By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War Part 8

"Of course," Frank said simply; "it has a tail."

The old man then furnished Frank with two or three sharp knives and scissors. Taking the bird and cat, he went out into the yard and in the course of an hour had skinned them both. Then he returned to the shop and set to work in the room behind.

"May I make a group of them?" he asked.

"Do them just as you like," the old man said.

After settling upon his subject, Frank set to work, and, except that he went out for five minutes to buy and eat a penny loaf, continued his work till nightfall. The old man came in several times to look at him, but each time went out again without making a remark. At six o'clock Frank laid down his tools.

"I will come again tomorrow, sir," he said.

The old man nodded, and Frank went home in high spirits. There was a prospect at last of getting something to do, and that in a line most congenial to his own tastes.

The old man looked up when he entered next morning.

"I shall not come in today," he remarked. "I will wait to see them finished."

Working without interruption till the evening, Frank finished them to his satisfaction, and enveloped them with many wrappings of thread to keep them in precisely the att.i.tudes in which he had placed them.

"They are ready for drying now, sir," he said. "If I might place them in an oven they would be dried by morning."

The old man led the way to the kitchen, where a small fire was burning.

"I shall put no more coals on the fire," he said, "and it will be out in a quarter of an hour. Put them in there and leave the door open. I will close it in an hour when the oven cools."

The next day Frank was again at work. It took him all day to get fur and feather to lie exactly as he wished them. In the afternoon he asked the naturalist for a piece of flat board, three feet long, and a perch, but said that instead of the piece of board he should prefer mounting them in a case at once. The old man had not one in the shop large enough, and therefore Frank arranged his group temporarily on the table. On the board lay the cat. At first sight she seemed asleep, but it was clearly only seeming. Her eyes were half open, the upper lip was curled up, and the sharp teeth showed. The hind feet were drawn somewhat under her as in readiness for an instant spring. Her front paws were before her, the talons were somewhat stretched, and one paw was curved. Her ears lay slightly back. She was evidently on the point of springing. The macaw perch, which had been cut down to a height of two feet, stood behind her. The bird hung by its feet, and, head downwards, stretched with open beak towards the tip of the cat's tail, which was slightly uplifted. On a piece of paper Frank wrote, "Dangerous Play."

It was evening before he had finished perfectly to his satisfaction.

Then he called the naturalist in. The old man stopped at the door, surveying the group. Then he entered and examined it carefully.

"Wonderful!" he said. "Wonderful! I should have thought them alive.

There is not a shop in the West End where it could have been turned out better, if so well.

"Lad, you are a wonder! Tell me now who and what are you? I saw when you first addressed me that you were not what you seemed to be, a working lad."

"I have been well educated," Frank said, "and was taught to preserve and stuff by my father, who was a great naturalist. My parents died suddenly, and I was left on my own resources, which," he said, smiling faintly, "have hitherto proved of very small avail. I am glad you are pleased. If you will take me into your service I will work hard and make myself useful in every way. If you require references I can refer you to the doctor who attended us in the country; but I have not a single friend in London except a railway porter, who has most kindly and generously taken me in and sheltered me for the last two months."

"I need no references," the old man said; "your work speaks for itself as to your skill, and your face for your character. But I can offer you nothing fit for you. With such a genius as you have for setting up animals, you ought to be able to earn a good income. Not one man in a thousand can make a dead animal look like a live one. You have the knack or the art."

"I shall be very content with anything you can give me," Frank said; "for the present I only ask to earn my living. If later on I can, as you say, do more, all the better."

The old man stood for some time thinking, and presently said, "I do but little except in live stock. When I had my daughter with me I did a good deal of stuffing, for there is a considerable trade hereabout. The sailors bring home skins of foreign birds, and want them stuffed and put in cases, as presents for their wives and sweethearts. You work fast as well as skillfully. I have known men who would take a fortnight to do such a group as that, and then it would be a failure. It will be quite a new branch for my trade. I do not know how it will act yet, but to begin with I will give you twelve shillings a week, and a room upstairs. If it succeeds we will make other arrangements. I am an old man, and a very lonely one. I shall be glad to have such a companion."

Frank joyfully embraced the offer, and ran all the way home to tell his friend, the porter, of the engagement.

"I am very glad," the man said; "heartily glad. I shall miss you sorely.

I do not know what I should have done without you when I first lost poor Jane and the kids. But now I can go back to my old ways again."

"Perhaps," Frank suggested, "you might arrange to have a room also in the house. It would not be a very long walk, not above twenty or five and twenty minutes, and I should be so glad to have you with me."

The man sat silent for a time. "No," he said at last, "I thank you all the same. I should like it too, but I don't think it would be best in the end. Here all my mates live near, and I shall get on in time. The Christmas holiday season will soon be coming on and we shall be up working late. If you were always going to stop at the place you are going to, it would be different; but you will rise, never fear. I shall be seeing you in gentleman's clothes again some of these days. I've heard you say you were longing to get your books and to be studying again, and you'll soon fall into your own ways; but if you will let me, I'll come over sometimes and have a cup of tea and a chat with you. Now, look here, I'm going out with you now, and I'm going to buy you a suit of clothes, something like what you had on when I first saw you. They won't be altogether unsuitable in a shop. This is a loan, mind, and you may pay me off as you get flush."

Frank saw he should hurt the good fellow's feelings by refusing, and accordingly went out with him, and next morning presented himself at the shop in a quiet suit of dark gray tweed, and with his other clothes in a bundle.

"Aha!" said the old man; "you look more as you ought to do now, though you're a cut above an a.s.sistant in a naturalist's shop in Ratcliff Highway. Now, let me tell you the names of some of these birds. They are, every one of them, foreigners; some of them I don't know myself."

