A Dog with a Bad Name Part 49

Once--it was about the beginning of August--in a lodging-house across the river, he met a man to whom for a day or two he felt drawn. His story was a sad one. His father had been a gentleman, and the boy had been brought up in luxury and virtue. While at school his father had died, and before he had left school his mother had been married again to a brute who not only broke her heart, but, after setting himself to corrupt his stepson, had at last turned him adrift without a penny in the world. The lad, with no strong principle to uphold him, had sunk deep in vice. Yet there lurked about him occasional flashes of something better.

"After all," he would say to Jeffreys, as the two lay at night almost on bare boards, "what's the odds? I may be miserable one day, but I'm jolly the next. Now you seem to prefer to be uniformly miserable."

"Hardly a case of preference," said Jeffreys; "but I'm not sure that it wouldn't be more miserable to be jolly."

"Try it. You'd give a lot to forget all about everything for an hour, wouldn't you?"

"It would be pleasant."

"You can do it."

"By dropping asleep?"

"Sleep! That's the time I'm most miserable. I remember the old days then, and my mother, and--I say, Jeffreys, I was once nearly drowned at Eton. Just as I was going down for the last time I put up my hand, and a fellow saw it and came in and fished me out. What a born fool I was to do it! I was grateful to the fellow at the time. I hate him now!"

And the poor fellow, with all the manhood out of him, cried himself to sleep; and Jeffreys in mercy said not a word to stop him.

A pitiful sort of friends.h.i.+p sprung up between the two--the bitter strong one, and the vicious weak one. It kept a soft corner in Jeffreys' heart to find some one who held to him even in this degradation, and to the poor prodigal it was worth anything to have some one to talk to.

Coming home one wet morning from one of his nocturnal expeditions, Jeffreys found his fellow-lodger up, with a bottle in his hands.

"My boy, my boy," cried the lad, "you're in luck, and just in time. Who says I'm lost to all decency after this? Why, I might have hidden it away when I heard you coming up. No. There's something of the n.o.bleman left in me yet. Half of this is yours, Jeffreys; only help yourself quickly, man, or I may repent."

He held out the bottle tremblingly and with a wince that spoke volumes.

"Take it. I never went halves before, and perhaps I never shall again."

Jeffreys took the bottle. It was brandy.

"Half a tumbler of that, Jeffreys, will make another man of you. It will send you into dreamland. You'll forget there is such a thing as misery in the world. Don't be squeamish, old fellow. You're cold and weak, you know you are; you ought to take it. You're not too good, surely--eh? Man alive, if you never do anything worse than take a drop of brandy, you'll pa.s.s muster. Come, I say, you're keeping me waiting."

Jeffreys sunk on a chair, and raised the bottle half-way to his lips.

What was it, as he did so, which flashed before his eyes and caused him suddenly to set it down and rise to his feet?

Nothing real, it is true, yet nothing new. Just a momentary glimpse of a boy's pale face somewhere in the dim gloom of that little room, and then all was as before. Yet to Jeffreys the whole world was suddenly altered.

He set the bottle down, and neither heeding nor hearing the expostulations of his companion, he left the house never to return.

That night he slept in another part of the town; and the poor bewildered prodigal, deserted by his only friend, cried half the night through, and cursed again the Eton boy who had once saved his life.

Jeffreys, hidden in another part of the great city, sunk to a lower depth of misery than ever. To him it seemed now that his bad name had taken form in the face of young Forrester, and was d.o.g.g.i.ng him in adversity more relentlessly even than in prosperity. It comforted him not at all to think it had saved him from a drunkard's ruin. He despised himself, when he came to himself, for having been scared so weakly. Yet he avoided his old quarters, and turned his back on the one friend he had, rather than face his evil genius again.

His evil genius! Was he blinded then, that he saw in all this nothing but evil and despair? Was he so numbed that he could not feel a Father's hand leading him even through the mist? Had he forgotten that two little boys far away were praying for him? Had he ceased to feel that young Forrester himself might be somewhere, not far away, ready to forgive?

He was blinded, and could see nothing through the mists.

He half envied his new fellow-lodgers in the den at Ratcliff. Four of them, at least, stood a chance of being hanged. Yet they managed to shake off care and live merrily.

"Come, old gallus," said one young fellow, who in that place was the hero of a recent "mystery" in the West End, "perk up. You're safe enough here. Don't be down. We're all in the same boat. Save up them long faces for eight o'clock in the morning at Old Bailey. Don't spoil our fun."

It was half pathetic, this appeal; and Jeffreys for a day tried to be cheerful. But he could not do it, and considerately went somewhere else.

