Mattie:-A Stray Volume I Part 3

"And you'll bring the brooch back? It's a bargain between us, Mattie."

"It's all right."

The youth re-echoed "all right," and went down-stairs, watched from the dark landing by the girl who had robbed him. After a while the girl closed the door and followed slowly down-stairs also. She was going in search of old Simes.

CHAPTER III.

LODGERS.

"Depend upon it, Sidney, you'll never set eyes on that brooch again."

"I'm not so sure about that," was the half-confident reply.

"And depend upon it, you don't deserve to see it, boy--and that I for one shall be glad if it never turns up."

"Pa!--you really can't mean it."

"You told a lie about it, Sidney, and though you saved the girl from prison, yet it was a big, black lie all the same; and if luck follows it, why it's clean against the Bible."

"The girl looked so pitifully at me, you see--and I did think she might give the brooch back, out of grat.i.tude."

"Grat.i.tude in a young thief out of Kent Street?" laughed the father; "well, it's a lesson in life to you, boy, and, after all, it only cost twelve and sixpence."

"Ah!" sighed Sidney, "it was a long pull."

"You'll have learned by this that a lie never prospers--that in the long run it confronts you again when least expected, to make your cheek burn with your own baseness. I wonder now," gravely surveying his son, "whether you would have let that girl off, if there had been no hope of the brooch coming to light."

The boy hesitated--then looked full at his sire.

"Well--I think I should."

"I think you told a lie for twelve and sixpence--the devil got a bargain from a Hinchford."

"You're rather hard upon me, pa," complained the boy, "and it wasn't for twelve and sixpence, because I never got the brooch back; and if I ever tell another lie, may I never see twelve and sixpence of my own again.

There!"

"Bravo, Sid!--that's a promise I'm glad to have wormed out of you, somehow. And yet--ye G.o.ds!--what a promise!"

"I'll keep it--see if I don't," said Master Sidney, with his lips compressed, and his cheeks a little flushed.

The father shook his head slowly.

"You are going into business--you will be a business man,--presently a City man--one who will drive hard bargains, make hard bargains, and have to fight his way through a hundred thousand liars. In the pursuit of money--above all, in the sc.r.a.ping together of that fugitive article, you must lie, or let a good chance go by to turn an honest penny. I can't expect you _much_ better than other men, Sid."

"I wonder whether uncle lied much before----"

"He lied as little as he could, I daresay," quickly interrupted the father, "but he became a rich man, and he rose from City trading. But I told you once before--I think I have told you more than once--that I never wish to hear that uncle's name."

"Yes, but I had forgotten it for the moment--speaking of money-making, and City men, threw me a little off my guard."

"Yes, yes, I saw that, my boy--drop the curtain over the old grievance, and shut the past away from you and me. I don't complain--I'm happy enough--a little contents me. In the future, with a son to love and be proud of, I see the old man's happiest days!"

"We'll try our best, sir, to make them so," exclaimed the boy.

"The Hinchfords are a buoyant race, and are not to be always kept down.

I never heard of more than one of us, a poor man in the same generation; the Hinchfords have intelligence, perseverance, and pluck, and they make their way in the world. If I have been unlucky in my time, and have dropped down to a lodging in Great Suffolk Street, I see the next on the list," laying his hand lightly on his boy's shoulder, "making his way to the higher ground, G.o.d willing."

"I haven't made much way yet," remarked the son, checking quietly the ambitious dreaming of the father. "I have only left school two months, and an office-boy in Hippen's firm is not a very great affair, after all."

"It's a step forward--don't grumble--you'll push your way--you're a Hinchford."

"I'll do my best--I never was afraid of work."

"No--rather too fond of it, I fear. Sometimes I think there is no occasion to pore, pore, pore over those books of an evening, studying a lot of dry works, which can never be of service to a City man."

"I should like to be _precious_ clever!" was the boy's exclamation.

The father laughed, and added, with more satire than the boy detected--

"The precious clever ones seek out-of-the-way roads to fortune, and miss them--die in the workhouse, occasionally. It is only respectable mediocrity that jogs on to independence."

