My own anxiety was not less than his, and in a very few minutes we were at the door of Russell’s lodgings. The answer to our inquiries was, that he was in much the same state, and that he was to be kept perfectly quiet; the old housekeeper was in tears; and although she said Dr Wilson told them he hoped there would be a change for the better soon, it was evident that poor Russell was at present in imminent danger.
I sent up my compliments to Miss Russell to offer my services in any way in which they could be made available; but nothing short of the most intimate acquaintance could have justified any attempt to see her at present, and we left the house. I thought I should never have got Smith from the door; he seemed thoroughly overcome. I begged him to come with me back to my rooms—a Bible-clerk has seldom too many friends in the University, and it seemed cruel to leave him by himself in such evident distress of mind. Attached as I was to Russell myself, his undisguised grief really touched me, and almost made me reproach myself with being comparatively unfeeling. At any other time, I fear it might have annoyed me to encounter as I did the inquisitive looks of some of my friends, as I entered the college gates arm-in-arm with my newly-found and somewhat strange-looking acquaintance. As it was, the only feeling that arose in my mind was a degree of indignation that any man should venture to throw a supercilious glance at him; and if I longed to replace his shabby and ill-cut coat by something more gentlemanly in appearance, it was for his sake, and not my own.
And now it was that, for the first time, I learnt the connection that existed between the Bible-clerk and the quondam gentleman-commoner. Smith’s father had been for many years a confidential clerk in Mr Russell’s bank; for Mr Russell’s bank it was solely, the Smith who had been one of the original partners having died some two generations back, though the name of the firm, as is not unusual, had been continued without alteration. The clerk was a poor relation, in some distant degree, of the some-time partner: his father, too, had been a clerk before him. By strict carefulness, he had saved some little money during his many years of hard work: and this, by special favour on the part of Mr Russell, he had been allowed to invest in the bank capital, and thereby to receive a higher rate of interest for it than he could otherwise have obtained. The elder Smith’s great ambition—indeed it was his only ambition—for the prosperity of the bank itself he looked upon as a law of nature, which did not admit of the feeling of hope, as being a fixed and immutable certainty—his ambition was to bring up his son as a gentleman. Mr Russell would have given him a stool and a desk, and he might have aspired hereafter to his father’s situation, which would have assured him £250 per annum. But somehow the father did not wish the son to tread in his own steps. Perhaps the close confinement, and unrefreshing relaxations of a London clerk, had weighed heavily upon his own youthful spirits: perhaps he was anxious to spare the son of his old age—for, like a prudent man, he had not married until late in life—from the unwholesome toils of the counting-house, varied only too often by the still less wholesome dissipation of the evening. At all events, his visions for him were not of annually increasing salaries, and future independence: of probable partnerships, and possible lord-mayoralties; but of some cottage among green trees, far away in the quiet country, where, even as a country parson, people would touch their hats to him as they did to Mr Russell himself, and where, when the time should come for superannuation and a pension—the house had always behaved liberally to its old servants—his own last days might be happily spent in listening to his son’s sermons, and smoking his pipe—if such a thing were lawful—in the porch of the parsonage. So while the principal was carefully training his heir to enact the fashionable man at Oxford, and in due time to take his place among the squires of England, and shunning, as if with a kind of remorseful conscience, to make him a sharer in his own contaminating speculations; the humble official too, but from far purer motives, was endeavouring in his degree, perhaps unconsciously, to deliver his boy from the snares of Mammon. And when Charles Russell was sent to the University, many were the inquiries which Smith’s anxious parent made, among knowing friends, about the expenses and advantages of an Oxford education. And various, according to each individual’s sanguine or saturnine temperament, were the answers he obtained, and tending rather to his bewilderment than information. One intimate acquaintance assured him, that the necessary expenses of an undergraduate need not exceed a hundred pounds per annum: another—he was somewhat of a sporting character—did not believe any young man could do the thing like a gentleman under five. So Mr Smith would probably have given up his darling project for his son in despair, if he had not fortunately thought of consulting Mr Russell himself upon the point; and that gentleman, though somewhat surprised at his clerk’s aspiring notions, good-naturedly solved the difficulty as to ways and means, by procuring for his son a Bible-clerk’s appointment at one of the Halls, upon which he could support himself respectably, with comparatively little pecuniary help from his friends. With his connections and interest, it was no great stretch of friendly exertion in behalf of an old and trusted servant; but to the Smiths, father and son, both the munificence which designed such a favour, and the influence