"Faith, doctor, ye answered nobly, and just as ye ought to have, if ye had had a hundred pounds in your pocket; but, man, ye stood in your ain light. There is nae saying what he might have done for you. It might hae been the king or the prime minister for onything ye kenned."
"He might," resumed the scholar; "but he rejoined, 'Sir, I admire the independence of your spirit, but wherefore should you, without cause, reject the acquaintance of one who seeks your friendship? You have endangered your life to save mine—what stronger claim could you have on my everlasting gratitude? If common feeling prompted you to rescue me, suffer me not to leave you until I have testified that I am actuated by such feelings, in common with yourself. You refuse to tell me your name; mine is William Forster, a colonel in the service of the East India Company.'
"At the mention of his name my heart leaped within me. The brother of my Bertha, and of whom I have spoken, was in the service of the East India Company. I dreaded that he and the individual I had saved might be the same person; and I resolved, more determinedly than before, to conceal from him my name and circumstances. But, finding he could learn nothing from me, he offered me money. O sir! at that time I could have taken his life—I could have taken my own. To what have I sunk, I thought, or what am I now, that I should be treated as the veriest beggar that crawls upon the streets! 'Sir,' I exclaimed, wildly, 'keep your gold—your dross—your insulting dross. I did not assist you in your hour of need, that you should insult my situation by a mendicant's reward. I, sir, have the feelings of a gentleman as well as you, whatever I may now seem—therefore torment me not.' He informed me that he had to leave London on the following day; and he entreated that I would tell him who I was, that he might show that he was grateful for what I had done, in a way that might not be painful to my feelings. But the thought that he was the brother of my Bertha haunted me, maddened me, and I waved my hand to him and cried, 'Away! away!' His countenance bespoke him to be a man to whom I could have poured forth my whole soul; but even in that countenance I read her lineaments, and my soul moved like an agitated thing that I could feel within me, as I gazed on them.
"'Go, sir,' I exclaimed; 'and if you will be grateful, be so to one who rejoices in having been instrumental in assisting you. Leave me. I ask no more, for your questions torture me, and your pecuniary offers insult me.'
"He left me, but never did I behold a man part from another more reluctantly, or one who was more under the influence of strong emotion. My wound confined me to the inn for five weeks, and, during much of that time, my thoughts were distracted regarding the bill of the innkeeper. But one day he came to me and said—
"'Sir, I don't know how you and the gentleman whom you rescued from the highwaymen stand; but one thing I know, he is a gentleman every inch of him. He has paid for all that you have had, or may have for a month to come; and here, master, are fifty pounds which he left me to give to you in as delicate a way as I could, for, as he said, you were rather proud-spirited. Now, master, here is the money, and he was as safe in trusting it in my hands as if he had put it in the bank.'
"I knew not what to do; but, after a struggle, and a severe one, I accepted the money. You may despise me for what I did——"
"Me despise you!" cried the farmer; "for what, I would like to ken? It is the only wiselike action I have heard you say that you did. The man that would despise another for taking fifty pounds where it was deserved, is a being that doesna understand what money is, or what it was made for. They may despise ye that like, doctor, upon that account, but it winna be me."
"Well, sir," resumed Musgrave, "with the fifty pounds in my pocket, I again appeared upon the streets of London. But a change had passed over me. Even the policemen who before had ordered me to 'walk on' knew me not. I was another man—I was as one on whom fashion shed its sunning influence. I again endeavoured to obtain a situation as an assistant-surgeon, but the attempt was unsuccessful. I should have told you that it was owing to being confined with my wound that I was unable to meet my 'brother in misfortune,' the artist of whom I have spoken. I now tried my fortune as a writer for the magazines, and was paid for what I wrote even liberally, as I considered it. But there was one drawback attending this liberality: though I could write an article for which I received three, four, or seven guineas, in a day (for authors always calculate in guineas, though they are paid in pounds), yet it was not every day, neither was it every month, that I could get such an article accepted; and it was not every magazine that admitted me as a contributor. But by such writing I managed to live; and, as my name became known, I felt less of the misery which I endured when I first embarked in the precarious trade of authorship. Yet a precarious trade I still found it to be. I was enabled to live, but I lived between the hand and the mouth.
"The publisher whom I have already mentioned as having given a guinea towards the publishing of my works by subscription, engaged me to translate a novel from the French, and a small work from the Italian, of which language I had but a scanty knowledge. But it does not require the perfect knowledge of a language to be a translator which many consider necessary."