“Thank you,” said Harry; “but you see I have become a man of business, and have very little time to spare for those sort of amusements; besides, I confess I care very little about them.”
“Well, you must take your own way,” answered the young gentleman, “though I must say I don’t think a young fellow of spirit would be content to live the humdrum life you do; or perhaps ‘still waters run deep,’ eh? that’s it, is it not?”
Wherever Harry had been on the previous night, or however late he had been in bed, he was always at his desk directly the office was open, and he also got through his work very much to Roger Kyffin’s satisfaction. Silas Sleech also always praised him. He told him also, should he find any difficulty, to come to him, and on several occasions Harry had to take advantage of his offer. His uncle, after some months, spoke approvingly to him. “You will, I have great hopes, in time be fitted to fulfil an important post in my office, from the reports I hear of you, and the way in which I see you get on with your work. You have your own fortune in your own hands, Harry, and I see no reason why you should not make it. Your success is secure if you go on as you have begun.”
Harry was not happy, however. He had great doubts on that subject. Mr Silas Sleech had been more cautious in his proceedings. He suspected that Harry might easily have been alarmed had he attempted to initiate him too rapidly into London life. For several weeks he did not take Harry to the gaming-house into which he had before introduced him. Indeed, sometimes he declined taking him out at all.
“It won’t do, my boy,” he said; “you are knocking yourself up with dissipation, and I am afraid you will get a taste for those sort of things if I take you out too often. Why you won more money last night than I have pocketed for months together. ‘The pitcher which goes too often to the well gets broken,’ and if you don’t take care you will have a run of ill-luck, and if you lose, where is the money to come from to pay your debts of honour?”
By these remarks it will be understood that Harry Tryon had not resisted the temptations to play which Silas had placed in his way, but as he had come off the gainer hitherto, he had in consequence suffered no inconvenience. He had been too much accustomed to see his grandmother replenish her purse in that way to feel acutely any sense of shame at depriving others of their property, which happily keeps some high-minded men from the vice. Silas Sleech had other baits by which he hoped to obtain entire power over his young companion. There was one, however, with which he entirely failed, Harry would never be allured by meretricious beauty. Silas was puzzled. He took good care to conceal his own sins from public view.
“The young one is deep,” he thought to himself. “He knows what he’s about, I am pretty sure of that.”
Harry, though duped by Silas, had never made him his confidant. He saw that Harry delighted in excitement, and took him once or twice to hear the debates in the House of Commons. They were pretty stormy sometimes, when Fox, and Pitt, and Wyndham were on their feet. Silas professed to be a “friend of the people.” Harry’s generous heart rose in rebellion against anything like tyranny and oppression, and Silas easily persuaded him that the French Revolution had been brought about by the tyrannical way in which the aristocracy had treated the people.
“Let me ask you, Harry,” he said, “are not our own people treated very much in the same way? Look at our ill-fed, ill-clad soldiers, robbed on all sides, and left to perish like dogs from neglect. Then see our sailors. Were you ever on board a man-of-war, Harry? I have been. Just see the tough dry meat, and weevily biscuit they are fed with; the fearful way in which they are flogged for the slightest offence, at the will, often capricious, of their captains; the little care taken of them in sickness; the ill-paid, half-educated men sent out as surgeons; and the wretched pensions they receive after, if they escape death, when wounded in battle.”
So Silas talked on. There was much truth in what he said, but his statements were often exaggerated.