John Halifax, Gentleman | Page 5

had met her with the rest; she was only a visitor. She looked at
us, then disappeared. Soon after, we saw the front door half opened,
and an evident struggle taking place behind it; we even heard loud
words across the narrow street.
"I will--I say I will."
"You shan't, Miss Ursula."
"But I will!"
And there stood the little girl, with a loaf in one hand and a
carving-knife in the other. She succeeded in cutting off a large slice,
and holding it out.
"Take it, poor boy!--you look so hungry. Do take it." But the servant
forced her in, and the door was shut upon a sharp cry.
It made John Halifax start, and look up at the nursery window, which
was likewise closed. We heard nothing more. After a minute he crossed
the street, and picked up the slice of bread. Now in those days bread

was precious, exceedingly. The poor folk rarely got it; they lived on rye
or meal. John Halifax had probably not tasted wheaten bread like this
for months: it appeared not, he eyed it so ravenously;--then, glancing
towards the shut door, his mind seemed to change. He was a long time
before he ate a morsel; when he did so, it was quietly and slowly;
looking very thoughtful all the while.
As soon as the rain ceased, we took our way home, down the High
Street, towards the Abbey church--he guiding my carriage along in
silence. I wished he would talk, and let me hear again his pleasant
Cornish accent.
"How strong you are!" said I, sighing, when, with a sudden pull, he had
saved me from being overturned by a horseman riding past--young Mr.
Brithwood of the Mythe House, who never cared where he galloped or
whom he hurt--"So tall and so strong."
"Am I? Well, I shall want my strength."
"How?"
"To earn my living."
He drew up his broad shoulders, and planted on the pavement a firmer
foot, as if he knew he had the world before him--would meet it
single-handed, and without fear.
"What have you worked at lately?"
"Anything I could get, for I have never learned a trade."
"Would you like to learn one?"
He hesitated a minute, as if weighing his speech. "Once I thought I
should like to be what my father was."
"What was he?"
"A scholar and a gentleman."

This was news, though it did not much surprise me. My father, tanner
as he was, and pertinaciously jealous of the dignity of trade, yet held
strongly the common-sense doctrine of the advantages of good descent;
at least, in degree. For since it is a law of nature, admitting only rare
exceptions, that the qualities of the ancestors should be transmitted to
the race--the fact seems patent enough, that even allowing equal
advantages, a gentleman's son has more chances of growing up a
gentleman than the son of a working man. And though he himself, and
his father before him, had both been working men, still, I think, Abel
Fletcher never forgot that we originally came of a good stock, and that
it pleased him to call me, his only son, after one of our forefathers, not
unknown--Phineas Fletcher, who wrote the "Purple Island."
Thus it seemed to me, and I doubted not it would to my father, much
more reasonable and natural that a boy like John Halifax--in whom
from every word he said I detected a mind and breeding above his
outward condition--should come of gentle than of boorish blood.
"Then, perhaps," I said, resuming the conversation, "you would not like
to follow a trade?"
"Yes, I should. What would it matter to me? My father was a
gentleman."
"And your mother?"
And he turned suddenly round; his cheeks hot, his lips quivering: "She
is dead. I do not like to hear strangers speak about my mother."
I asked his pardon. It was plain he had loved and mourned her; and that
circumstances had smothered down his quick boyish feelings into a
man's tenacity of betraying where he had loved and mourned. I, only a
few minutes after, said something about wishing we were not
"strangers."
"Do you?" The lad's half amazed, half-grateful smile went right to my
heart.

"Have you been up and down the country much?"
"A great deal--these last three years; doing a hand's turn as best I could,
in hop-picking, apple-gathering, harvesting; only this summer I had
typhus fever, and could not work."
"What did you do then?"
"I lay in a barn till I got well--I'm quite well now; you need not be
afraid."
"No, indeed; I had never thought of that."
We soon became quite sociable together. He guided me carefully out of
the town into the Abbey walk, flecked with sunshine through
overhanging trees. Once he stopped