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

blurted out the soldier, “especially when none of their old friends seem to care anything about them. Excuse me, Mrs Osborn,” added he, seeing that the lady coloured. “I wasn’t meaning you, but myself. Cruden was on old comrade, who did me more than one good turn. I must certainly take a day in town on my way back and find them out. As for the boy, I don’t believe he’s got it in him to be a blackleg.”

The major was as good as his word. He sacrificed a day of his loved pastime to look for his old friend’s widow in London.

After a good deal of hunting he discovered her address, and presented himself, with not a little wonderment at the shabbiness of her quarters, at Dull Street.

Barely convalescent, and still in the agony of suspense as to Reginald’s fate, Mrs Cruden was able to see no one. But the major was not thus to be baulked of his friendly intentions. Before he left the house he wrote a letter, which in due time lay in the widow’s hands and brought tears to her eyes.

“Dear Mrs Cruden,—I am on my way back to Malta, and sorry not to see you. We all have our troubles, but you seem to have had more than your share; and what I should have liked would be to see whether there was anything an old friend of your husband could do to serve you. I trust you will not resent the liberty I take when I say I have instructed my agent, whose address is enclosed, to put himself at your disposal in any emergency when you may need either advice or any other sort of aid. He is a good fellow, and understands any service you may require (and emergencies often do arise) is to be rendered on my account. As to your eldest son, about whom I read a paragraph in the papers the other day, nothing will make me believe he is anything but his honest father’s honest son. My brother-in-law, whom you will remember, is likely shortly to have an opportunity of introducing a young fellow into an East India house in the City. I may mention this because, should you think well to tell Reginald of it, I believe there would not be much difficulty in his getting the post. But you will hear about this from my brother-in-law, whom I have asked to write to you. I don’t expect to get leave again, for eighteen months; but I hope then to find you all well.

“Believe me, dear Mrs Cruden,—

“Yours truly,—

“Thomas Lambert.”

This simple warm-hearted letter came to Mrs Cruden as the first gleam of better things on the troubled waters of her life. Things were just then at their worst. Reginald lost, Horace away in search of him, herself slowly recovering from a sad illness into a still more sad life, with little prospect either of happiness or competency, nothing to look forward to but a renewal of the old struggles, possibly single-handed. At such a time Major Lambert’s letter came to revive her drooping spirits and remind her of a Providence that never sleeps less than when we are ready to consider ourselves forgotten.

All she could do was to write a grateful reply back, and then await news from Horace, trusting meanwhile it would not be necessary to draw on the major’s offered help. A few days later Horace was home again, jubilant at having found his brother, but anxious both as to his immediate recovery and the state of mind in which restored health would find him.

“He told me lots about the past, mother,” said he. “No one can conceive what a terrible three months he has had since he left us, or how heroically he has borne it. He doesn’t think so himself, and is awfully depressed about his trial and the way in which the magistrate spoke to him—the brute!”

“Poor boy! he is the very last to bear that sort of thing well.”

“He’s got a sort of idea he’s a branded man, and is to be dragged down all his life by it. Perhaps when he hears that an old friend like Major Lambert believes in him, he may pick up. You know, mother, I believe his heart is in the grave where that little office-boy of his lies, and that he would have been thankful if—well, perhaps not so bad as that—but just at present he can’t speak or even think of the boy without breaking down.”

“According to the letter from Major Lambert’s brother-in-law, the post that is offered him is one he will like, I think,” said Mrs Cruden. “I do hope he will take it. To have nothing to do would be the worst thing that could happen to him.”

“To say nothing of the necessity of it for you, mother,” said Horace; “for there’s to be no more copying out manuscripts, mind, even if we all go to the workhouse.”

Mrs Cruden sighed. She knew her son was right, but the wolf was at the door, and she shrank from becoming a useless burden on her boys’ shoulders.

“I wonder, Horace,” said she, presently, “whether we could possibly find less expensive quarters than these. They are—”

“Hullo, there’s the postman!” said Horace, who had been looking from the window; “ten to one there’s a line from Harker.”

And he flew down the stairs, just in time to see the servant-girl take a letter from the box and put it in her pocket.

“None for us?” said he.

The girl, who till this moment was not aware of his presence, turned round and coloured very violently, but said nothing.

“Show me the letter you put into your pocket just now,” said Horace, who had had experience before now in predicaments of this kind.

The girl made no reply, but tried to go back to the kitchen. Horace, however, stopped her.

“Be quick!” said he. “You’ve a letter for me in your pocket, and if I don’t have it before I count twenty I’ll give you in charge;” and he proceeded to count.

