Tony Butler Part 78

The consul sat smoking his cigar with a friend at a window, little heeding the turmoil around, but leaving the charge of the various difficulties to his clerks, who only referred to him on some special occasions.

"Here's a man, sir," cried one of the clerks, "who wishes to be entered in the ship's books under an a.s.sumed name. I have told him it can't be done."

"Why does he ask it? Is he a runaway convict?" asked the consul.

"Not exactly," said Tony, laughing; "but as I have not been brought up before the mast, and I have a few relatives who might not like to hear of me in that station--"

"A scamp, I take," broke in the consul, "who, having done his worst on sh.o.r.e, takes to the sea for a refuge?"

"Partly right,--partly wrong," was the dry answer.

"Well, my smart fellow, there 's no help for it. You must give your name and your birthplace; and if they should prove false ones, take any consequences that might result."

"What sort of consequences might these be?" asked Tony, calmly; and the consul, having either spoken without any distinct knowledge attached to his words, or provoked by the pertinacity of the question, half irritably answered: "I 've no time to throw away in discussing casualties; give your name or go your way."

"Yes, yes," murmured the skipper. "Who knows anything about you down here?--Just sign the sheet and let's be moving."

The sort of good-humored tone and look that went with the words decided Tony, and he took the pen and wrote "Tony Butler, Ireland."

The consul glanced at the writing, and said, "What part of Ireland? Name a town or a village."

"I cannot; my father was a soldier, quartered in various places, and I 'm not sure in what part of the island I was born."

"Tony Butler means Anthony Butler, I suppose?"

"Tony Butler!" cried the consul's friend, suddenly starting up, and coming forward; "did _you_ say your name was Tony Butler?"

"Yes; that is my name."

"And are you from the North of Ireland,--near the Causeway?"

Tony nodded, while a flush of shame at the recognition covered his face.

"And do you know Dr. Stewart, the Presbyterian minister in that neighborhood?"

"I should think so. The Burnside, where he lives, is not above a mile from us."

"That's it,--the Burnside,--that's the name of it. I'm as glad as fifty pounds in my pocket to see you, Mr. Butler," cried he, grasping Tony's hand in both his own. "There 's not a man from this to England I 'd as soon have met as yourself. I 'm Sam M'Grader, Robert M'Grader's brother.

You have n't forgot _him_, I hope?"

"That I haven't," cried Tony, warmly returning the honest pressure of the other's hand. "What a stupid dog I have been not to remember that you lived here! and I have a letter for you, too, from your brother!"

"I want no letter of introduction with you, Mr. Butler; come home with me. You 're not going to sea this time;" and, taking a pen, he drew a broad line of ink across Tony's name; and then turning, he whispered a few words in the consul's ear.

"I hope," said the consul, "Mr. Butler is not offended at the freedom with which I commented on him."

"Not in the least," said Tony, laughing. "I thought at the time, if you knew me you would not have liked to have suggested my having been a runaway convict; and now that you _do_ know me, the shame you feel is more than enough to punish you."

"What could have induced you to go before the mast, Mr. Butler?" said M'Gruder, as he led Tony away.

"Sheer necessity. I wanted to earn my bread."

"But you had got something,--some place or other?"

"I was a messenger, but I lost my despatches, and was ashamed to go home and say so."

"Will you stop with me? Will you be a clerk?" asked the other; and a certain timidity in his voice showed that he was not quite a.s.sured as he spoke. "My business is like my brother's,--we 're 'in rags.'".

"And so should I be in a few days," laughed out Tony, "if I had n't met you. I 'll be your clerk, with a heart and a half,--that is, if I be capable; only don't give me anything where money enters, and as little writing as possible, and no arithmetic, if you can help it."

"That will be a strange sort of clerkship," said M'Gruder, with a smile; "but we 'll see what can be done."

CHAPTER XLVIII. "IN RAGS"

If Tony Butler's success in his new career only depended on his zeal, he would have been a model clerk. Never did any one address himself to a new undertaking with a stronger resolution to comprehend all its details, and conquer all its difficulties. First of all, he desired to show his grat.i.tude to the good fellow who had helped him; and secondly, he was eager to prove, if proven it could be, that he was not utterly incapable of earning his bread, nor one of those hopeless creatures who are doomed from their birth to be a burden to others.

So long as his occupation led him out of doors, conveying orders here and directions there, he got on pretty well. He soon picked up a sort of Italian of his own, intelligible enough to those accustomed to it; and as he was alert, active, and untiring, he looked, at least, a most valuable a.s.sistant. Whenever it came to indoor work and the pen, his heart sank within him; he knew that his hour of trial had come, and he had no strength to meet it. He would mistake the letter-book for the ledger or the day-book; and he would make entries in one which should have been in the other, and then, worst of all, erase them, or append an explanation of his blunder that would fill half a page with inscrutable blottedness.

