John Halifax, Gentleman | Page 6

ill health seemed to have doubled and trebled my sixteen years into a mournful maturity--this lad's face had come like a flash of sunshine; a reflection of the merry boyhood, the youth and strength that never were, never could be, mine. To let it go from me was like going back into the dark.
"Not good-bye just yet!" said I, trying painfully to disengage myself from my little carriage and mount the steps. John Halifax came to my aid.
"Suppose you let me carry you. I could--and--and it would be great fun, you know."
He tried to turn it into a jest, so as not to hurt me; but the tremble in his voice was as tender as any woman's--tenderer than any woman's I ever was used to hear. I put my arms round his neck; he lifted me safely and carefully, and set me at my own door. Then with another good-bye he again turned to go.
My heart cried after him with an irrepressible cry. What I said I do not remember, but it caused him to return.
"Is there anything more I can do for you, sir?"
"Don't call me 'sir'; I am only a boy like yourself. I want you; don't go yet. Ah! here comes my father!"
John Halifax stood aside, and touched his cap with a respectful deference, as the old man passed.
"So here thee be--hast thou taken care of my son? Did he give thee thy groat, my lad?"
We had neither of us once thought of the money.
When I acknowledged this my father laughed, called John an honest lad, and began searching in his pocket for some larger coin. I ventured to draw his ear down and whispered something--but I got no answer; meanwhile, John Halifax for the third time was going away.
"Stop, lad--I forget thy name--here is thy groat, and a shilling added, for being kind to my son."
"Thank you, but I don't want payment for kindness."
He kept the groat, and put back the shilling into my father's hand.
"Eh!" said the old man, much astonished, "thee'rt an odd lad; but I can't stay talking with thee. Come in to dinner, Phineas. I say," turning back to John Halifax with a sudden thought, "art thee hungry?"
"Very hungry." Nature gave way at last, and great tears came into the poor lad's eyes. "Nearly starving."
"Bless me! then get in, and have thy dinner. But first--" and my inexorable father held him by the shoulder; "thee art a decent lad, come of decent parents?"
"Yes," almost indignantly.
"Thee works for thy living?"
"I do, whenever I can get it."
"Thee hast never been in gaol?"
"No!" thundered out the lad, with a furious look. "I don't want your dinner, sir; I would have stayed, because your son asked me, and he was civil to me, and I liked him. Now I think I had better go. Good day, sir."
There is a verse in a very old Book--even in its human histories the most pathetic of all books--which runs thus:
"And it came to pass when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit unto the soul of David; and Jonathan loved him as his own soul."
And this day, I, a poorer and more helpless Jonathan, had found my David.
I caught him by the hand, and would not let him go.
"There, get in, lads--make no more ado," said Abel Fletcher, sharply, as he disappeared.
So, still holding my David fast, I brought him into my father's house.
CHAPTER II
Dinner was over; my father and I took ours in the large parlour, where the stiff, high-backed chairs eyed one another in opposite rows across the wide oaken floor, shiny and hard as marble, and slippery as glass. Except the table, the sideboard and the cuckoo clock, there was no other furniture.
I dared not bring the poor wandering lad into this, my father's especial domain; but as soon as he was away in the tan-yard I sent for John.
Jael brought him in; Jael, the only womankind we ever had about us, and who, save to me when I happened to be very ill, certainly gave no indication of her sex in its softness and tenderness. There had evidently been wrath in the kitchen.
"Phineas, the lad ha' got his dinner, and you mustn't keep 'un long. I bean't going to let you knock yourself up with looking after a beggar-boy."
A beggar-boy! The idea seemed so ludicrous, that I could not help smiling at it as I regarded him. He had washed his face and combed out his fair curls; though his clothes were threadbare, all but ragged, they were not unclean; and there was a rosy, healthy freshness in his tanned skin, which showed he loved and delighted in what poor folk generally abominate--water. And now the sickness of hunger had gone from his face, the lad,