The Call of the Town Part 9

There was a great change to be noted in the appearance of the only Henry. It was four years since he had left Wheelton, almost six since he went away to Stratford, and Laysford especially stamps its character on its residents.

"Bless me, 'Enry, but you're growing all to legs, like a young colt,"

his father remarked, as he seated himself and took a smiling survey of his son, who was given the honour of the arm-chair; a fact that marked another stage in his upward career. "All to legs, my boy!"

"But there's lots of time to fill out yet, dad. I weigh ten stone eleven."

"Mostly bones, eh?"

"But I feel all right."

"You look it, my lad; and between you an' I, I'd rather have your bones than my beef!"

"I hope you have always remembered to wear flannel next your skin, Henry?" his mother ventured to ask, in the hilarious moment which her husband was enjoying as the meed of his merry thought.

"Oh, I'm all right, mother! Don't worry about me. Wear flannel next the skin, drink cod-liver oil like water, and am never without a chest-protector on the hottest day."

His sisters laughed, but doubted their ears. Henry had never been jocular. Evidently the neat cut of his summer suit, the elegant tie, were not the only things Laysford had endowed him with.

"Your mother always was coddling you up as a boy. She forgets that you're a man now. Why, your moustache is big enough for a Frenchie.

Don't it get into the tea? I never could abide a moustache. It's one of they furrin ideas."

"My moustache is rather admired, dad," said Henry brightly, glancing slily at his sisters.

"Hark at the lad.... By whom?"

"Ladies ... perhaps!"

Oh, Henry, you might have broken it more gently! Edward John smiled and called him "a young dog"; his mother's face clouded for a moment, and brightened; the girls understood--at least Dora, who was nineteen, and Kit, who was two years younger, understood--and laughed. Milly was only a maiden of bashful fifteen.

"It's simply wonnerful, 'Enry, how you've smartened up since you were 'ome two years ago. Your second two years have done more for you than the first," said Edward John, b.u.t.tering his bread at the tea-table.

"Glad you think so, dad. But I say, mother, it's funny to be b.u.t.tering my own bread again; I haven't b.u.t.tered any since I was at home last."

"When I was in London I never b.u.t.tered a bit. All done for you.

Wonnerful how they encourage laziness in the city." Edward John had need to remind them that he had been to London; for Henry had actually spent two summer holidays there instead of coming to Hampton, and the glory of his father's visit was in danger of being tarnished.

"Still thinking o' going to London some day for good, I suppose?" he went on.

"Oh, of course; but the fact is that the more I learn of journalism the more difficult London seems. It is all plain sailing at eighteen; but at twenty-two ... well, I'm just beginning to think I'm not a heaven-born genius, dad."

"But it ain't what you think about yourself that matters."

"That's just what does matter--in journalism. I've learned one great thing since leaving home. The world takes a man pretty much at his own valuation. A fool who takes himself seriously is like to be taken seriously by other fools, and you know how many fools there are in England according to Carlyle."

"Well, then, if you are a fool, try it," retorted the postmaster merrily.

"But a wise man, who thinks himself a fool, is likely to be thought a fool by--"

"Wise men?"

"Perhaps by them also; but certainly by the fools, who are in the majority."

"Nonsense, my lad! Was it for this I paid that Springthorpe fellow five-and-twenty pounds?"

"Henry's only joking, dad," Dora suggested. Her sense of humour was not magnetic.

"A jest in earnest, Dora; for the more one learns the less one knows."

An amazing fellow: a veritable changeling this Henry! His mother watched him almost like a stranger.

"Rank heresy, now, you're talking. I wunner what old Mr. Needham would say to that?" exclaimed his father, who had a fear that his son had grown a trifle conceited.

"That I had learned a lot since you wanted him to tackle me on Virgil.

But I like my work for all that; in fact, because of it. It is about the only kind of work in which one is learning every day; and I'm beginning to think that the real fun of life is not the knowledge of things so much as the getting to know them."

"Well, look 'ere, 'Enry. You're dragging your poor old father out into deep waters, an' you know he can't swim. You're talking like one of your articles. For I read 'em all that you mark with blue pencil, and your mother keeps 'em, even when she's hard up for paper to light the fire."

Henry wondered in his heart if, at a pinch, she would have used one for her curl-papers. He noticed just then, for the first time in his life, that the parlour of his old home was very small; the ceiling was so low that he found himself almost choking for breath when he looked up.

