A Sheaf of Corn Part 2

"Come under my umbrella," she said, as they walked on together. "And turn up the collar of your coat, Peter. Didn't he have a fire for you?"

she asked, with a distrustful glance in the direction of that great physician whose portals the youth had just quitted.

"There was a roaring fire," Peter said. "It isn't the cold so much--it's the inside of me that's s.h.i.+vering. Cicely, it's going to be no use. He doesn't mean to pa.s.s me."

Cicely, a fairly well-grown girl of fourteen, with straight thin legs, straight, thick-hanging, dark hair, a straight, serious face, came to a stop on the wet pavement. Answering to a tug upon his coat-sleeve, the youth stopped too.

"He must!" she said. "You shouldn't have left him. You should have _made_ him, Peter." The tears came into her eyes and her lip shook.

"Oh, Peter, he will--he will!"

"He spotted that place on my throat," Peter said, with dejection.

"I told you to tie a handkerchief over it!"

"Handkerchief? I should think I did! He told me three times before I took it off. He wouldn't have so much as a rag on me. 'What's this?'

says he. 'A little trouble I had a year or so ago, with a gland that swelled,' says I. 'It had to be cut, and has been as right as rain ever since.' Just in that offhand way, Cicely. Quite brisk and cheerful.

'Tubercular, eh?' says he, very soft and thoughtful-like. And I knew it was all up with me."

"You should have told him it wasn't!" Cicely said, tearfully impatient of him. "Oh, if I'd been there----!"

"Don't you be afraid! I told him fast enough, or tried to, but he stopped me. 'That'll do, thank you,' says he. 'I form my own opinion.'

He wouldn't listen."

"Did you stand like that?" Cicely demanded, with a condemning glance at the stooping, s.h.i.+vering figure beneath the umbrella; "or did you hold your head up and throw your shoulders back, and push out your chest as I told you?"

"I stood up as brave as a lion," the young man a.s.sured her, his teeth chattering. "I yarned to him about how fond I was of athletics and swimming, how many miles I could walk at a stretch. Oh, I wasn't going to lose the berth for the want of a little gas. Only--" he stopped and sadly shook his head; "he'd made up his mind," he went on in a drooping tone. "He'd made it up as soon as he looked at me. 'Keep on with your walking; live in the open air,' he said. 'You're not fitted for the office-stool. Stooping all day over a desk would be about the worst thing you could do. Thank you. That's all. Good-morning.'"

"And you came away? You shouldn't have come away! You should have told him what it is to you. What you will have to put up with if you can't get the berth. You should have said, 'You're taking the bread out of my mouth, you're stealing the coat off my back. It's life and death to me.' You should have said that, and made him hear. And you came away!"

Peter looked back upon that action, sorrowfully considering it. "I thought it very affable of him to shake hands," he said, "but he had a very final way of doing it. And, besides, I didn't care to make a tale of my private affairs, and seem to cringe. I didn't want him to think----"

"What does it matter about _him_?" Cicely demanded, with scorn. "Do we care what _he_ thinks? Oh, Peter, go back to him, dear; do--do go back.

Tell him he _must_ pa.s.s you. Tell him it's your chance, your only--only one. And how you've tried and tried--and this is the only one; and how cruel everyone is at home--just as if it was your fault that no one--no one will give you work to do. And tell him you'd rather be dead than go home and say you'd lost it. Oh, Peter, say that; it is true--it is true----!"

She was crying. The rain blown on her cheek by the angry wind mingled with the tears there. She held his wrist--that bony, flat wrist, which had had its own tale to tell to the examining physician--protruding from the shabby coat-sleeve, and led him, he nearly unresisting, back to the door. On the door-step he hesitated, looking at the child with beseeching dark eyes.

"He's awfully busy--his room's full--he isn't the sort to take liberties with--I don't want to bother him again."