This strange dialogue between father and son occurred in the first-floor of the little stationer's shop in Great Suffolk Street. Father and son had lodged there eight years at least; Mrs. Hinchford, a delicate woman, several years her husband's junior, had died there--the place was home to the stiff-backed, white-haired man, who had prophesied a rise in life for his son. Eight or nine years ago, the three Hinchfords had walked into Mr. Wesden's shop, and looked at the apartments that had been announced to be let from the front pane of the first-floor windows; had, after a little whispering together, decided on the rooms, and had never left them since, the wife excepted, who had died with her husband's hand in hers, praying for her boy's future. The Hinchfords had settled as firmly to those rooms on the first-floor, as Mr. Wesden, stationer, had settled to Great Suffolk Street in ages remote. The rent was low, the place was handy for Mr. Hinchford, who was clerk and book-keeper to a large builders, Southwark Bridge Road way; the attendance was not a matter of trouble to the Hinchfords, and the landlord and his wife were un.o.btrusive people, and preferred the lodgers rent to their society.

For three years and a half the Hinchfords and Wesdens had only exchanged good mornings in their meetings on the stairs--the Wesdens were humble, taciturn folk, and the Hinchfords proud and stand-offish. After that period Mrs. Hinchford fell ill, and Mrs. Wesden became of service to her; helped, at last, to nurse her, and keep her company during the long hours of her husband's absence at business, even to take care of her noisy boy down-stairs, when his boisterousness in the holidays made his presence--much as the mother loved him--unbearable. The Wesdens were kind to the Hinchfords, and Mr. Hinchford, a man to be touched by true sympathy, unbent at that time. He was a proud man, but a sensible one, and he never forgot a kindness proffered him. He had belonged to a higher estate once, and, dropping suddenly to a lower, he had brought his old notions with him, to render him wretched and uneasy. He had thought himself above those Wesdens--petty hucksters, as they were--until the time when Mrs. Wesden became a kind nurse to his wife, almost a mother to his boy; and then he felt his own inferiority to a something in them, or belonging to them, and was for ever after that intensely grateful.

When Mrs. Hinchford died, and the lonely man had got over his first grief, he sought Mr. Wesden's company more often, smoked a friendly pipe with him in the back parlour now and then--begged to do so, for refuge from that solitary drawing-room up-stairs, filled with such sad memories as it was then. Hinchford and Wesden did not talk much, the latter was not fond of talking; and they were odd meetings enough, either in the parlour, or in the up-stairs room, as business necessitated.

They exchanged a few words about the weather, and the latest news in the papers, and then subsided into their tobacco-smoke till it was time to say good night; but Wesden was company for Hinchford in his trouble, and when time rendered the trouble less acute, each had fallen into the habit of smoking a pipe together once or twice a week, and did not care to break it.

In the parlour meetings, Mrs. Wesden would bring her spare form and pinched countenance between them, and would sit darning socks and saying little to relieve the monotony--unless the little girl were sitting up late, and her vivacity required attention or reprimand. They were quiet evenings with a vengeance, and Hinchford took his cue from the couple who managed business in Great Suffolk Street--and managed it well, for they minded their own, and were not disturbed by other people's.

Whilst we are looking back--taking a pa.s.sing glimpse over our shoulder at the bygones--we may as well add, that the Wesdens were naturally quiet people, and did not put on company-manners for Mr. Hinchford in particular. Thirty years ago they had married and opened shop in Great Suffolk Street; struggled for a living without making a fuss about it; lived frugally, pinched themselves in many ways which the world never knew anything about; surmounted the first obstacles in their way, and then, in the same quiet manner, saved a little money, then a little more, and then, as if by habit, continued saving, maintaining the same appearance in themselves, and the same quaint stolidity towards their neighbours. They had even borne their family troubles quietly, losing three children out of four without any great demonstration of grief--keeping their lamentations for after-business hours, and their inflexible faces for their curious neighbours, to whom they seldom spoke, and from whom they chose no friends. They were a couple contented with themselves and their position in society,--a trifle too frugal, if not near--staid, jogtrot, business people of week days, church-goers who patronized free seats for economy's sake on Sundays.

Once a year the Wesdens launched out--celebrating, in the month of January, the natal day of the bright-faced girl in whom so much love was centred, for whom they were working steadily and persistently still.

They had a juvenile party on that day always, and Harriet's school friends came in shoals to the feast, and Mr. Wesden presented his compliments to Mr. Hinchford, and begged the favour of borrowing the drawing-room for one night, and hoped also to have the honour of Mr.

Hinchford's company, and Master Hinchford's company, on that occasion--all of which being responded to in the affirmative, affairs went off, as a rule, satisfactorily, until that momentous night in January, when Master Sidney Hinchford lost his brooch.

This incident altered many things, and led to many things undreamed of by the characters yet but in outline in these pages; without it we should not have sat down to tell the history of these people--bound up so inextricably with that poor wanderer of the streets whom we have heard called Mattie.

CHAPTER IV.

MR. HINCHFORD'S EXPERIMENT.