“And afterwards?”
“There is no afterwards, till you come to the hospital, which is a really pleasant place, and the black box. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.” He mixed another soda-and-whisky and drank it off. “It’s thirsty work along the roads under the sun—a red-hot burning sun, not like your red frying-pan skulking behind a cloud. Wherever you stop you get a drink. Then you bring out your wares. I’ve got a tongue that runs like an engine newly oiled. And where you put up for the night there are the boys on the road, and there are songs and stories. Respectability go hang!”
He laughed again. He put on his hat and swung out of the room, laughing as at the very finest joke in the world—to come home as a gentleman, and to go back as a tramp.
CHAPTER XVI
AND ANOTHER CAME
ALMOST immediately after the colonial merchant—the wholesale trader in sardines and tea-leaves from a shanty—had departed, there came another. They might almost have passed each other on the stairs.
It was none other than the Counsel learned in the Law, the pride and prop of his family, the successful barrister, Mr. Christopher Campaigne.
“Good heavens!” cried Leonard, “what is the matter with this man?” For his uncle dropped speechless, limp, broken up, into a chair, and there lay, his hands dangling, his face filled with terror and care. “My dear Uncle Christopher,” he said, “what has happened?”
“The worst,” groaned the lawyer—“the very worst. The impossible has happened. The one thing that I guarded against. The thing which I feared. Oh, Leonard! how shall I tell you?”
Come with me to the chambers where the Professor of Oratory was preparing, as in a laboratory, his great effects of laughter and of tears. It was morning—high noon. He was engaged upon what is perhaps the most fascinating branch of a most delightful profession—a speech of presentation. Before him, in imagination, stood the mug; beside him the recipient; and in front of him a vast hall filled with sympathetic donors. Such a speech is the enunciation and the magnifying of achievements. It must be illustrated by poetical quotations; the better known and the more familiar they are, the more effective they will prove. The speaker should tell one funny story at least; he must also contrive, but not obtrusively—with modesty—to suggest his own personal importance as, if anything, superior to that of the recipient; he must not grovel before greatness.
All these points the professional manufacturer of oratory understood and had at his fingers’ ends. He was quite absorbed in his work, insomuch that he paid no kind of attention to footsteps outside, nor even, at first, to an angry voice in the outer office, which, as we have seen, was only protected by the boy, who had nothing else to do, unless the reading of Jack Harkaway’s adventures be considered a duty.