But she kept a relentless hold upon the wrist, and herself rang the bell, and when the door opened, pushed him within with remorseless urgency. "Never mind cringing," she whispered. "Tell him everything.

Tell him how they treat you at home. Don't mind what he thinks."

So, in Peter went, and Cicely, her school-books tucked away under her arm for the protection afforded by her mackintosh, the rain coming on faster and faster, walked the pavement, or waited on the doorstep, and now and again crossed the road in the baseless hope that she might not find the other side so wet, for a miserable two hours.

"Why, I thought I had finished with you, sir, more than an hour ago,"

the physician said, looking up, not too well pleased, when Peter, nervously smiling, his dark-curled head with its pale Jewish features pushed well forward, appeared in the consulting-room again.

The doctor, a fine-looking, red-faced man with keen blue eyes, looked a giant of health and strength and well-being beside the slight and meagre form. He was physician to the great firm of Clomayne, Company, Limited, who never appointed a clerk to their offices without a favourable report from him. Peter had already pa.s.sed the educational test by which they weeded out the applicants to fill their vacancies.

As a typist he had proved himself expert; in shorthand he had attained the highest speed. Nothing but the medical examination stood between him and the office-stool, which to him was as much an object of desire as is a throne to a prince.

"I think, sir," he said, his eyes, very dark and softly luminous, on the doctor's face,--"I'm afraid you didn't form a very high opinion of my physique. I wanted to ask you--I wanted to beg you, sir, to pa.s.s me.

It would be the making of me, sir, to get to Clomayne's. I've been trying for more than a year to get a clerks.h.i.+p. The market is so very full, and I've been unfortunate. This is a great chance for me. I hope very much, sir, you won't let me lose it."

The doctor looked down from his goodly height upon the stooping shoulders of the suppliant. "I've got my duty to Clomayne's to perform, you know," he said. "They send their clerks abroad into all sorts of climates--very unhealthy, some of them. Climates where you, my poor fellow, could not live a month."

"I could take my chance," Peter said quickly. "I'm not afraid, sir. I shouldn't ask any favour. If I died, it would make no difference to Clomayne's. I mean the inconvenience would be mine."

"My dear fellow, you're a phthisical subject--not to mince matters. You told me your family history----"

"You asked me, sir," Peter interrupted, with a note of reproach in his softly thick voice.

"It was my duty to ask. Your father died a year ago of pneumonia, your mother ten years ago in a decline. Do you ask me to conceal these facts from Clomayne's?--to say that I consider you in strong health? Then, you ask what is absolutely impossible. I am sorry, but it is impossible. I think that is all I have to say on the subject, and--my time is very short."

"I am going almost at once, sir," Peter said, speaking with an effort of cheerfulness, but with a load of sorrow and disappointment lying, a physical weight, upon his heart. "I came because Cicely thought if I told you 'twas a matter of life and death, sir--. It is that to me, almost--it is. I'm very good at shorthand--hundred and twenty a minute; my arithmetic and book-keeping, too, are more than fair. My hand-writing's good, I might say. My hands don't always shake like this----"

"My dear boy," the doctor said, with an impatience at once angry and pitiful, "all that has less than nothing to do with me!"

"But if you'd give me a chance, sir!" His eyes were extraordinarily bright and pleading, his slight frame shook with eagerness; he made as though he swallowed something with difficulty. "After all, I shall have to cringe," he said to himself. "Since my father died, I have had to depend on my uncle, sir," he went on. "I owe everything to him. He's very good--but there are a lot of his own children; and there's my aunt--and she thinks--. My uncle doesn't grudge me anything, he often says so, but he naturally wants me to be getting my own living--and so does my aunt; and she doesn't quite understand how difficult it is, nowadays, to get in to anything--and my cousins don't understand it either, except Cicely, she's different. Of course, I can't at present contribute anything for my board and lodging and my clothes." He stopped, a minute, and looked down at his shabby overcoat, then lifted his eyes, alight with their soft, irresistible appeal, to the physician's face; his voice dropped in a kind of awe. "This berth carries a pound a week, sir. It would be all the world to me to get it."

