My Novel Part 66

CHAPTER XIV.

Leonard went out the next day with his precious ma.n.u.scripts. He had read sufficient of modern literature to know the names of the princ.i.p.al London publishers; and to these he took his way with a bold step, though a beating heart.

That day he was out longer than the last; and when he returned, and came into the little room, Helen uttered a cry, for she scarcely recognized him,--there was on his face so deep, so silent, and so concentrated a despondency. He sat down listlessly, and did not kiss her this time, as she stole towards him. He felt so humbled. He was a king deposed.

He take charge of another life! He!

She coaxed him at last into communicating his day's chronicle. The reader beforehand knows too well what it must be to need detailed repet.i.tion. Most of the publishers had absolutely refused to look at his ma.n.u.scripts; one or two had good-naturedly glanced over and returned them at once with a civil word or two of flat rejection. One publisher alone--himself a man of letters, and who in youth had gone through the same bitter process of disillusion that now awaited the village genius--volunteered some kindly though stern explanation and counsel to the unhappy boy. This gentleman read a portion of Leonard's princ.i.p.al poem with attention, and even with frank admiration. He could appreciate the rare promise that it manifested. He sympathized with the boy's history, and even with his hopes; and then he said, in bidding him farewell,

"If I publish this poem for you, speaking as a trader, I shall be a considerable loser. Did I publish all I admire, out of sympathy with the author, I should be a ruined man. But suppose that, impressed as I really am with the evidence of no common poetic gifts in this ma.n.u.script, I publish it, not as a trader, but a lover of literature, I shall in reality, I fear, render you a great disservice, and perhaps unfit your whole life for the exertions on which you must rely for independence."

"How, sir?" cried Leonard. "Not that I would ask you to injure yourself for me," he added, with proud tears in his eyes.

"How, my young friend? I will explain. There is enough talent in these verses to induce very flattering reviews in some of the literary journals. You will read these, find yourself proclaimed a poet, will cry 'I am on the road to fame.' You will come to me, 'And my poem, how does it sell?' I shall point to some groaning shelf, and say, 'Not twenty copies! The journals may praise, but the public will not buy it.'

'But you will have got a name,' you say. Yes, a name as a poet just sufficiently known to make every man in practical business disinclined to give fair trial to your talents in a single department of positive life; none like to employ poets;--a name that will not put a penny in your purse,--worse still, that will operate as a barrier against every escape into the ways whereby men get to fortune. But having once tasted praise, you will continue to sigh for it: you will perhaps never again get a publisher to bring forth a poem, but you will hanker round the purlieus of the Muses, scribble for periodicals, fall at last into a bookseller's drudge. Profits will be so precarious and uncertain, that to avoid debt may be impossible; then, you who now seem so ingenuous and so proud, will sink deeper still into the literary mendicant, begging, borrowing--"

"Never! never! never!" cried Leonard, veiling his face with his hands.

"Such would have been my career," continued the publisher; "but I luckily had a rich relative, a trader, whose calling I despised as a boy, who kindly forgave my folly, bound me as an apprentice, and here I am; and now I can afford to write books as well as sell them.

"Young man, you must have respectable relations,--go by their advice and counsel; cling fast to some positive calling. Be anything in this city rather than poet by profession."

"And how, sir, have there ever been poets? Had they other callings?"

"Read their biography, and then--envy them!"

Leonard was silent a moment; but lifting his head, answered loud and quickly, "I have read their biography. True, their lot was poverty,--perhaps hunger. Sir, I--envy them!"

"Poverty and hunger are small evils," answered the bookseller, with a grave, kind smile. "There are worse,--debt and degradation, and--despair."

"No, sir, no, you exaggerate; these last are not the lot of all poets."

"Right, for most of our greatest poets had some private means of their own. And for others--why, all who have put into a lottery have not drawn blanks. But who could advise another man to set his whole hope of fortune on the chance of a prize in a lottery? And such a lottery!"

groaned the publisher, glancing towards sheets and reams of dead authors, lying, like lead, upon his shelves.

Leonard clutched his ma.n.u.scripts to his heart, and hurried away.

