” he began, in a half-apologetic, half-melancholy way, “and I often fear I am to blame. I have thought too much of my work out of doors, and too little of my duty to him. I have not been to him all that a father should be.”
He said this more in the way of talking to himself than of addressing us. But I saw Jack colour up at the last reference, and hastened to change the subject.
We felt quite sorry for him when he rose to go. He evidently knew his son’s failings only too well, and with a father’s love tried to cover them. And I could see how in all he said he was almost pleading with us to befriend his boy.
To me it was more than painful to hear him talk thus—to speak to me as if I was a paragon of virtue, and to apologise to me for the defects of his own son. It was more than I could endure; and when he started to go I asked if I might walk with him.
He gladly assented, and then I poured into his ears the whole story of my follies and struggles and troubles in London.
I shall never forget the kind way in which he listened and the still kinder way in which he talked when he had heard all.
I am not going to repeat that talk here; the reader may guess for himself what a simple Christian minister would have to say to one in my case, and how he would say it. He neither preached nor lectured, and he broke out into no exclamations. Had he done so, I should probably have been flurried and frightened away. But he talked to me as a father to his son—or rather as a big brother to a young one—entering into all my troubles and difficulties, and even claiming a share in them himself.
It was a long time since I had had such a talk with any one, and it did me good.
An uneventful week or two followed. We occasionally saw Mr Hawkesbury at our lodgings, for Smith could never bring himself to the point of again visiting the rectory. Indeed, he was now so busily engaged in the evenings preparing for his coming examination that he had time for nothing, and even the education of the lively Billy temporarily devolved on me.
It was not till after a regular battle royal that that young gentleman could be brought to submit to be “larned” by any one but his own special “bloke,” and even when he did yield, under threats of actual expulsion from the school, he made such a point of comparing everything I did and said with the far superior manner in which Smith did and said it, that for a time it was rather uphill work. At length, however, he quieted down, and displayed no small aptitude for instruction, which was decidedly encouraging.