"You want me to perjure myself?"

Peter did not shrink from the stern tone, nor blush at the imputation.

"I want you not to take away my chance," he said.

He did not leave for some fifteen minutes longer, and when he did leave, it was with eyes lit almost to rapture, a glow of happiness on his pale face, and words of thanks bubbling forth from trembling lips.

The doctor had consented not to conceal the state of the young man's predisposition to tubercular mischief, but to make the best of his chance of escaping the family taint. He had promised, too, to explain matters to one of the managers with whom he was on very friendly terms.

Peter's position at Clomayne's was a.s.sured.

"I will never forget it, sir, never!" the boy said, stopping again at the door of the consulting-room to reiterate the fact. "It will be the making of me. I shall get on--you'll see I will. There's men that don't make the most of their chances--but I will. I've got a splendid one--thanks to your goodness--and I will. I feel it in me. You'll never regret it."

"Oh, that'll do--that'll do," the doctor said. He was a little ashamed of his weakness in the matter, knew it was a bad precedent, didn't wish to hear any more about it. "Haven't you got something warmer to put on?" he asked. "You're not going out into this pouring rain in that thin coat?"

"This is my great-coat, sir," Peter explained, with a glance at the sleeve that exposed the flat red wrist. "And Cicely is waiting outside for me with an umbrella."

The doctor was sufficiently interested to walk to that window in his consulting-room which looked upon the street in order to watch the youth who had taken what was in his experience the very unusual course of questioning his fiat. He saw the stooping figure of the lad join the upright one of the child, hurrying to meet him. He almost saw the glad words of the reversal of his doom upon the young man's lips; he saw the change on the straight-featured serious face of the child from an expression of unchildlike anxiety to one of almost womanly joy. The pair stood for three minutes in the drenching rain before the window, and even at that crisis Cicely did not forget to hoist her dripping umbrella over the head so eagerly thrust forward. Then Peter put a thin wrist through a mackintoshed arm, and looking in each other's faces, and eagerly talking, unconscious of the eyes that watched them, the wet impatient people pus.h.i.+ng past, the boy and girl walked slowly away.

The doctor touched the bell that would bring his next patient for inspection, then took one more look through the window. The pair had taken hands and were running now, running over the clean-washed, s.h.i.+ny pavement. Cicely turned her face so that he saw it once again, and it was a laughing face.

"It's something to be young," the doctor said to himself as he turned away. "Young--and to have the thing you wish for! Yes, even if you're never to know a day's health while you live, and have got to die a lingering, painful death in a year or so."

He only saw Peter once after he obtained his heart's desire and the proud position of a post as a junior clerk in Clomayne's office. It was on a platform of Liverpool Street Suburban line. He was going down to Enfield in his professional capacity, and while he waited for his train, walking up and down, his attention was caught by a figure which appeared in some way familiar to him standing at the book-stall. A minute, and he had recognised it as that of the youth who had been so bent on becoming Clomayne's clerk.

He was better dressed now, and wore a warmer over-coat (for the summer was over, by now, and winter coming on again), and a more fas.h.i.+onably shaped bowler. Cicely, in her waterproof still, although there was no rain, and with her straight, heavy hair upon her shoulders, was by his side.

The physician, having established in his own mind the ident.i.ty of the pair, resumed his pacing to and fro of the platform, and forgot them.

In a minute, a voice at his elbow spoke his name, and glancing down, he saw, taking off his hat to him, and accosting him with a very eager look on the duskily pale face, the youth whose name, even, he had forgotten. A light of triumphant gladness was in the mild darkness of the eyes.

"Excuse my speaking to you, sir," Peter said, "Cicely would have me come. She thought you'd be pleased to hear our very good news."

"I'm always glad to hear anyone's good news," the big doctor said.

"Let's see--it's Mr----?"