Part 19

But nurse made us go to bed before dark we told him, and we so longed for the precious kitten.

We should know it would be there, he said. Leave the screen down, and the window open all night, and we should know it would be there, and could bring it its breakfast, the first thing in the morning.

With this prospect we were obliged to be content; but although at present, separated from our new treasure, we stayed in its neighbourhood as long as we could, learning from the obliging young man many wrinkles for the education and upbringing of the kitten, which would have to live in the play-room, its bread and milk obtained by cunning and subterfuge from under nurse's nose.

Inexpressibly I longed to have the little thing in my possession; for with its present owner, despite his love for it, it seemed less happy than I could wish—stowed away, heedless of its feelings, in his coat-pocket, or exposed on the narrow window-ledge, where it shivered, and mewed, and squeezed up to shelter, in an agony of terror lest it might fall.

We stayed with it until we were called to bed, but it was not of the kitten alone we talked. It gave us much pleasure to find what interest our new friend took in us. He even troubled to inquire where, exactly, in our house, which was built like Miss Miller's, did we sleep—how near to mother's room, how far from the servants? As you went up from the back passage to the great square front landing, our mother's door was the one that faced you—he knew that—

We laughed, and told him no, and cried out in our new delightful friendliness how stupid he was! That was our nursery door, and then came our night nursery, and then mother's, and—so on.

It was with much reluctance we tore ourselves away when nurse called; the wind from the open window blew chill upon us as we nodded good-bye to our friend. He waved the mewing kitten to us in farewell. It protested loudly, its little fluffy hind legs clawing despairingly at the empty air.

In the afternoon of the next day our parents were home again, brought back by a telegram which told them that their house had been robbed, the strong box in our mother's room broken open, and all the easily portable articles of plate taken from the housemaid's pantry.

We had policemen in the house, all the morning, policemen were closeted with our father when he came home. Willy, in a suddenly disorganised household, free from nursery rule, trotted about, proud of his courage in thus daring, at a policeman's heels. Now and again, I would hear him coming at a rush upstairs to report progress to me, who would not leave the play-room.

All the bars of the doors and shutters were untouched. The thief must have been let into the house, the policeman said; and our father, who trusted all his servants, was furious with the policeman.

A policeman wasn't a man to be afraid of when you knew him; why wouldn't I come and see this one? He—Willy, quite a hero that morning—would take care of me.

Then away, with excited face and flying feet, downstairs again. And presently, a quieter step upon the stairs—a step I knew well then, hear often in the lonely silence now, shall surely know amid the sound of all the myriad feet that tread the golden floor when I hear it again—and my mother was in the room.

"Where is my little girl, and what is she hiding away for? And what have you got in your lap, and why are you crying, Polly?" she asked.

Then she turned back my little skirt which hid it, and there was the kitten; sobbing wildly, I flew up and pushed it into her arms.

"The man—the man at the window—promised it," I cried, incoherently. "And I wanted it because it was so unhappy—and we left the window open—and I loved it so. And it had to walk the plank—and Willy and me thought it was asleep, and I picked it up—and it was dead."

Soon, lying with the dead kitten in her arms, I had sobbed out something of the story. "It is a secret—a secret," I told her, wildly; "don't let Willy and the man at the window know I told!"

She carried me away, before the policeman and my father had mounted to the attic. It was Willy, shaken and frightened now, who had to tell the story of the unscrewed screen, the open window, the plank laid across.

They said it was the young man at the window who came over on the plank, sitting on it and pulling himself along; they said he brought the kitten, as he had promised, having first choked the life out of it lest it should mew, and wake the house. They said that when they caught the robber, Willy and I would have to go and look at him and say, "That is the man." We used to lie shaking in our beds at night, dreading the hour when we should be called on to do this duty.

But they never got the jewellery back, they never caught the robber.

