long after the storm had broken and rolled away were we still sitting talking in the dim lamplight. in these hours i learned what dark confidences my friend had to give me as to his solitary and haunted past; learned more truly, also, than i had ever done as yet, the value of a moral courage that had enabled him, dogged by the cruelest hate of adversity, to emerge from the furnace noble and thrice refined.
he had been picked up, as a mere child drowning in the river, by the thames police and had been ultimately consigned to a charity school, from which, in due course, he had been apprenticed to a printer. thus far had his existence, emerging from profoundest gloom, run a straight and uneventful course—but before?
into what deadly corner of a great city’s most secret burrows his young life had been first hemmed and then crushed out of shape who may say? when i had got him down again, unnerved but quiet now and wistful with apology over his outburst, he told me all that he knew.
“thunder always seems to turn my brain a little, renny, perhaps because it is associated in the depths of my mind with that strange young experience. the muttering sound of it brings a picture, as it were, before my eyes. i seem to see a confusion of wharfs and monstrous piles of blackness standing out against the sky; deadly water runs between, in which smudges of light palpitate and are splintered into arrows and come together again like drops of quicksilver.”
“and you are given something to drink?”
“it is poison; i know it as certainly as that it is my father who wishes to be quit of me. i can’t tell you how i know.”
“and before?”
“there is only the room and the window in the roof, and myself, a sickly cripple lying in bed, always alone and always fearful of something.”
“duke, was the gentle woman your mother?”
“i feel that it must have been. but she went after a time. perhaps he killed her as he wished to kill me.”
“can you remember him at all?”
“only through a dreadful impression of cruelty. i know that i am what i am by his act; though when made so, or under what provocation, if any, is all a blank. it is the dog that haunts my memory most. that seems queer, doesn’t it? i suppose it was the type or symbol of all the hate i was the victim of, and i often feel as if some day i shall meet it once more—only once more—and measure conclusions with it on that little matter of the suffering it caused me.”
we fell silent for awhile. then said i, softly: “duke, with such a past for background, i think i can understand how dolly must stand out in the front of your picture.”
“yes,” he said, with a tender inflection in his voice. “but anyhow i have no quarrel with her sex. what should i have been without that other presence in the past? i have known only two women intimately. for their sake my right arm is at the service of all.”
his eyes shone upon me from the sallow, strong face. he looked like a crippled knight of errantry, fearless and dangerous to tamper with where his right of affection was questioned.
the week that followed was barren of active interest. it was a busy one at great queen street, and all personal matters must needs be relegated to the background. occasionally i saw dolly, but only in the course of official routine, and no opportunity occurred for us to exchange half a dozen words in private.
nevertheless, there was in the dusty atmosphere of the place a sensation of warmth and romance that is scarcely habitual to the matter-of-fact of the workshop. compromise with my heart as i might on the subject of zyp’s ineffaceable image, i could not but be conscious that ripley’s at present held a very pretty and tender sentiment for me. the sense of a certain proprietorship in it was an experience of happiness that made my days run rosily, for all the perplexity in my soul. yet love, such as i understood it in its spiritual exclusiveness, was absent; nor did i ever entertain for a moment the possibility of its awakening to existence in my breast.
so the week wore on and it was saturday again, and to-morrow, for good or evil, the question must be put.
that evening, as duke and i were sitting talking after supper, jason’s voice came clamoring up the stairs and a moment after my brother burst into the room. he was in high spirits—flushed and boisterous as a young antinous—and he flung himself into a chair and nodded royally to duke.
“renny’s chum, i suppose?” said he. “and that’s a distinction to be proud of, for all it’s his brother that says so. glad to know you, straw.”
duke didn’t answer, but he returned the nod, striving to gloze over prejudice genially for my sake.
“renny, old chap!” cried jason, “i sha’n’t want my friend at court yet—not yet, by a long chalk, i hope. look here.”
he seized a purse from his pocket and clapped it down on the table with a jingling thud.
“there’s solid cash for you, my boy! forty-three pounds to a penny, and a new pleasure to the pretty face of each of ’em.”
“where on earth did you get it, jason?”
“won’t you be shocked, barebones? come with me some night and see for yourself.”
“you’ve been gambling, i believe.”
“horrid, isn’t it?—the wailing baby and the deserted wife and the pistol in a garret—that’s what you are thinking of, eh? oh, you dear thing! but we aren’t built alike, you and i.”