which could secure it, tended to strengthen if possible their previous conviction that the power and the bounty of the house of Russell came within a few degrees of omnipotence. Even now, when recent events had so fearfully shaken them from this delusion; when the father’s well-earned savings had disappeared in the general wreck with the hoards of wealthier creditors, and the son was left almost wholly dependent on the slender proceeds of his humble office; even now, as he told me the circumstances just mentioned, regret at the ruined fortunes of his benefactors seemed in a great measure to overpower every personal feeling. In the case of the younger Russell, indeed, this gratitude was not misplaced. No sooner was he aware of the critical situation of his father’s affairs, and the probability of their involving all connected with him, than, even in the midst of his own harassing anxieties, he turned his attention to the prospects of the young Bible-clerk, whose means of support, already sufficiently narrow, were likely to be further straitened in the event of a bankruptcy of the firm. His natural good-nature had led him to take some little notice of young Smith on his first entrance at the University, and he knew his merits as a scholar to be very indifferent. The obscure suburban boarding-school at which he had been educated, in spite of its high-sounding name—“Minerva House,” I believe—was no very sufficient preparation for Oxford. Where the Greek and the washing are both extras at three guineas per annum, one clean shirt in the week, and one lesson in Delectus, are perhaps as much as can reasonably be expected. Poor Smith had, indeed, a fearful amount of up-hill work, to qualify himself even for his “little-go.” Charles Russell, not less to his surprise than to his unbounded gratitude, inasmuch as he was wholly ignorant of his motives for taking so much trouble, undertook to assist and direct him in his reading: and Smith, when he had got over his first diffidence, having a good share of plain natural sense, and hereditary habits of plodding, made more rapid progress than might have been expected. The frequent visits to Russell’s rooms, whose charitable object neither I nor any one else could have guessed, had resulted in a very safe pass through his first formidable ordeal, and he seemed now to have little fear of eventual success for his degree, with a strong probability of being privileged to starve upon a curacy thereafter. But for Russell’s aid, he would, in all likelihood, have been remanded from his first examination back to his father’s desk, to the bitter mortification of the old man at the time, and to become an additional burden to him on the loss at once of his situation and his little capital.
Poor Smith! it was no wonder that, at the conclusion of his story, interrupted constantly by broken expressions of gratitude, he wrung his hands, and called Charles Russell the only friend he had in the world. “And, oh! if he were to die! Do you think he will die?”
I assured him I hoped and trusted not; and with the view of relieving his and my own suspense, though it was little more than an hour since we had left his lodgings, we went down again to make inquiries. The street door was open, and so was that of the landlady’s little parlour, so we walked in at once. She shook her head in reply to our inquiries. “Dr Wilson has been up-stairs with him, sir, for the last hour nearly, and he has sent twice to the druggist’s for some things, and I fancy he’s no better at all events.”
“How is Miss Russell?” I inquired.
“Oh, sir, she don’t take on much—not at all, as I may say; but she don’t speak to nobody, and she don’t take nothing: twice I have carried her up some tea, poor thing, and she just tasted it because I begged her, and she wouldn’t refuse me, I know—but, poor dear young lady! it is very hard upon her, and she all alone like.”
“Will you take up my compliments—Mr Hawthorne—and ask if I can be of any possible service?” said I, scarce knowing what to say or do. Poor girl! she was indeed to be pitied; her father ruined, disgraced, and a fugitive from the law; his only son—the heir of such proud hopes and expectations once—lying between life and death; her only brother, her only counsellor and protector, now unable to recognise or to speak to her—and she so unused to sorrow or hardship, obliged to struggle on alone, and exert herself to meet the thousand wants and cares of illness, with the added bitterness of poverty.
The answer to my message was brought back by the old housekeeper, Mrs Saunders. She shook her head, said her young mistress was very much obliged, and would be glad if I would call and see her brother to-morrow, when she hoped he would be better. “But oh, sir!” she added, “he will never be better any more! I know the doctors don’t think so, but I can’t tell her, poor thing—I try to keep her up, sir; but I do wish some of her own friends were here—she won’t write to anybody, and I don’t know the directions”—and she stopped, for her tears were almost convulsing her.
I could not remain to witness misery which I could do nothing to relieve; so I took Smith by the arm—for he stood by the door half-stupified—and proceeded back towards college. He had to mark the roll at his own chapel that evening; so we parted at the top of the street, after I had made him promise to come to breakfast with me in the morning. Russell’s illness cast a universal gloom over the college that evening; and when the answer to our last message, sent down as late as we could venture to do, was still unfavourable, it was with anxious anticipation that we awaited any change which the morrow might bring.