Lover or Friend Part 14

'Well, I suppose we made it too hot for him, ma'am, for he soon beat a retreat. Joe was always a coward. I would have hurried him out with a kick, but I thought it better to be prudent; and Priscilla went and had a fit of hysterics in her own room, and she has been looking mortal bad, poor la.s.s! ever since.'

'I wish we could save her these trying scenes, Mr. O'Brien; they get on her nerves.'

'Ah, that is what her mother said! "Prissy will never have a day's health if we can't hinder Joe from coming to plague her"--I remember my Susan saying that. Why, it was half for Prissy's sake we gave up the shop. "What is the good of filling our purse, Tom, when we have plenty for ourselves and Priscilla!" she was always saying to me. But there, I was fond of the shop--it is no use denying it--and it takes a special sort of education to fit one for idleness. Even now--would you believe it, ma'am?--I have a sort of longing to finger the oats and peas again.'

'But you are very fond of your cottage and your garden, Mr. O'Brien.

Captain Burnett says it is the prettiest little place about here.'

'Ah, I have been forgetting my manners, and I have never asked after the Captain, though he is a prime favourite of mine. Oh yes, he always has his little joke. "What will you sell it for, O'Brien, just as it stands?

Name your own price." Well, it is a snug little place; and if only my little woman were here and I had news of Mat----' And here Mr. O'Brien pushed his hand through his gray hair again, and sighed as he looked out on his row of lilies.

Audrey sat still in sympathising silence. She knew how her old friend loved to unburden himself. He talked to no one else as he did to this girl--not even to the Captain. He liked to enlarge in his simple way on his old happy life, when Prissy was young and he and his wife thought handsome Joe Baxter a grand lover for their girl, with his fine figure and soft, wheedling tongue.

'But we were old enough to know better--we were a couple of fools, of course; I know that now,' he would say. 'But he just talked us over--Joe is a rare hand at talking even now. He can use fine words; he has learnt it in his business. I think our worst time was when Prissy's baby died and she began to droop, and in her weakness she let it all out to her mother. I remember my little woman coming into the shop that day, with the tears running down her face. "Tom," she says, "what have we ever done to be so punished? Joe is treating Prissy like a brute, and my poor girl's heart is broken." Dear, dear! how I wanted Mat then!'

Audrey knew all about this Mat--at least, the little there was to know.

One day, soon after Mr. O'Brien had lost his wife, and she had found him sitting alone in the porch, he had begun talking to her of his own accord of a young brother whom he called Mat, but to no one else had he ever mentioned his name. Audrey had been much touched and surprised by this confidence, and from time to time Mr. O'Brien had continued to speak of him, until she was in possession of the main facts.

Thomas...o...b..ien had lost his parents early, and his brothers and sisters had died in infancy, with the exception of the youngest, Matthew, or Mat, as he was generally called. There was so much difference between their ages that Mat was quite a plaything and pet to his elder brother.

From all accounts, he was a bright, engaging little fellow, and developed unusual capacity.

'He was a cut above us, and people took notice of him, and that spoiled him,' observed Mr. O'Brien one day.

Audrey, piecing the fragments of conversation together, could picture the clever, handsome lad learning his lessons in the little back parlour, while honest Tom served in the shop. But Mat was not always so studious: he would be sliding with the Rector's boys, or helping them to make a snow man; sometimes he would be having tea at the Rectory, or with his master, or even with the curates. One of the curates was musical, and Mat had an angelic voice. One could imagine the danger to the precocious, clever boy, and how perhaps, on his return, he would gibe a little in his impertinent boyish fashion at thickheaded, clumsy Tom among his cornbins and sacks of split peas.

Mat did not wish to be a corn-chandler. When Tom married the daughter of a neighbouring baker, Mat was heard to mutter to one of his intimates that Tom might have looked higher for a wife. He grew a little discontented after that, and gave the young couple plenty of trouble until he got his way--a bad way, too--and went off to seek his fortunes in London.

Tom missed the lad sadly; even his Susan's rosy cheeks and good-humour failed to console him for a while. Not until Prissy made her appearance--and in clamorous baby fashion wheedled her way into her father's affections--did his sore heart cease to regret the young brother.

Susan used to talk to her husband in her sensible way.

