You’d be a rum one, sir, if you was. Nobody ever masters it all. They pretend to, but it would take a thousand men boiled down and double distilled to get one as could regularly tackle it. It’s an impossibility, sir.”
“What!” said Tom, with plenty of animation now. “Why, look at all the great lawyers!”
“So I do, sir, and the judges too, and what do I see? Don’t they all think different ways about things, and upset one another? Don’t you get thinking you’re not clever because you don’t get on fast. As I said before, you’d be a rum one if you did.”
“But my cousin does,” said Tom.
“Him? Ck!” cried the clerk, with a derisive laugh. “Why, it’s my belief that you know more law already than Mr. Sam does, and what I say to you is—Look out! the guv’nor!”
The warning came too late, for Mr. James Brandon entered the outer office suddenly, and stopped short, to look sharply from one to the other—a keen-eyed, well-dressed man of five-and-forty; and as his brows contracted he said sharply—
“Then you’ve finished the deed, Pringle?” just as the clerk was in the act of passing through the door leading to the room where he should have been at work.
“The deed, sir?—no, not quite, sir. Shan’t be long, sir.”
“You shall be long—out of work, Mr. Pringle, if you indulge in the bad habit of idling and gossiping as soon as my back’s turned.”
Pringle shot back to his desk, the door swung to, and Mr. James Brandon turned to his nephew, with his face looking double of aspect—that is to say, the frown was still upon his brow, while a peculiarly tight-looking smile appeared upon his lips, which seemed to grow thinner and longer, and as if a parenthesis mark appeared at each end to shut off the smile as something illegal.
“I am glad you are mastering your work so well, Tom,” he said softly.
“Mastering it, uncle!” said Tom, with an uneasy feeling of doubt raised by his relative’s look. “I—I’m afraid I am getting on very slowly.”
“But you can find time to idle and hinder my clerk.”
“He had only just come in, uncle, and—”
“That will do, sir,” said the lawyer, with the smile now gone. “I’ve told you more than once, sir, that you were a fool, and now I repeat it. You’ll never make a lawyer. Your thick, dense brain has only one thought in it, and that is how you can idle and shirk the duty that I for your mother’s sake have placed in your way. What do you expect, sir?—that I am going to let you loaf about my office, infecting those about you, and trying to teach your cousin your lazy ways? I don’t know what I could have been thinking about to take charge of such a great idle, careless fellow.”
“Not careless, uncle,” pleaded the lad. “I do try, but it is so hard.”
“Silence, sir! Try!—not you. I meant to do my duty by you, and in due time to impoverish myself by paying for your articles—nearly a hundred pounds, sir. But don’t expect it. I’m not going to waste my hard-earned savings upon a worthless, idle fellow. Lawyer! Pish! You’re about fit for a shoeblack, sir, or a carter. You’ll grow into as great an idiot as your father was before you. What my poor sister could have seen in him I don’t—”
Bang!
Chapter Two.
The loudly-closed door of the private office cut short Mr. James Brandon’s speech, and he had passed out without looking round, or he would have seen that his nephew looked anything but a fool as he sat there with his fists clenched and his eyes flashing.
“How dare he call my dear dead father an idiot!” he said in a low fierce voice through his compressed teeth. “Oh, I can’t bear it—I won’t bear it. If I were not such a miserable coward I should go off and be a soldier, or a sailor, or anything so that I could be free, and not dependent on him. I’ll go. I must go. I cannot bear it,” he muttered; and then with a feeling of misery and despair rapidly increasing, he bent down over his book again, for a something within him seemed to whisper—“It would be far more cowardly to give up and go.”
Then came again the memory of his mother’s words, and he drew his breath through his teeth as if he were in bodily as well as mental pain; and forcing himself to read, he went on studying the dreary law-book till, in his efforts to understand the author, his allusions, quotations, footnotes, and references, he grew giddy, and at last the words grew blurred, and he had to read sentences over and over again to make sense of them, which slid out of his mind like so much quicksilver.
Lunch-time came, and Pringle crept through the place where he was seated, glanced at Mr. Brandon’s door, stepped close up, and whispered—
“I’m going to get my dinner. Don’t look downhearted about a wigging, Mr. Tom. It’s nothing when you’re used to it.”
“Ahem!” came from the inner office, and Pringle made a grimace like a pantomime clown, suggesting mock horror and fear, as he glided to the outer door, where he turned, looked back, and then disappeared; while, as soon as he was alone, Tom took out a paper of sandwiches, opened it, and began to eat, it being an understood thing that he should not leave the office all day.
But those sandwiches, good enough of their kind, tasted as if they were made of sawdust, and he had hard work to get them down, and then only by the help of a glass of water from the table-filter, standing at the side of the office—kept, Pringle said, to revive unfortunate clients whose affairs were going to the bad. Every now and then a cough was heard from the inner office, and Tom hurried over his meal in dread lest his uncle should appear before he had finished. Then, as soon as the last was eaten, and the paper thrust into the waste-basket, the boy attacked his book once more, and had hardly recommenced when the inner office door opened, and his uncle appeared, looking at him sharply—ready, Tom thought, to find fault with him for being so long over his midday meal.
But there was nothing to complain about.
“I’m going to have my lunch,” he said sharply, “and I may not come back, though all the same I may. Mind that man Pringle goes on with his work, and don’t let me have any fault to find about your reading. When you go home tell them to give you something to eat, for there will be no regular dinner to-day, as I shall be out. Take home any letters that may come, in case I don’t look in.”
“All right, uncle.”
“And don’t speak in that free-and-easy, offhand, unbusiness-like manner. Say ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir,’ if you are not too stupid to remember.”
He put on his hat and went out, leaving the boy feeling as if a fresh sting had been planted in his breast, and his brow wrinkled up more than ever, while his heart grew more heavy in his intense yearning for somebody who seemed to care for him, if ever so little.
Five minutes later Pringle came back, looking shining and refreshed. As he entered he gave Tom an inquiring look, and jerked his head sidewise toward the inner office.
Tom was not too stupid to understand the dumb language of that look and gesture.
