“Our dear Ellen!” she concluded. “If she had known how much I loved her, she would have disregarded her natural scruples,”—and she glanced at her son,—“and let me befriend and protect her. It goes to my heart to see Mr. Brent so worn and sad. He, too, has become very dear to us all. I have adopted him as my son as long as he pleases, and try to give him a mother’s sympathy.”
Brent walked back with me to Smorley’s.
“How different we are!” he said, as we parted. “I am all impulse; you are all steadiness.”
“Suffering might throw me off my balance. Remember that I have had trial and experience, but no torture.”
“Torture, that is the word; and it has unmanned me like a wearing disease. Your coming makes a man of me again.”
“Give me a day or two for Short’s Cut-off and the mechanical nineteenth century, and we will take our knight-errantry upon us again. We are dismounted cavaliers now, to be sure,—no Pumps or Fulano to help us,—but we shall find, I will not doubt, some other trusty aid against the demon forces.”
Brent bade me good night with a revival of his old self. We were to meet again to-morrow.
I sat down to gladden Short with the story of my success to-day, and wrote hard and fast to catch to-morrow’s steamer.
The dwarf, I knew, would be a man after Short’s own heart,—these men of iron and steel are full of magnetism for each other. I gave Short a minute description of Padiham’s shop.
As I described, I found that my observation had been much keener than I supposed. Every object in the shop came back to me distinctly. I saw the Rembrandt interior, barred with warm sunbeams; the grim master standing there over his vice; the glinting steel; the polished brass; the intelligent tools, ready to spring up and do their duty in the craftsman’s hands; that little pretty plaything of a steam-engine, at rest, but with its pocket-piece of an oscillating cylinder hanging alert, so that it could swing off merrily at a moment’s notice, and its piston with a firm grip on the crank, equally eager to skip up and down in the cylinder on its elastic cushion of steam.