As time went on, Willy, who was always brave for his age, grew braver, and would often declare he, if policemen were present, and the robber in hand-cuffs, would not be afraid to look upon him; but be sure that I, who thought of the murdered kitten, had never a wish to see the young man with the prominent black eyes and the runaway chin again.

I made a pilgrimage to that wide street the other day, and stopped before that big old house where we two had lived as children, where I had played so contentedly second fiddle to Willy. Willy, who was so eager to act the leading part, so determined to enjoy, to do, to conquer; Willy

"Whose part in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills Is that his grave is green!"

I stepped into the narrow passage between the two houses, and looking up, saw that the present neighbours, friendlily inclined, had slung a rope across from window to window, upon which towels hung to dry. I could see only the projecting ledge of the window through which our little faces used to peep and the projecting ledge of that upon which the kitten had shivered and mewed. But I looked long at these, and at the tiny slip of blue sky above, and then came home and wrote this story.

A BROKEN BOOT

"Oh, the insufferable eyes of these poor might-have-beens."

Every morning of the spring and early summer he had walked down that sun- and shadow-flecked suburban road, and rested on that particular iron chair. The butcher's and fishmonger's boys going their rounds, the policeman on his beat, the postman wearily footing it, the daily governess returning from her morning's occupation, had become used to his appearance there; and he watched each one going upon his or her business, wistful-eyed.

To-day, on one of the chairs planted by the thoughtfulness of the ever-solicitous Town Council at intervals along the road, a tramp had also placed himself. He was a tramp of a dirty and unprepossessing appearance, and having cast a sidelong glance at the well-dressed, handsome, and distinguished-looking young man beside him, he had begun in hoarse, faint tones to beg of him. The voice was evidently that of a hungry man; but to the appeal no response was made, unless there was reply of a sort in a painfully crimsoning cheek and an averted gaze. The tramp pointed to his feet, the ragged boots grey with dust of weary miles, the naked toe peeping through. The gentleman faintly shook the head that he continued to hold aside. With an effort the tramp got upon his feet.

"D—n you!" he said. "May your belly go as empty as mine. May hell-fire blister your feet as mine are blistered!"

The man left alone upon the iron bench looked after the tramp shuffling painfully away, with no anger or condemnation in his eyes, only a submissive sadness.

"Poor devil!" he said. "Poor devil! What a beast I must seem to him."

Once again his fingers, hopeless as his eyes, felt over the region of his coat and waistcoat-pockets, wandered nervelessly to his trousers-pockets—empty all! How many a time had they flown there in the last few weeks to make the same discovery—a discovery causing a shock at first, surprise, incredulity, anger; of late, mechanically only, quite hopelessly.

And only a short time ago his pockets had been so well lined! He had been in debt, it is true, but money had been forthcoming for who cared to take. No beggar, however "professional," however visibly lying, had ever asked of him in vain. He had squandered, in a society his father's son should never have known, the fortune his father had left him; his extravagance had been mad, his self-indulgence unlimited; but it must be told of him that the occasion on which he most bitterly felt his present poverty was such an one as this. He missed so much—all that made life worth living in that foolish whirl "from gilded bar to gilded bar" which was all his manhood's experience: his credit at his tailor's, the cigars he had smoked and given away, his daily games of billiards (the one thing at which he had excelled in all his wasted life was billiards, his fingers sometimes itched with the longing to feel the cue in his hand again), all the thousand extravagances of such a young man's day. But up to the present it was this alone which made poverty intolerable,—the having to refuse when Want asked of him.

He watched the tramp hobbling painfully into the distance, and in his pale blue eyes came that pricking which is of tears.

"His blistered feet!" he said. "His blistered feet!"

And then very slowly he lifted one of his own long legs and laid it at the ankle upon the other knee, and touching his slender, high-arched foot very gingerly, he bent his head and examined his own boot.

Yes; there, sure enough, was the crack in the leather he had first discovered yesterday, and which had caused him a sleepless night. The first crack in his last pair of boots!