Before he had reached ten the girl broke out into tears, and took from her pocket not only the letter in question, but three or four others.

“There you are; that’s all of them. I’ve done with it!” sobbed she.

Horace glanced over them in bewilderment. One was in Reginald’s writing, written three weeks ago; two were from himself to his mother, written last week, and the last was from Harker, written yesterday.

“Why,” exclaimed he, too much taken aback almost to find words, “what does it mean? How do you come—”

“Oh, I’ll tell you,” said the girl; “I don’t care what they do to me. I’d sooner be sent to prison than go on at it. He told me to do it, and threatened me all sorts of things if I didn’t. Oh dear! oh dear!”

“Who told you?”

“Why, Mr Shuckleford. He said Mr Reginald was a convict, or something, and if I didn’t mind every letter that came to the house from Liverpool I’d get sent to prison too for abetting him. I’m sure I don’t want to abet no one, and I can’t help if they do lock me up.”

“You mean to say Mr Shuckleford told you to do this?” said—or rather roared—Horace.

“Yes, he did; and he had them all before that one,” said the girl, pointing to the letter from Reginald. “But he’s never been for these, and I didn’t dare not to keep them for him. Please, sir, look over it this time.”

Horace was too agitated to heed her tears or entreaties. He rushed from the house with the letters in his hand, and made straight for the Shucklefords’ door. But, with his hand on the bell, he hesitated. Mrs Shuckleford and her daughter had been good to his mother; he could not relieve his mind to Samuel in their presence. So he resolved to postpone that pleasure till he could find the young lawyer alone, and meanwhile hurried back to his mother and rejoiced her heart with the good news of Reginald contained in Harker’s letter.

How and when Horace and Shuckleford settled accounts no one exactly knew, but one evening, about a week afterwards, the latter came home looking very scared and uncomfortable, and announced that he was getting tired of London, the air of which did not agree with his constitution. He intended to close with an offer he had received some time ago from a firm in the country to act as their clerk; and although the sacrifice was considerable, still the country air and change of scene he felt would do him good.

So he went, much lamented by his mother and sister and club. But of all his acquaintances there was only one who knew the exact reason why, just at that particular time, the country air promised to be so beneficial for his constitution.

Three weeks passed, and then one afternoon a cab rolled slowly up to the door of Number 6, Dull Street. Horace was away at the office, and Mrs Cruden herself was out taking a walk.

So the two young men who alighted from the cab found themselves monarchs of all they surveyed, and proceeded upstairs to the parlour with no one to ask what their business was.

“Now, old man,” said the sturdier of the two, “I won’t stay. I’ve brought you safe home, and you needn’t pretend you’ll be sorry to see my back.”

“I won’t pretend,” said the other, with a smile on his pale face, “but if you’re not back very soon, in an hour or two, I shall be very very sorry.”

“Never fear, I’ll be back.”

And he went.

The pale youth sat down, and looked with a strange mixture of sadness and eagerness round the little room. He had seen it before, and yet he seemed hardly to recognise it. He got up and glanced at a few envelopes lying on the mantel-piece. He took into his hands a piece of knitting that lay on one of the chairs and examined it. He turned over the leaves of a stray book, and read the name on the title-page. It all seemed so strange—yet so familiar. Then he crept silently to the half-open door of a little bedroom and peeped in, and his heart beat strangely as he recognised a photograph on the dressing-table, and by its side a letter written in his own handwriting. From this room he turned to another still smaller and more roughly furnished. A walking-stick stood in the corner that he knew well, and there was a cap on the peg behind the door, the sight of which sent a thrill through him.

Yet he felt he dared touch nothing—that he scarcely dare let his foot be heard as he paced across the room, or venture even to stir the little fire that was dying out in the grate.

The slight flush which the excitement of his first arrival had called up faded from his cheeks as the minutes wore on.

Presently his ears caught a light footfall on the pavement outside, and his heart almost stood still as it halted and the bell rang below.

It was one of those occasions when a man may live a lifetime in a minute. With a mighty rush his thoughts flew back to the last time he had heard that step. What goodness, what hope, what love did it not bring back to his life! He had taken it all for granted, and thought so little of it; but now, after months of loveless, cheerless drudgery and disappointment, that light step fell with a music which flooded his whole soul.

He sat almost spell-bound as the street-door closed and the steps ascended the stairs. The room seemed to swim round him, and to his broken nerves it seemed for a moment as though he dreaded rather than longed for what was coming. But as the door opened the spell broke and all the mists vanished; he was his own self once more—nothing but the