'It is no use your fretting, Tom,' she would say; 'boys will be boys, and anything is better for Mat than hanging about here with his hands in his pockets and doing nothing but gossip with the customers. He was growing into idle ways. It was a shame for a big fellow like Mat to be living upon his brother; it is far better for him to be thrown on himself to work for his bread,' finished Susan, rocking her baby, for she was a shrewd little person in her way.

'I don't like to think of Mat alone in London,' returned Tom slowly; but as he looked into his wife's innocent eyes he forbore to utter all his thoughts aloud. Tom was old enough to know something of the world; he could guess at the pitfalls that stretched before the lad's unwary feet.

Mat was young, barely eighteen, his very gifts of beauty and cleverness might lead him into trouble.

'I wish I had him here,' muttered Tom, as he went off to serve a customer. 'Peterborough is a better place for him than London;' for they were living at Peterborough then.

Tom cheered up presently, when Mat wrote one of his flourishing letters; he was a fine letter-writer. He was in luck's way, he told Tom, and had fallen on his feet; at his first application he had obtained a clerkship in some business house, and his employer had taken a fancy to him.

'I feel like d.i.c.k Whittington,' wrote Mat, in his happy, boastful way; 'all night long the bells were saying to me, "Turn again, turn again, Mat O'Brien, for fortune is before you." I could hear them in my dreams--and then the next morning came a letter from Mr. Turner. Dear old chap, you won't bother about me any more, for I mean to stick to my work like a galley slave. Give my love to Susan, and kiss the little one--couldn't you have found a better name than that Puritan Priscilla, you foolish Tom?'--and so on. Audrey once read that letter, and a dozen more of the same type; she thought them very affectionate and clever.

Every now and then there were graphic descriptions of a day's amus.e.m.e.nt or sight-seeing. What was it they lacked? Audrey could never answer that question, but she laid them down with a dim feeling of dissatisfaction.

Mat used to run down for a day or two when business permitted, and take possession of his shabby little room under the roof. How happy honest Tom would be on these occasions! how he would chuckle to himself as he saw his customers--female customers especially--cast sidelong glances at the handsome dark-haired youth who lounged by the door!

'Old Mrs. Stevenson took him for a gentleman,' Tom remarked to Susan once, rubbing his hands over the joke. 'Mat is so well set up, and wears such a good coat; just look at his boots!--and his shirts are ever so much finer than mine; he looks like a young lord in his Sunday best,'

went on Tom, who admired his young brother with every fibre of his heart.

Mat was quite aware of the sensation he made among his old friends and neighbours; he liked to feel his own importance. He came pretty frequently at first; he was tolerant of Susan's homeliness and sisterly advice, he took kindly to Prissy, and brought her a fine coral necklace to wear on her fat dimpled neck; but after a year or two he came less often.

'Leave him alone,' Susan would say when Tom grumbled to her over his pipe of an evening; 'Mat has grown too fine for the shop; nothing pleased him last time. He wanted napkins with his food because of his moustache, and he complained that his bed was so hard he could not sleep on it. It is easy to see that our homely ways do not suit him. I wish your heart were not set on him so much, Tom; it is thankless work to cling to a person who wants to get rid of his belongings.'

'Nay, Susan, you are too hard on the lad,' her husband remonstrated; 'Mat will never cut us--he has an affectionate heart. He is only having his fling, as lads, even the best of them, will at times. By and by he will settle down, and then we shall see more of him.'

But in spite of Tom's faith, that time never came. By and by Mat wrote with a greater flourish than ever.

'Wish me joy, my dear Susan and Tom,' he wrote, 'for I am going to be married, and to the prettiest and the dearest girl in the world. Just fancy, Tom, her uncle is a Dean! what do you think of your brother Mat now? "Turn again, turn again, Mat O'Brien"--that is what the bells said to me, and, by Jove! they were right. Haven't I had a rise this Christmas?--and now my dear little Olive has promised to take me for better or worse. Oh, Tom, you should just see her--she is such a darling! and I am the luckiest fellow in the world to get her! I can see Susan shaking her head and saying in her wise way that I am young to take the cares of life on my shoulders; but when a fellow is head over heels in love, he cannot stop to balance arguments. And after all, we are not so imprudent, for when the Dean dies, and he is an old man, Olive will have a pretty penny of her own. So wish me joy, dear Tom, and send me your blessing.'

Tom fairly wept over this letter; he carried it about with him and read it at intervals during the day.