The lower lip of that small mouth which had been used to laugh at such foolish nothings, and which now so easily drooped to grieving, fell open as he looked. The crack was quite close to the sole and was scarcely noticeable yet, but it would take—how few days! to widen to a considerable gap! Then the people of the town in which he had been born, through which he had ridden his father's horses, and driven his father's carriages, would notice that he walked about in broken boots! To-day he had been careful to come by back ways to that favourite road whose sunshine and shadow he had run over so often as a boy; to his seat on that chair which was placed beneath the hedge of the garden in whose house he had been born.

Three months ago, when to his overwhelming astonishment it was first made clear to him that he had no longer a penny under heaven, he had gone in his bewilderment to his brother, a man whose share of the patrimony had not been squandered—had been put out to usury rather, bringing in thirty, forty, a hundredfold—a man living in luxury and holding the respect of his fellow-townsmen.

"You can come to me," the brother had said. "Eat at my table, sleep beneath my roof. I shall not turn my back upon my brother. But I shall not pay any bills for you, nor shall I allow you a farthing of money—you have shown us the use you make of money. You will find it inconvenient to be without, and I advise you therefore to get work."

So, for three months he had availed himself of his brother's hospitality, and the brother had kept his word. For three months he had crossed in the muddiest part of the street because he had feared to look the crossing-sweeper in the face, he had avoided the placarded blind man, the paralytic woman who had known him well. He carefully made détours to escape these, and the shoeblack boys with whom he had been held in high favour. As for the people of his own class—the world is not all unkind, but it is very busy, very forgetful—none remembered to seek him. He had been surrounded by associates of a sort; and he found himself quite alone.

For the first week or so he had thought it would be an easy thing to find employment; a few rebuffs where he had looked for a helping hand, a curt refusal or two, seemed to show him it was an impossibility. He had no knowledge of book-keeping, he could not take a clerkship; business men, with a mere glance at his handsome, delicate features, at the shrinking, deprecating glance of his eyes, at his white, nervous fingers, his faultless dress, decided that he was no good.

"Work? Yes. But at what can I work?" he had asked his brother at length, flushing and hesitating; for since he had been a recipient of his bounty he had become afraid of his highly-respected relatives, and of the wife who looked at him with hard eyes as he took his place at the table.

To that question no answer but a sour smile of a dragged-down lip and a shrug of the shoulder had come, followed by the reminder that there was always a crossing to sweep.

"I would rather sweep a crossing than lead the life you are leading," the brother had said.

And the other had acquiesced. It would be better, certainly; but—

For a young man of aristocratic appearance and faultlessly cut clothes to take a place at a crossing in his native town, and beg of the passers-by, some of whom would be personal friends, for coppers, requires moral courage; he had been all his life, hence his misfortunes, a moral coward.

So, of late, only spasmodically, and with a hopelessness that prepared defeat, did he make efforts to find occupation. But he was not naturally an idle man nor in all directions incompetent, and he watched the people passing to office, shop, workroom, with a gaze which had grown unspeakably wistful.

When the hour for the midday meal arrived, he had been wont to return to his brother's house, but to-day he had something else to do.

The road being emptied of the stream of passers-by which flowed more fully at that time, he got up and walked to the gate of the house where he had been born, and looked long within, upon the garden. It had always been a beautiful garden, full of flowering shrubs, and wide lawns, and winding, box-edged paths. Very little had it altered since to him it had seemed all the world, and he had the fancy to follow now about its sunny, shadowy ways into all its pleasant haunts, the figure of a little boy who had played there long ago.

It had been a lonely child who had played there, his only brother being too old to play, and he had gone about the garden-ways, carrying his absurd jumble of childish fancies, incredible aspirations, baby ambitions, on untiring little feet. It pleased the young man at the gate to follow him in fancy, from spot to spot, always in the sunshine, always with flowers around him, and the whisper of trees about him, and the song of birds overhead.

