The Three Clerks Part 11

'Men go down and come up again every day of their lives, and what other men can do, I can, I suppose.'

'That doesn't follow at all,' said Captain Cutt.w.a.ter, 'What sort of a figure would you make on a yard-arm, reefing a sail in a gale of wind?'

'Pray do take care of yourself,' said Gertrude.

Norman's brow grew black. 'I thought that it was settled that Mr.

Neverbend was to go down, and that you were to stay above ground,' said he.

'So Mr. Neverbend settled it; but that arrangement may, perhaps, be unsettled again,' said Alaric, with a certain feeling of confidence in his own strong will.

'I don't at all doubt,' said Mrs. Woodward, 'that if we were to get a sly peep at you, we should find you both sitting comfortably at your inn all the time, and that neither of you will go a foot below the ground.'

'Very likely. All I mean to say is, that if Neverbend goes down I'll go too.'

'But mind, you gloomy gnome, mind you bring up a bit of gold for me,' said Katie.

On the Monday morning he started with the often-expressed good wishes of all the party, and with a note for Sir Jib Boom, which the captain made him promise that he would deliver, and which Alaric fully determined to lose long before he got to Plymouth.

That evening he and Norman pa.s.sed together. As soon as their office hours were over, they went into the London Exhibition, which was then open; and there, walking up and down the long centre aisle, they talked with something like mutual confidence of their future prospects. This was a favourite resort with Norman, who had schooled himself to feel an interest in works of art. Alaric's mind was of a different cast; he panted rather for the great than the beautiful; and was inclined to ridicule the growing taste of the day for torsos, Palissy ware, and a.s.syrian monsters.

There was then some mutual confidence between the two young men.

Norman, who was apt to examine himself and his own motives more strictly than Alaric ever did, had felt that something like suspicion as to his friend had crept over him; and he had felt also that there was no ground for such suspicion. He had determined to throw it off, and to be again cordial with his companion. He had resolved so to do before his last visit at Hampton; but it was at Hampton that the suspicion had been engendered, and there he found himself unable to be genial, kindly, and contented. Surbiton Cottage was becoming to him anything but the abode of happiness that it had once been. A year ago he had been the hero of the Hampton Sundays; he could not but now feel that Alaric had, as it were, supplanted him with his own friends. The arrival even of so insignificant a person as Captain Cutt.w.a.ter--and Captain Cutt.w.a.ter was very insignificant in Norman's mind--had done much to produce this state of things. He had been turned out of his bedroom at the cottage, and had therefore lost those last, loving, lingering words, sometimes protracted to so late an hour, which had been customary after Alaric's departure to his inn--those last lingering words which had been so sweet because their sweetness had not been shared with his friend.

He could not be genial and happy at Surbiton Cottage; but he was by no means satisfied with himself that he should not have been so. When he found that he had been surly with Alaric, he was much more angry with himself than Alaric was with him. Alaric, indeed, was indifferent about it. He had no wish to triumph over Harry, but he had an object to pursue, and he was not the man to allow himself to be diverted from it by any one's caprice.

'This trip is a great thing for you,' said Harry.

'Well, I really don't know. Of course I could not decline it; but on the whole I should be just as well pleased to have been spared. If I get through it well, why it will be well. But even that cannot help me at this examination.'

'I don't know that.'

'Why--a week pa.s.sed in the slush of a Cornish mine won't teach a man algebra.'

'It will give you _prestige_.'

'Then you mean to say the examiners won't examine fairly; well, perhaps so. But what will be the effect on me if I fail? I know nothing of mines. I have a colleague with me of whom I can only learn that he is not weak enough to be led, or wise enough to lead; who is so self-opinionated that he thinks he is to do the whole work himself, and yet so jealous that he fears I shall take the very bread out of his mouth. What am I to do with such a man?'

'You must manage him,' said Harry.

'That is much easier said than done,' replied Alaric. 'I wish you had the task instead of me.'