How long was it to go on? A time came when he could get no work, and starvation stared him in the face. But a dying boy bequeathed him a loaf, and once again he was doomed to live.

But a loaf, and the proceeds of a week's odd jobs, came to an end. And now once more, as he sits in the rain in Regent's Park, he faces something more than the weather. He has not tasted food for two whole days, and for all he knows may never taste it again.

So he sits there, with his eyes still on that football ground, and his ears ringing still with the merry shouts of the departed boys.

The scene changes as he stays on. It is a football field still, but not the brown patch in a London park. There are high trees, throwing shadows across the green turf, and in the distance an old red school- house. And the boys are no longer the lively London urchins with their red, white, and blue bouncer. They are in flannels, and their faces are familiar, and the names they call each other he knows. Nor is the game the same. It, like the London boys' game, has ended suddenly, but not in a helter-skelter stampede in the rain. No. It is a silent, awe- struck group round something on the ground; and as he, Jeffreys, elbows his way among them, he sees again a boy's face lying there pallid and perhaps lifeless. Then instinctively he lifts his hands to his ears.

For a howl rises on all sides which deafens him, stuns him.

After all, it is only the last effort of the October squall in Regent's Park buffeting him with a fusillade of rain and withered leaves. He takes his hands from his ears, and with a sigh gets up and walks away, he cares not whither.

His steps lead him round the park and into the long avenue. The rain and the wind are dying down, and already a few wayfarers, surprised by the sudden storm, are emerging from their shelters and speeding home.

The park-keeper boldly parades the path in his waterproof, as if he had braved the elements since daybreak. A nursemaid draws out her perambulator from under the trees and hastens with it and its wailing occupant nursery-wards. And there, coming to meet him, sheltered under one umbrella, are two who perhaps have no grudge against the storm for detaining them in their walk that afternoon.

It is long since Jeffreys has seen anything to remind him of the world he has left, but there is something about these two as they advance towards him, their faces hidden by the umbrella, which attracts him.

The youth is slim and well-dressed, and holds himself well; his companion's figure reminds him of a form he knew--can it be only six months ago?--light, gentle, courageous, beside which he has walked in the Wildtree Park and on the London pavements. Ah, how changed now!

Where, he wonders, is _she_ now? and what is she thinking of him, if she thinks of him at all?

They meet--the tramp and the young couple. They never heed him; how should they? But a turn of the umbrella gives him a momentary glimpse of them, and in that glimpse poor hapless Jeffreys recognises Raby and Scarfe! Surely this blow was not needed to crush him completely!

Scarfe! How long he stood, statue-like, looking down the path by which they had gone neither he nor any one else could tell. But it was dark when he was roused by a harsh voice in front of him.

"Come, sheer off, young fellow! It's time you was out of the park!"

"Yes, I'll go," said he, and walked slowly to the gate.

It was ridiculous of him, of course, to writhe as he did under that chance meeting. What else could he have expected? A hundred times already he had told himself she had forgotten all about him, or, worse still, she remembered him only to despise him. And a hundred times, too, he had seen her in fancy beside the enemy who had stabbed him.

For Scarfe might have spared his precaution in begging Mrs Rimbolt not to name him as Jeffreys' accuser. Jeffreys needed no telling to whom he owed his ruin, and he needed no telling the reason why.

That reason had made itself clear this afternoon, at any rate, and as the wretched outcast wandered out into the night, it seemed as if the one ray of light which yesterday had glimmered for him, even across the darkness, was now quenched for ever, and that there was nothing left either to hope or dread.

He could not quit the park, but wandered round and round it, outside its inhospitable palings, covering mile after mile of wet pavement, heedless of the now drenching rain, heedless of his hunger, heedless of his failing limbs.

The noisy streets had grown silent, and a clock near at hand had struck two when he found himself on the little bridge which crosses the ca.n.a.l.

It was too dark to see the water below, but he heard the hard rain hissing on its surface.

He had stood there before, in happier days, and wondered how men and women could choose, as they sometimes did, to end their misery in that narrow streak of sluggish water.

He wondered less now. Not that he felt tempted to follow them; in his lowest depths of misery that door of escape had never allured him. Yet as he stood he felt fascinated, and even soothed, by the ceaseless noise of the rain on the invisible water beneath. It seemed almost like the voice of a friend far away.

He had been listening for some time, crouched in a dark corner of the parapet, when he became aware of footsteps approaching.

Imagining at first they were those of a policeman coming to dislodge the tramp from his lurking-place, he prepared to get up and move on. But listening again he remained where he was.