Dora and her mother were clearing away the tea-dishes, and Henry went upstairs to the bedroom where he would sleep with his father. The old nest had altered in a hundred ways, although none but Henry knew that.

He had once been a bird of the brood here, but he had taken wings away, and to return for a fortnight once in two years was only to realise how far his wings had carried him. Henry had been born here, the people that he loved the best of all were still living here in the old home--his old home. Yet it could never be anything but his _old_ home now. We talk about returning home; but really we never do so. Once we leave the home of our boyhood and youth, we never return again. It is seldom we wish to go back to the old life; and when the wish is there, Fate is usually against its fulfilment.

Henry Charles had certainly altered in a bewildering variety of ways since we first made his acquaintance. Then a tall, sallow youth of sixteen, ungainly in limb and not well-featured, his nose unshapely, his mouth too large, but a pair of dark eyes gleaming with spirit to light up the homeliness of the face. Now, a man--oh, the few short years, the tiny bridge across the chasm, the bridge we never pa.s.s again!--a man: tall as a dragoon, leggy, it is true, as the shrewd eye of his father had judged; but no longer thin to veritable lantern jaws, rather a promise of ample fleshing, and a nose that had sharpened itself into an organ not uncomely of outline. This changing of the nose is one of the most curious of our few tadpole resemblances. His mouth might still be large, but a glossy moustache hides many an anti-Cupid pair of lips, which a few pa.s.ses of the razor would unmask to set the dear boy flying.

Henry's hair was raven black and ample--perilously near to disaster for a hero. But we must have the truth in this narrative, cost what it may.

As he stood in the bedroom, brushing his hair and bending carefully to avoid knocking his head against the ceiling, which sloped steeply to the dormer window, where stood the looking-gla.s.s on its old mahogany table with the white linen cover, Henry presented the picture of a wholesome young Englishman, proud of brain rather than muscle, and differing therein from the ruck of his fellows, but joining hands with them again in the careful touch to his hair, the neat collar, the pretty necktie.

Now, the moment a young man begins to look to his neckties, unless he is a mere dude, there is a reason for it. Henry Charles was impossible miles from dudeism; _ergo_, there was a reason for his lingering at the looking-gla.s.s.

He had been slower than the average young man to awaken to the fact that for most male beings still unmated, there is some young lady deeply interested in his neckties and the cut of his coat. But he had awakened, and now the difficulty was to know which young lady: there seemed to be so many in Laysford who took an interest in the clever young a.s.sistant editor of the _Leader_. To be on the safe side, it was well to be observant of the sartorial conventions, even while in the inner recesses of the literary mind disdaining them.

That is Henry's state of mind when we see him after tea at the mirror in the camceiled bedroom. If it surprises you, remember that it is four years since you met him last, and many things can happen in that time.

How do we know what has happened to him? His necktie tells us something, doesn't it?

CHAPTER X

VIOLET EYES

WHEN Henry was seated alongside the carrier that fateful morning long ago--Henry, you must be more than twenty-two!--he had to pa.s.s the cottage of old Carne the s.e.xton, and a sweet face, jewelled with a pair of violet eyes, looked out between the curtains, a girl's hand rattled on the window-pane. The owner of these eyes had been playing with a caterpillar when Henry went round the village telling everybody he met that he was going away to Stratford--her among the rest. But surely that was ages ago! "I could never have been such a young a.s.s," Henry would say to a certainty if you were to ask him at the mirror.

Well, here is Eunice Lyndon in proof of the fact that it was almost six years since. At all events, she says she is just nineteen, and she was thirteen then. She doesn't play with caterpillars now; but her eyes are certainly violet, though Henry probably thought they were blue, if he thought of them at all.

The six years have wrought wonders in the girl who rattled on the window when Henry went forth to the fray.

For one thing, Eunice, who was the chum of Dora, and thus a frequent visitor in the Charles household, had discredited the croakers by continuing to live and even to strengthen, despite the fact of her mother's consumptive end. Poor Mrs. Charles, who had seldom a chance of opening her mouth on any topic, never avoided stating, as an article of her faith, that all children of consumptive parents were doomed as clearly as though their sentence had been pa.s.sed by a hanging judge. It was positively an insult to her and to many another anxious mother for the progeny of consumptive parents to go on living. For such to wax strong was against Nature, and in the teeth of medical experience.