"I can tell all the family names," Frank said quietly, "and the species, but I do not know the varieties."

"Can you!" the old man said in surprise. "What is this now?"

"That is a mockingbird, the great black capped mockingbird, I think. The one next to it is a golden lory."

So Frank went round all the cages and perches in the shop.

"Right in every case," the old man said enthusiastically; "I shall have nothing to teach you. The sailor has been here this morning. I offered him two pounds for the cat and bird to put in my front window, but he would not take it, and has paid me that sum for your work. Here it is.

This is yours, you know. You were not in my employment then, and you will want some things to start with, no doubt. Now come upstairs, I will show you your room. I had intended at first to give you the one at the back, but I have decided now on giving you my daughter's. I think you will like it."

Frank did like it greatly. It was the front room on the second floor. The old man's daughter had evidently been a woman of taste and refinement. The room was prettily papered, a quiet carpet covered the floor, and the furniture was neat and in good keeping. Two pairs of spotless muslin curtains hung across the windows.

"I put them up this morning," the old man said, nodding. "I have got the sheets and bedding airing in the kitchen. They have not been out of the press for the last three years. You can cook in the kitchen. There is always a fire there.

"Now, the first thing to do," he went on when they returned to the shop, "will be for you to mount a dozen cases for the windows. These drawers are full of skins of birds and small animals. I get them for next to nothing from the sailors, and sell them to furriers and feather preparers, who supply ladies' hat and bonnet makers. In future, I propose that you shall mount them and sell them direct. We shall get far higher prices than we do now. I seem to be putting most of the work on your shoulders, but do not want you to help me in the shop. I will look after the birds and buy and sell as I used to do; you will have the back room private to yourself for stuffing and mounting."

Frank was delighted at this allotment of labor, and was soon at work rummaging the drawers and picking out specimens for mounting, and made a selection sufficient to keep him employed for weeks. That evening he sallied out and expended his two pounds in underlinen, of which he was sorely in need. As he required them his employer ordered showcases for the window, of various sizes, getting the backgrounds painted and fitted up as Frank suggested.

Frank did not get on so fast with his work as he had hoped, for the fame of the sailor's cat and macaw spread rapidly in the neighborhood, and there was a perfect rush of sailors and their wives anxious to have birds and skins, which had been brought from abroad, mounted. The sailor himself looked in one day.

"If you like another two pounds for that 'ere cat, governor, I'm game to pay you. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. Every one's wanting to see 'em, and there's the old woman dressed up in her Sunday clothes a-sitting in the parlor as proud as a peac.o.c.k a showing of 'em off. The house ain't been so quiet since I married. Them animals would be cheap to me at a ten pound note. They'll get you no end of orders, I can tell you."

The orders, indeed, came in much faster than Frank could fulfill them, although he worked twelve hours a day; laying aside all other work, however, for three hours in order to devote himself to the shop cases, which were to be chef d'oeuvres.

CHAPTER VII: AN OLD FRIEND

For three months Frank pa.s.sed a quiet and not unpleasant life with the old naturalist in Ratcliff Highway. The latter took a great liking to him, and treated him like a son rather than an a.s.sistant. The two took their meals together now, and Frank's salary had been raised from twelve to eighteen shillings a week. So attractive had the cases in the windows proved that quite a little crowd was generally collected round them, and the business had greatly augmented. The old naturalist was less pleased at this change than most men would have been in his position. He had got into a groove and did not care to get out of it. He had no relatives or any one dependent on him, and he had been well content to go on in a jog trot way, just paying his expenses of shop and living. The extra bustle and push worried rather than pleased him.

"I am an old man," he said to Frank one day, as after the shop was closed they sat over their tea. "I have no motive in laying by money, and had enough for my wants. I was influenced more by my liking for your face and my appreciation of your talent, than by any desire of increasing my business. I am taking now three times as much as I did before. Now I should not mind, indeed, I should be glad, if I thought that you would succeed me here as a son would do. I would gladly take you into partnership with me, and you would have the whole business after my death. But I know, my boy, that it wouldn't do. I know that the time will come when you will not be content with so dull a life here.

You will either get an offer from some West End house which would open higher prospects to you, or you will be wandering away as a collector.

In any case you would not stop here, of that I am quite sure, and therefore do not care, as I should have done, had you been my son, for the increase of the business. As it is, lad, I could not even wish to see you waste your life here."

Frank, after he was once fairly settled at his new work, had written to his friend the doctor, at Deal, telling him of the position he had taken, and that he was in a fair way to make at least a comfortable living, and that at a pursuit of which he was pa.s.sionately fond. He asked him, however, while writing to him from time to time to give him news of his sister, not to tell any one his address, as although he was not ashamed of his berth, still he would rather that, until he had made another step up in life, his old schoolfellows should not know of his whereabouts. He had also written to his friend Ruthven a bright chatty letter, telling him somewhat of his adventures in London and the loss of his money, and saying that he had now got employment at a naturalist's, with every chance of making his way.

"When I mount a bit higher," he concluded, "I shall be awfully glad to see you again, and will let you know what my address may then be.

For the present I had rather keep it dark. If you will write to me, addressed to the General Post Office, telling me all about yourself and the fellows at school, I shall be very, very glad to get your letter. I suppose you will be breaking up for Christmas in a few days."

Christmas came and went. It was signalized to Frank only by the despatch of a pretty present to Lucy, and the receipt of a letter from her written in a round childish hand. A week afterwards he heard somebody come into the shop. His employer was out, and he therefore went into the shop.