“be quiet, can’t you?” i cried, angrily.
“not a bit of it. i’m breezy as a weathercock to-night. i must talk, i tell you, and you always rouse the laughing imp in me. where’s the harm of gambling, if you win? eh, jack straw?”
“it’s no very good qualification for work, if that’s what you want to get, mr. trender.”
“work? hang the dirty rubbish! work’s for the poor in pocket and in spirit. i want to see life; to feel the sun of enjoyment down to my very finger-tips. you two may work, if you like, with your codes of cranky morals. you may go back to your mill every monday morning with a guilty sense of relief that another weekly dissipation on hampstead heath is over and done with. that don’t do for me. the shops here aren’t all iron-ware and stationery. there’s color and glitter and music and rich food and laughter everywhere around, and i want my share of it. when i’m poor i’ll work; only—i don’t ever intend to be poor again.”
“well, we don’t any of us intend to, for the matter of that,” said duke.
“oh, but you go the wrong way about it. you’re hampered in the beginning with the notion that you were made to work, and that if you do it in fine manly fashion your wages will be paid you in full some day. why, what owls you are not to see that those wages that you think you are storing up so patiently are all the time being spent by such as me! here’s happiness at your elbow, in the person of jason trender—not up in the skies there. but it’s your nature and luckily that’s my gain. you wouldn’t know how to enjoy ten thousand a year if you had it.”
“you think not?”
“i know it. you’d never be able to shake off the old humbug of responsibility.”
“toward others, you mean?”
“of course i do, and that’s not the way to make out life.”
“not your way?”
“mine? mine’s to be irresponsible and independent—to act upon every impulse and always have a cat by me to claw out the chestnuts.”
“a high ideal, isn’t it?”
“don’t fire that nonsense at me. ideal, indeed! a cant term, jack straw, for a sort of religious mania. no ideal ever sparkled like a bottle of champagne. i’ve been drinking it for the first time lately and learning to play euchre. i’ve not proved such a bad pupil.”
he slapped the pocket to which he had returned his purse, with a joyous laugh.
“champagne’s heaven!” he cried. “i never want any better. come out with me to-morrow and taste it. let’s have a jaunt!”
duke shook his head.
“we shouldn’t agree in our notions of pleasure,” said he.
“then, come you, renny, and i’ll swear to show you more fun in a day than you’ve known in all your four years of london.”
“i can’t, jason. i’ve got another engagement.”
“who with?”
“never mind. but i can’t come.”
“oh, rubbish! you’ll have to tell me or else we go together.”
“neither the one nor the other.”
for a moment he looked threatening. “i’m not fond of these mysteries,” he said. then his face cleared again.
“well,” he cried, “it’s a small matter for me, and, after all, you don’t know what you miss. you don’t keep whisky here, i suppose?”
“no, we don’t drink grog, either of us.”
“so i should have thought. then i’ll make for livelier quarters”—and crying good-night to us, he went singing out of the room.
the moment i heard the outer door shut on him, i turned to duke.
“don’t hold me responsible for him,” i said. “you see what he is.”
“renny,” said duke, gravely, “i see that friendship is impossible to him, and can understand in a measure what he made you suffer.”
“yet, i think, it’s true that he’s of the sort whom fortune always favors.”
“they sign a compact in blood for it, though, as the wicked baron does in the story books.”
he smiled and we both fell silent. presently duke said from the darkness:
“where has he put up in london?”
“i don’t know. he wouldn’t say. i’m not particularly anxious to find out as long as he keeps away from here.”
“ah, as long as he does,” said my companion, and sunk into a pondering fit again.
“get off early to-morrow,” he said, suddenly. “what time have you arranged to—to meet dolly?”
“half-past nine, duke.”
“not before? well, be punctual, there’s a good fellow. she’s worth an effort.”
i watched him, as he rose with a stifled sigh and busied himself over lighting our bedroom candle. in the gusty dance of the flame his eyes seemed to change and glint red like beads of garnet. i had no notion why, but a thrill ran through me and with it a sudden impulse to seize him by the hand and exclaim: “thank god, we’re friends, duke!”
he startled a little and looked full in my face, and then i knew what had moved me.
friends were we; but heaven pity the man who made him his enemy!