'If only she makes the lad happy!' he said to Susan. 'To think of our Mat marrying a gentlewoman, for of course a Dean's niece is that;' and Susan, whose knowledge of the world was small, supposed so too.

Tom was hoping that Mat would bring his young wife down to receive his brotherly congratulations in person; but there was always some excuse for the delay. Olive was delicate; she could not travel; Mat could not leave her to come himself, and so on. Tom never doubted these excuses; he even made his little joke about the lad becoming a family man; but Susan, who was sharper than her husband, read between the lines. Mat was ashamed of bringing the Dean's niece down to see the shop; it was possible, but here Susan almost shuddered at the awfulness of the thought, that he might not have told his wife that he had a brother.

'Mat is as weak as water, with all his cleverness,' she said to herself; 'if he has not told her yet, he will put it off from day to day. There is nothing easier than procrastination if you once give in to it. Few people speak the truth like my Tom, bless him!'

Susan would not grieve her husband by hinting at these suspicions, though they grew stronger as time went on. Mat never brought his wife to see them; he seldom wrote, unless to tell them of the birth of a child, and then his letters were brief and unsatisfactory. Tom once wrote and asked him if he were happy, 'for somehow Susan and I have got into our heads that things are not quite square,' wrote the simple fellow. 'Do come and let us have a chat together over our pipes. Prissy is getting quite a big girl; you would hardly know her now.'

Perhaps Mat was touched by this persistent kindness on his brother's part, for he answered that letter by return of post.

'One must not expect too much happiness in this crooked old world,' he wrote; 'but you and Susan are such old-fashioned people. Olive and I have as much enjoyment of life as ordinary folk. We quarrel sometimes and make it up again. I was never a very patient mortal--eh, old chap?--and one's temper does not improve with age.' And then after a little talk about the children, who had been ill with scarlatina, the letter wound up by begging the loan of a five-pound note.

Tom did not show this letter to Susan. For the first time in his life he kept a secret from the wife of his bosom. He put two five-pound notes in an envelope, and sent them with his love to Olive and the children. A pang of remorse must have crossed Mat's heart at this fresh act of kindness; but though he acknowledged the gift with the utmost grat.i.tude, he neither came nor wrote again for a long time.

Some time after that Tom took an odd notion in his head: he would go up to London and see Mat and his wife and children; he was just hankering for a sight of the lad, as he told Susan. To be sure, Mat had never invited him--never hinted at such a thing in his letters; he could not be sure of his welcome. Susan tried to dissuade him, but to no purpose; for once Tom was deaf to his little woman's advice. He left her in charge of the shop one fine spring morning and started for London and Bayswater, where Mat lived.

He came back earlier than Susan expected, and there was a sad look in his eyes as he sat down and filled his pipe. Susan forbore to question him at first; she got him some supper and a jug of the best ale, and presently he began to talk of his own accord:

'There were other people living in No. 23 Mortimer Terrace. The O'Briens had left more than a year ago, and no one knew where they were. Fancy Mat leaving and never giving me his address!' finished Tom with an air of deep depression.

He was evidently much wounded at this want of brotherly confidence.

'But surely you know his business address, dear?' Susan asked quietly.

No; Tom did not know even that. He reminded her that Mat had long ago left his old employers, and had set up for himself; but Tom did not know where his office was.

'I always wrote to his private address, you know, Susan,' he went on.

'Mat told me that no one ever opened his letters but himself; but how am I to find him out now if he chooses to hide himself from his only brother?'

And though Tom said no more, he moped for many a day after that fruitless expedition.

By and by the truth leaked out--Mat was in trouble, and in such trouble that no fraternal help could avail him. One awful day, a day that turned Tom's hair gray with horror and anguish, he heard that Mat--handsome, brilliant Mat--was in a felon's cell, condemned to penal servitude for a long term of years. In a moment of despair he had forged the name of one of his so-called friends, and by this terrible act had obtained possession of a large sum of money.

Tom's anguish at this news was not to be described; he cried like a child, and Susan vainly tried to comfort him.

'My father's name,' he kept repeating--'he has disgraced our honest name! I will never forgive him; I will have nothing more to do with him--he has covered us all with shame!'

And then the next moment he relented at the thought of Mat, beaten down and miserable, and perhaps repentant, in his wretched cell.