Reginald Cruden, Talbot Baines Reed [best black authors txt] 📗

Reginald Cruden was a young man who took life hard and seriously. He was not brilliant—indeed, he was not clever. He lacked both the good sense and the good-humour which would have enabled him, like Horace, to accept and make the best of his present lot. He felt aggrieved by the family calamity, and just enough ashamed of his poverty to make him touchy and intractable to a degree which, as we have seen already, amounted sometimes almost to stupidity.

Still Reginald was honest. He made no pretence of enjoying life when he did not enjoy it. He disliked Mr Durfy, and therefore he flared up if Mr Durfy so much as looked at him. He liked young Gedge, and therefore it was impossible to leave the youngster to his fate and let him ruin himself without an effort at rescue.

It is one thing to snatch a heedless one from under the hoofs of a cab-horse and another to pick him up from the slippery path of vice and set him firmly on his feet. Reginald had thought nothing of the one, but he looked forward with considerable trepidation to meeting the boy next morning and attempting the other.

Gedge was there when he arrived, working very busily, and looking rather troubled. He flushed up as Reginald approached, and put down his composing-stick to shake hands with him. Reginald looked and felt by a long way the more uncomfortable and guilty of the two, and he was at least thankful that Gedge spared him the trouble of beginning.

“Oh! Cruden,” said the boy, “I know exactly what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me you’re deceived in me, and that I’m a young fool and going to the dogs as hard as I can. I don’t wonder you think so.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” said Reginald. “I was going to ask you how you were.”

“Oh, I’m all right; but I know you’re going to lecture me, Cruden, and I’m sure you may. There’s nothing you can say I don’t deserve. I only wish I could make you believe I’ll never be such a fool again. I’ve been making resolutions all night, and now you’ve come here I’m sure I shall be able to break it off. If you will only stand by me, Cruden! I owe you such a lot. If you only knew how grateful I was!”

“Perhaps we’d better not talk about it now,” said Reginald, feeling very uncomfortable and rather disconcerted at this glib flow of penitence.

But young Gedge was full of it yet, and went on,—

“I’m going to turn over a new leaf this very day, Cruden. I’ve told the errand-boy he’s not to get me any beer, and I’m determined next time that beast Durfy asks me to go—”

“What!” exclaimed Reginald; “was it with him you used to go?”

“Yes. I know you’ll think all the worse of me for it, after the blackguard way he’s got on to you. You see, before you came I didn’t like—that is, I couldn’t well refuse him; he’d have made it so hot for me here. I fancy he found out I had some pocket-money of my own, for he generally picked on me to come and have drinks with him, and of course I had to pay. Why, only last night—look out, here he comes!”

Sure enough he was, and in his usual amiable frame of mind.

“Oh, there you are, are you?” he said to Reginald, with a sneer. “Do you know where the lower-case ‘x’ is now, eh?”

Reginald, swelling with the indignation Gedge’s story had roused in him, turned his back and made no answer.

Nothing, as he might have known by this time, could have irritated Mr Durfy more.

“Look here, young gentleman,” said the latter, coming close up to Reginald’s side and hissing the words very disagreeably in his ear, “when I ask a question in this shop I expect to get an answer; mind that. And what’s more, I’ll have one, or you leave this place in five minutes. Come, now, give me a lower-case ‘x.’”

Reginald hesitated a moment. Suppose Mr Durfy had it in him to be as good as his word. What then about young Gedge?

He picked up an “x” sullenly, and tossed it at the overseer’s feet.

“That’s not giving it to me,” said the latter, with a sneer of triumph already on his face. “Pick it up directly, do you hear? and give it to me.”

Reginald stood and glared first at Mr Durfy, then at the type.

Yesterday he would have defiantly told him to pick it up himself, caring little what the cost might be. But things had changed since then. Humiliating as it was to own it, he could not afford to be turned off. His pride could not afford it, his care for young Gedge could not afford it, the slender family purse could not afford it. Why ever did he not think of it all before, and spare himself this double indignity?

With a groan which represented as much inward misery and humiliation as could well be compressed into a single action, he stooped down and picked up the type and handed it to Mr Durfy.

It was well for him he did not raise his eyes to see the smile with which that gentleman received it.

“Next time it’ll save you trouble to do what you’re told at once, Mr Puppy,” he said. “Get on with your work, and don’t let me catch you idling your time any more.”

And he walked off crowned with victory and as happy in his mind as if he had just heard of the decease of his enemy the manager.

It was a bad beginning to the day for Reginald. He had come to work that morning in a virtuous frame of mind, determined, if possible, to do his duty peaceably and to hold out a helping hand to young Gedge. It was hard enough now to think of anything but his own indignities and the wretch to whom he owed them.

He turned to his work almost viciously, and for an hour buried himself in it, without saying a word or lifting his eyes from his case. Then young Gedge, stealing a nervous glance at his face, ventured to say,—

“I say, Cruden, I wish I could stand things like you. I don’t know what I should have done if that blackguard had treated me like that.”

“What’s the use?” said Reginald. “He wants to get rid of me, and I’m not going to let him.”

“I’m jolly glad of it for my sake. I wish I could pay him out for you.”

“So you can.”

“How?”

“Next time he wants you to go and drink, say No,” said Reginald.

“Upon my word I will,” said Gedge; “and I don’t care how hot he makes it for me, if you stick by me, Cruden.”

“You know I’ll stick by you, young ’un,” said Reginald; “but that won’t do you much good, unless you stick by yourself. Suppose Durfy managed to get rid of me after all—”

“Then I should go to—to the dogs,” said Gedge, emphatically.

“You’re a greater fool than I took you for, then,” said Reginald. “If you only knew,” he added more gently, “what a job it is to do what’s right myself, and how often I don’t do it, you’d see it’s no use expecting me to be good for you and myself both.”

“What on earth am I to do, then? I’m certain I can’t keep square myself; I never could. Who’s to look after me if you don’t?”

Like a brave man, Reginald, shy and reserved as he was, told him.

I need not repeat what was said that morning over the type cases. It was not a sermon, nor a catechism; only a few stammering laboured words spoken by a boy who felt himself half a hypocrite as he said them, and who yet, for the affection he bore his friend, had the courage to go through with a task which cost him twenty times the effort of rescuing the boy yesterday from his bodily peril.

Little good, you will say, such a sermon from such a perverse, bad-humoured preacher as Reginald Cruden, could do! Very likely, reader; but, after all, who are you or I to say so? Had any one told Reginald a week ago what would be taking place to-day, he would have coloured up indignantly and hoped he