“But why should you trouble? I could get Lady Frances—she’d do anything for me.”
“No doubt! Find my umbrella there in the corner—the one with the silver knob—and walk down with me to the school.”
It was certainly very pleasant to see how the young woman, after a few moments of reserve, and in the presence of Erb’s depression, became brighter than usual, pushing away all her own trouble, and talking of the Professor’s last escapade as though it were the best joke in the world. The Professor, still declining in the service of the profession, had recently been offered the post of baggage man in a newly-starting provincial company, with the added duty of acting as understudies to the man who played the old City man in Act I., and the Chief of Police in Russia in Act IV. Professor, with many protestations and frequent appeals to the shades of Barry Sullivan and John Ryder and others, had accepted the offer, and, securing on the Saturday night the sum of ten shillings in advance for the purpose of obtaining fine linen, appeared at St. Pancras station the next afternoon on the starting of the special, and denounced “The Banker’s Blood” Company, individually and generally, called upon Heaven to punish them for the attempt to degrade one who had trod the boards long before many of them had been allowed, mistakenly, to see the light of day, and altogether making such a furious scene on the platform, that the manager, consulting hastily with other members of the company in the labelled compartments, gave Rosalind’s father another half-sovereign to refrain from accompanying the party. All of which Rosalind told in such a merry way that Erb found himself for a time half wooed from melancholy.
“That blessed paper,” he said, going back to trouble ruefully, “has got me in a corner the very first start off.”
“It wants fifteen minutes to the hour,” said Rosalind, looking up at the clock at the corner. “Let’s walk round the Green and hear all about it.”
Rosalind’s hopeful view of the matter was that it might be only what was called a “try on,” and the statement of Erb that he felt he hadn’t a leg to stand on, she declared to be unworthy of him.
Erb walked back to his office feeling that the talk had done good. It was certainly a great thing to find himself more hopeful in regard to Louisa. But he composed on the way a bitter, bitter paragraph concerning the firm in Neckinger Road and its occupation. This seemed so excellent, that he had half a mind to turn it into poetry, but there proved to be some difficulty in finding rhymes for “murder” and for “dastardly,” and he allowed himself on arrival to write it in prose. The copy for number three being made up, he deleted a humorous paragraph about a Bricklayers’ Arms man, whose wife had run away, and this made room. There was much in the lines themselves; more to be read by those who could fill up the blank spaces intervening. Erb looked at it when he had crossed the t’s and dotted the i’s with the pride of a man who, with a mere dip of ink, could force monied folk to tremble. A fine thing to have control in this way over the printed word.
All the more satisfactory to get on a grievance, which appeared to be solid, in that he eventually found that he had to step out apologetically from the corner into which Spanswick’s ingenuity had thrust him. There were, it appeared, no grounds whatever for the statement made, and in Featherstone Buildings, Holborn, in a dim office with one light, under which he had to sit, whilst the two partners of the legal firm remained at the other end of the table in the shadow, he underwent, perhaps, the very worst quarter of an hour that he had endured since the time of schooldays. He had had to wait some time whilst one partner was sent for by the other.
“Then we may take it, Mr. Barnes, that you withdraw unreservedly every word of the paragraph in question?”
“That is so.”