I declined to stay longer than was necessary, for I had promised to spend that evening with my fellow-clerk Atherton, and did not want to be late for my engagement with the lad, for whom I had a sort of elder-brotherly affection. But I promised to call at the hospital next day and inquire for my protégé; and departed, the richer by what I suppose would be regarded as a virtuous action, and the poorer by the eighteenpence I had paid for the cab-fare.
It now seems to me to have been despicably, ludicrously selfish to have thought so little of the fate of the man I had left in such dangerous plight at the hospital, and so much of that expenditure of eighteenpence. I hope that I am not naturally a miser, yet I fear some niggardly instincts were dawning in me at that time, as, indeed, is almost inevitable in a young man who, having passed his early years under the shadow of that most wearing of sorrows—debt, is desirous of not merely living within, but effecting some savings from, an income of a hundred and twenty pounds a year. I recall now that I determined to do without tobacco for a week; and with this resolution in my mind, I hurried to the Broad Street station, en route for Atherton’s lodgings in Camden Town.
I could not have told at that time what attracted me so strongly to Gerald Atherton, any more than Olivia could have explained the prophetic fascination which drew her to Viola. But there was an atmosphere of youth and freshness about the boy—he was the youngest of all the clerks in our office, a bright-eyed lad, not yet eighteen—that had a refreshing influence on me. I was not old myself—just twenty-four—but eight years’ life in a City office, coming after a boyhood which had had many of the anxieties of middle age, made me feel almost patriarchal compared with my joyous and inexperienced junior. There was, too, a similarity in the circumstances of our lives which tended to friendship.
‘Only, you know, Langham,’ said the boy one day, early in our acquaintance, when we were speaking on the subject, ‘my responsibilities are greater than yours; I have May to look after. A sister is a great anxiety, and when she happens to be your twin-sister, you feel that you are in a special way bound to take care of her.’
‘Where is your sister now?’ I asked.
‘Not far away. She is companion to an old lady at Hampstead. That’s why I live in Camden Town, because it is comparatively near; and I can go occasionally to see May, and even sometimes have a visit from her at my lodgings.’
‘Companion to an old lady!’ I repeated. ‘That’s a dreary life for a young girl.’
‘May doesn’t seem to dislike it; and Mrs Bowden treats her very kindly. The plague of her life is the continual espionage of the old lady’s relations—or rather her dead husband’s relations; she seems to have none of her own—who are quite convinced that my poor little sister’s courtesy to her employer—she hasn’t it in her to be uncivil to a boa-constrictor, the little darling!—is inspired by mercenary motives. That annoys her; but as we are two young people alone in the world, without a penny except what we earn, we must put up with disagreeables—May, with the suspicions of those greedy waiters on dead men’s shoes; and I, with getting the blame of everybody else’s blunders as well as my own. Really, the undeserved or only half-deserved scoldings I get, sometimes irritate me fearfully—and then at times I feel I’d do anything for a good game at cricket. I don’t think I could bear it all, if you didn’t stand by me, Langham.’
‘Who wouldn’t stand by a manly boy like you, Gerald!’ I protested, laughing.
‘Boy, my friend!’ cried Gerald with one of those bright merry glances, accompanied with an upward toss of the head, which always came upon me with the effect of a sunbeam—‘boy, indeed! I am a City man, sir, and demand to be spoken to with respect!’