Leaving behind him the gay flower-beds upon which the creeper-covered house looked forth, into many a leafy nook and shrub-bound fastness the phantom little form ran happily. Where the trees grew tall and close above an undergrowth of shepherd's-parsley and blue-bell had been a favourite resort of the child's. When the eyes of the young man followed him there, and saw him stop beside the smooth trunk of a silver birch, he knew that a new knife had been given him that day, and that he was going to carve his own name upon the bark. He knew that, the task being accomplished, the child would fetch his mother, and lead her to the tree to see how deep the knife cut, and how always—always the name would be there!

Once, being tired with overmuch play, the child had fallen asleep against that tree, and had wakened to hear his mother's voice calling,—

The young man came back to the iron bench, his figure drooping. The lower lip had fallen open, showing the small, regular teeth. Into the face, "accustomed to refusals," into the wistful gaze of the pale blue eyes, something of awe had crept. Presently he put up his boot upon his knee, and once more his eyes fell upon the crack in the side. He moved his foot within the boot—certainly a bulging showed; by to-morrow the stocking would be seen.

To-morrow! Yes. He nodded his handsome head with eyes upon the boot and breathed the word to himself.

How long ago it seemed since this tragedy of the broken boot had befallen! Could it have been but yesterday? Was that possible?

His great need had developed his strategical powers, and accident had seemed to further his design. Quick upon the discovery, he had encountered his brother's page on his way to his brother's shoemaker, bearing that relative's shoes to be repaired. Seizing the opportunity, he had hastily divested himself of his own boot and had added that to the page's burden.

His spirits so easily arose; such a load by that simple manoeuvre had been lifted from his heart! He pushed his feet into his slippers and came whistling downstairs to lunch. He had a perfect ear, and his whistle was most melodious and sweet; the canaries in the dining-room windows awoke and joined in shrilly. His brother, standing, with sour, sarcastic face, upon the hearth, held fastidiously between finger and thumb an article which apparently it was not agreeable to him to touch.

"I met Payne taking my boots," he said; "he had managed to get hold of one of yours by mistake. I rescued it. I think we don't employ the same bootmaker."

The young man's cheek did not burn any longer as he recalled that incident. He felt nothing now, no anger, no bitterness. To such as he it is so easy to forgive. Forgiveness had ever flowed from him in sheer weakness. It had been the habit of his life to love and admire his brother—he loved and admired him still. He did not think that he himself would have been quite so hard on a poor devil in his place; but his brother was a strong man and he a weak one—no doubt his brother was right.

It was certain he was not a cruel man—did he not owe him the bread he ate? Had he not shed tears over the death of a dog a day or two before? The dog had been in incurable pain, and a pill which had been procured from the chemist had caused that pain instantly to cease. The master had given the order of execution, and had turned away from the gaze of the suffering brute with the waters of sensibility in his eyes.

And how quietly the dog had died! One instant in convulsions of pain, and the next still—quite still! The young man who had carried with him from childhood a great dread of death had been much impressed. After all, could it be so terrible?

Only one little pill had sufficed to produce that great change—would suffice to kill two or three dogs, the chemist had said. But the young man had brought away with him a second dose for fear of accident. As he looked with unseeing eyes at the broken boot, his finger and thumb held the second little pill securely in the corner of his waistcoat pocket.

He was afraid of death; but, as a child believes, he believed in God. Through the recklessness, the wildness, the "joyous folastries" of youth there had clung to him still the feeling that God was above him; there beyond the stars; he had felt His smile sometimes, or grown cold beneath His frown. He had not read, nor thought; nor had he listened to clever talk on the absurdities of a worn-out faith, the uselessness of an obsolete creed. His business had been with enjoying himself simply—with none of those things. Of every other foolishness on earth his lips had babbled, but not blasphemies. He had not trodden the downward path with lingering steps, he had gone precipitately to his ruin; but at least his eyes had been on the stars.