As to payments, he jotted them down anywhere, and in his anxiety to compose confidential letters with due care, he would usually make three or four rough drafts of the matter, quite sufficient to impart the contents to the rest of the office.

Sam M'Gruder bore n.o.bly up under these trials. He sometimes laughed at the mistakes, did his best to remedy,--never rebuked them. At last, as he saw that poor Tony's difficulties, instead of diminishing, only increased with time, inasmuch as his despair of himself led him into deeper embarra.s.sments, M'Gruder determined Tony should be entirely employed in journeys and excursions here and there through the country,--an occupation, it is but fair to own, invented to afford him employment, rather than necessitated by any demands of the business.

Not that Tony had the vaguest suspicion of this. Indeed, he wrote to his mother a letter filled with an account of his active and useful labors.

Proud was he at last to say that he was no longer eating the bread of idleness. "I am up before dawn, mother, and very often have nothing to eat but a mess of Indian corn steeped in oil, not unlike what Sir Arthur used to fatten the bullocks with, the whole livelong day; and sometimes I have to visit places there are no roads to; nearly all the villages are on the tops of the mountains; but, by good luck, I am never beat by a long walk, and I do my forty miles a day without minding it.

"If I could only forget the past, dearest mother, or think it nothing but a dream, I 'd never quarrel with the life I am now leading; for I have plenty of open air, mountain walking, abundance of time to myself, and rough fellows to deal with, that amuse me; but when I am tramping along with my cigar in my mouth, I can't help thinking of long ago,--of the rides at sunset on the sands, and all the hopes and fancies I used to bring home with me, after them. Well! it is over now,--just as much done for as if the time had never been at all; and I suppose, after a while, I 'll learn to bear it better, and think, as you often told me, that 'all things are for the best.'

"I feel my own condition more painfully when I come, back here, and have to sit a whole evening listening to Sam M'Gruder talking about Dolly Stewart and the plans about their marriage. The poor fellow is so full of it all that even the important intelligence I have for him he won't hear, but will say, 'Another time, Tony, another time,--let us chat about Dolly.' One thing I 'll swear to, she 'll have the honestest fellow for her husband that ever stepped, and tell her I said so. Sam would take it very kindly of you if you could get Dolly to agree to their being married in March.

"It is the only time he can manage a trip to England,--not but, as he says, whatever time Dolly consents to shall be his time.

"He shows me her letters sometimes, and though he is half wild with delight at them, I tell you frankly, mother, they would n't satisfy _me_ if I was her lover. She writes more like a creature that was resigned to a hard lot, than one that was about to marry a man she loved. Sam, however, does n't seem to take this view of her, and so much the better.

"There was one thing in your last letter that puzzled me, and puzzles me still. Why did Dolly ask if I was likely to remain here? The way you put it makes me think that she was deferring the marriage till such time as I was gone. If I really believed this to be the case, I'd go away tomorrow, though I don't know well where to, or what for, but it is hard to understand, since I always thought that Dolly liked me, as certainly I ever did, and still do, _her_.

"Try and clear up this for me in your next. I suppose it was by way of what is called 'sparing me,' you said nothing of the Lyles in your last, but I saw in the 'Morning Post' all about the departure for the Continent, intending to reside some years in Italy.

"And that is more than I 'd do if I owned Lyle Abbey, and had eighteen blood-horses in my stable, and a clipper cutter in the Bay of Currygla.s.s. I suppose the truth is, people never do know when they're well off."

The moral reflection, not arrived at so easily or so rapidly as the reader can imagine, concluded Tony's letter, to which in due time came a long answer from his mother. With the home gossip we shall not burden the reader, nor shall we ask of him to go through the short summary--four close pages--of the doctor's discourses on the text, "I would ye were hot or cold," two sensations that certainly the mere sight of the exposition occasioned to Tony. We limit ourselves to the words of the postscript.

"I cannot understand Dolly at all, and I am afraid to mislead you as to what you ask. My impression is--but mind, it is mere impression--she has grown somewhat out of her old friendship for you. Some stories possibly have represented you in a wrong light, and I half think you may be right, and that she would be less averse to the marriage if she knew you were not to be in the house with them. It was, indeed, only this morning the doctor said, 'Young married folk should aye learn each other's failings without bystanders to observe them,'--a significant hint I thought I would write to you by this post."

When Tony received his epistle, he was seated in his own room, leisurely engaged in deciphering a paragraph in an Italian newspaper, descriptive of Garibaldi's departure from a little bay near Genoa to his Sicilian expedition.

Nothing short of a letter from his mother could have withdrawn his attention from a description so full of intense interest to him; and partly, indeed, from this cause, and partly from the hard labor of rendering the foreign language, the details stuck in his mind during all the time he was reading his mother's words.