'So do not I. Sir Gregory, when he chose you, knew what he was about.'

'Upon my word, Harry, you are full of compliments to-day. I really ought to take my hat off.'

'No, I am not; I am in no mood for compliments. I know very well what stuff you are made of. I know your superiority to myself. I know you will be selected to go up over all our heads. I feel all this; and Alaric, you must not be surprised that, to a certain degree, it is painful to me to feel it. But, by G.o.d's help I will get over it; and if you succeed it shall go hard with me, but I will teach myself to rejoice at it. Look at that fawn there,'

said he, turning away his face to hide the tear in his eye, 'did you ever see more perfect motion?'

Alaric was touched; but there was more triumph than sympathy in his heart. It was sweet, much too sweet, to him to hear his superiority thus acknowledged. He was superior to the men who worked round him in his office. He was made of a more plastic clay than they, and despite the inferiority of his education, he knew himself to be fit for higher work than they could do. As the acknowledgement was made to him by the man whom, of those around him, he certainly ranked second to himself, he could not but feel that his heart's blood ran warm within him, he could not but tread with an elastic step.

But it behoved him to answer Harry, and to answer him in other spirit than this.

'Oh, Harry,' said he, 'you have some plot to ruin me by my own conceit; to make me blow myself out and destroy myself, poor frog that I am, in trying to loom as largely as that great cow, Fidus Neverbend. You know I am fully conscious how much inferior my education has been to yours.'

'Education is nothing,' said Harry.

Education is nothing! Alaric triumphantly re-echoed the words in his heart--'Education is nothing--mind, mind is everything; mind and the will.' So he expressed himself to his own inner self; but out loud he spoke much more courteously.

'It is the innate modesty of your own heart, Harry, that makes you think so highly of me and so meanly of yourself. But the proof of what we each can do is yet to be seen. Years alone can decide that. That your career will be honourable and happy, of that I feel fully sure! I wish I were as confident of mine.'

'But, Alaric,' said Norman, going on rather with the thread of his own thoughts, than answering or intending to answer what the other said, 'in following up your high ambition--and I know you have a high ambition--do not allow yourself to believe that the end justifies the means, because you see that men around you act as though they believed so.'

'Do I do so--do I seem to do so?' said Alaric, turning sharply round.

'Don't be angry with me, Alaric; don't think that I want to preach; but sometimes I fancy, not that you do so, but that your mind is turning that way; that in your eager desire for honourable success you won't scrutinize the steps you will have to take.'

'That I would get to the top of the hill, in short, even though the hillside be miry. Well, I own I wish to get to the top of the hill.'

'But not to defile yourself in doing so.'

'When a man comes home from a successful chase, with his bag well stuffed with game, the women do not quarrel with him because there is mud on his gaiters.'

'Alaric, that which is evil is evil. Lies are evil--'

'And am I a liar?'

'Heaven forbid that I should say so: heaven forbid that I should have to think so! but it is by such doctrines as that that men become liars.'

'What! by having muddy gaiters?'

'By disregarding the means in looking to the end.'

'And I will tell you how men become mere vegetables, by filling their minds with useless--needless scruples--by straining at gnats--'

'Well, finish your quotation,' said Harry.

'I have finished it; in speaking to you I would not for the world go on, and seem to insinuate that you would swallow a camel. No insinuation could be more base or unjust. But, nevertheless, I think you may be too over-scrupulous. What great man ever rose to greatness,' continued Alaric, after they had walked nearly the length of the building in silence, 'who thought it necessary to pick his steps in the manner you have described?'

'Then I would not be great,' said Harry.

'But, surely, G.o.d intends that there shall be great men on the earth?'

'He certainly wishes that there should be good men,' said Harry.

'And cannot a man be good and great?'

'That is the problem for a man to solve. Do you try that. Good you certainly can be, if you look to Him for a.s.sistance. Let that come first; and then the greatness, if that be possible.'