"Yes," he muttered, as Helen clung to him, and tried to console,--"yes, you were right: London is very vast, very strong, and very cruel;" and his head sank lower and lower yet upon his bosom.

The door was flung widely open, and in, unannounced, walked Dr. Morgan.

The child turned to him, and at the sight of his face she remembered her father; and the tears that for Leonard's sake she had been trying to suppress found way.

The good doctor soon gained all the confidence of these two young hearts; and after listening to Leonard's story of his paradise lost in a day, he patted him on the shoulder and said, "Well, you will call on me on Monday, and we will see. Meanwhile, borrow these of me!"--and he tried to slip three sovereigns into the boy's hand. Leonard was indignant. The bookseller's warning flashed on him. Mendicancy! Oh, no, he had not yet come to that! He was almost rude and savage in his rejection; and the doctor did not like him the less for it.

"You are an obstinate mule," said the h.o.m.oeopathist, reluctantly putting up his sovereigns. "Will you work at something practical and prosy, and let the poetry rest a while?"

"Yes," said Leonard, doggedly. "I will work."

"Very well, then. I know an honest bookseller, and he shall give you some employment; and meanwhile, at all events, you will be among books, and that will be some comfort."

Leonard's eyes brightened. "A great comfort, sir." He pressed the hand he had before put aside to his grateful heart.

"But," resumed the doctor, seriously, "you really feel a strong predisposition to make verses?"

"I did, sir."

"Very bad symptom indeed, and must be stopped before a relapse! Here, I have cured three prophets and ten poets with this novel specific."

While thus speaking he had got out his book and a globule. "Agaricus muscarius dissolved in a tumbler of distilled water,--teaspoonful whenever the fit comes on. Sir, it would have cured Milton himself."

"And now for you, my child," turning to Helen, "I have found a lady who will be very kind to you. Not a menial situation. She wants some one to read to her and tend on her; she is old and has no children. She wants a companion, and prefers a girl of your age to one older. Will this suit you?"

Leonard walked away.

Helen got close to the doctor's ear, and whispered, "No, I cannot leave him now,--he is so sad."

"Cott!" grunted the doctor, "you two must have been reading 'Paul and Virginia.' If I could but stay in England, I would try what ignatia would do in this case,--interesting experiment! Listen to me, little girl, and go out of the room, you, sir."

Leonard, averting his face, obeyed. Helen made an involuntary step after him; the doctor detained and drew her on his knee.

"What's your Christian name?--I forget."

"Helen."

"Helen, listen. In a year or two you will be a young woman, and it would be very wrong then to live alone with that young man. Meanwhile you have no right to cripple all his energies. He must not have you leaning on his right arm,--you would weigh it down. I am going away, and when I am gone there will be no one to help you, if you reject the friend I offer you. Do as I tell you, for a little girl so peculiarly susceptible (a thorough pulsatilla const.i.tution) cannot be obstinate and egotistical."

"Let me see him cared for and happy, sir," said she, firmly, "and I will go where you wish."

"He shall be so; and to-morrow, while he is out, I will come and fetch you. Nothing so painful as leave-taking, shakes the nervous system, and is a mere waste of the animal economy."

Helen sobbed aloud; then, writhing from the doctor, she exclaimed, "But he may know where I am? We may see each other sometimes? Ah, sir, it was at my father's grave that we first met, and I think Heaven sent him to me. Do not part us forever."

"I should have a heart of stone if I did," cried the doctor, vehemently; "and Miss Starke shall let him come and visit you once a week. I'll give her something to make her. She is naturally indifferent to others. I will alter her whole const.i.tution, and melt her into sympathy--with rhododendron and a.r.s.enic!"

CHAPTER XV.

Before he went the doctor wrote a line to "Mr. p.r.i.c.kett, Bookseller, Holborn," and told Leonard to take it the next morning, as addressed. "I will call on p.r.i.c.kett myself tonight and prepare him for your visit. But I hope and trust you will only have to stay there a few days."

He then turned the conversation, to communicate his plans for Helen.

Miss Starke lived at Highgate,--a worthy woman, stiff and prim, as old maids sometimes are; but just the place for a little girl like Helen, and Leonard should certainly be allowed to call and see her.