Ringrose decided that it would be worth her son's while to let his trophies go for fifty pounds.
"A tall man in a topper!" whispered Harry, bursting quietly in. "I saw him through the ground glass; who can it be?"
"Your Uncle Spencer," said Mrs. Ringrose, looking straight at Harry over the wash-leather and the mustard-pot.
"Uncle Spencer!" Harry looked aghast. "What's bringing him, mother?"
"I wrote to him directly I got the telegram."
"You never said so!"
"No; I knew you wouldn't be pleased."
"Need I see him?"
"It is you he has come to see. Go, my boy; take him into the sitting-room, and I will join you when you have had your talk. Meanwhile, remember that he is your mother's brother, and will exert his influence to get you a situation; he has come so promptly, I shouldn't be surprised if he has got you one already! And you are letting him ring twice!"
Indeed, the avuncular thumb had already pressed the button longer than was either necessary or polite, and Harry went to the door with feelings which he had difficulty in concealing as he threw it open. Uncle Spencer stood without in a stiff attitude and in sombre clerical attire; he beheld his nephew without the glimmer of a smile on his funereal, bearded countenance, while his large hand was slow in joining Harry's, and its pressure perfunctory.
"So sorry to keep you waiting, but – but I forgot we hadn't a servant," fibbed Harry to be polite. "Do come in, Uncle Spencer."
"I thought nobody could be at home," was the one remark with which the clergyman entered; and Harry sighed as he heard that depressing voice again.
The Reverend Spencer Walthew was indeed the survival of a type of divine now rare in the land, but not by any means yet extinct. His waistcoat fastened behind his back in some mysterious manner, and he never smiled. He was the vicar of a semi-fashionable parish in North London, where, however, he preached in a black gown to empty pews, while a mixed choir behaved abominably behind his back. As a man he was neither fool nor hypocrite, but the natural enemy of pleasure and enthusiasm, and one who took a grim though unconscious satisfaction in disheartening his neighbour. No two proverbial opposites afford a more complete contrast than was presented by Mr. Walthew and Mrs. Ringrose; and yet at the bottom of the brother's austerity there lay one or two of the sister's qualities, for those who cared to dig deep enough in such stony and forbidding ground.
Harry had never taken to his uncle, who had frowned on Lord's and tabooed the theatre on the one occasion of his spending a part of his holidays in North London; and Mr. Walthew was certainly the last person he wanted to see that day. It made Harry Ringrose throb and tingle to look on the clergyman and to think of his father; they had never been friendly together; and if one syllable was said against the man who was down – no matter what he had done – the son of that man was prepared to make such a scene as should secure an immunity from further insult. But here Harry was indulging in fears as unworthy as his determination, and he was afterwards ashamed of both.
The clergyman began in an inevitable strain, dwelling solemnly on the blessing of adversity in general, before proceeding to point out that the particular misfortunes which had overwhelmed Harry and his mother could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as adventitious or accidental, since they were obviously the deliberate punishment of a justly irate God, and as such to be borne with patience, meekness, and humility. Harry chafed visibly, thinking of his innocent mother in the next room; but, to do the preacher justice, his sermon was a short one, and the practical issue was soon receiving the attention it deserved.
"I understand, Henry," said Mr. Walthew, "that you did obtain some useful and remunerative employment in Africa, which you threw up in order to come home and enjoy yourself. It is, of course, a great pity that you were so ill-advised and improvident; but may I ask in what capacity you were employed, and at what salary?"
"I don't admit that I was either ill-advised or improvident," cried Harry, with disrespectful warmth. "I didn't go out to work, but for my health, and I only worked for the fun of it, and am jolly glad I did come back to take care of my mother and to work for her. I was tutor in a Portuguese planter's family, and he gave me seventy pounds a year."
"And your board?"
"And my board."
"It was very good. It is a great deal better than anything you are likely to get here. How long were you with the planter?"
"Ten months."
"Only ten months! You must allow an older head than yours to continue thinking it is a pity you are not there still. Now, as to money matters, your father would doubtless cease sending you remittances once you were earning money for yourself?"
"No, he sent me fifty pounds last Christmas."
"Then, at any rate, you have brought enough home to prevent your being a burden to your mother? Between fifty and a hundred pounds, I take it?"
Harry shook his head; it was hot with a shame he would have owned to anybody in the world but Mr. Walthew.
"Not fifty pounds?"
"No."
"How much, then?"
"Not a penny!"
The clergyman opened his eyes and lifted his hands in unaffected horror. Harry could not help smiling in his face – could not have helped it if he had stood convicted of a worse crime than extravagance.
"You have spent every penny – and you smile!" the uncle cried. "You come home to find your mother at starvation's door – and you smile! You have spent her substance in – in – "
"Riot!" suggested Harry wickedly. "Sheer riot and evil living! Oh, Uncle Spencer, don't look like that; it's not exactly true; but, can't you see, I had no idea what was going to happen here at home? I thought I was coming back to live on the fat of the land, and when I'd made my miserable pile I spent it – like a man, I thought – like a criminal, if you will. Whichever it was, you must know which I feel now. And whatever I have done I am pretty badly punished. But at least I mean to take my punishment like a man, and to work like one, too, at any mortal thing I can find to do."
Mr. Walthew looked down his nose at the carpet on which he stood. He had sense enough to see that the lad was in earnest now, and that it was of no use to reproach him further with what was past.
"It seems to me, Henry," he said at length, "that it's a case of ability rather than of will. You say you are ready to do anything; the question is – what can you do?"
"Not many things," confessed Henry, in a humbler voice; "but I can learn, Uncle Spencer – I will do my best to learn."
"How old are you, Henry?"
"Twenty-one."
Harry was about to add "yesterday," but refrained from making his statement of fact an appeal for sympathy; for the man in him was coming steadily to the front.
"Then you would leave school in the Sixth Form?"
Harry had to shake his head.
"Perhaps you were on the Modern Side? All the better if you were!"
"No, I was not; I left in the form below the Sixth."
"Then you know nothing about book-keeping, for example?"
"I
