James Matthew Barrie - The Complete Works of J. M. Barrie (With Illustrations)

'I do and I don't,' answered Josephs. 'Hair-dressing suits me best as a business, but gentility for pleasure. A fortnight of the gentleman sets me up for the year. I should not like to be a gentleman all the year round.'

'The hair oil is an insurmountable obstacle.'

'Yes,' said the barber; 'besides, to be a gentleman is rather hard work.'

'I dare say it is,' said Dick, 'when you take a short cut to it. Well, I presume this interview is at an end. You may go.'

He jerked his foot in the direction of the door, but Josephs hesitated.

'Colonel Abinger well?' asked the barber.

'The door, Josephs,' replied Dick.

'And Miss Abinger?'

Dick gave the barber a look that hurried him out of the room and down the stairs. Abinger's mouth twitched every time he took the cigar out of it, until he started to his feet.

'I have forgotten that Angus and my father are together,' he murmured. 'I wonder,' he asked himself, as he returned to his own chambers, 'how the colonel will take this? Must he be told? I think so.'

Colonel Abinger was told, as soon as Rob had left, and it added so much fuel to his passion that it put the fire out.

'If the story gets abroad,' he said, with a shudder, 'I shall never hold up my head again.'

'It is a safe secret,' Dick answered; 'the fellow would not dare to speak of it anywhere. He knows what that would mean for himself.'

'Angus knows of it. Was it like the chivalrous soul you make him to flout this matter before us?'

'You are hard up for an argument against Angus, father. I made him promise to let me know if he ever came on the track of the impostor, and you saw how anxious he was to keep the discovery from you. He asked me at the door when he was going out not to mention it to either you or Mary.'

'Confound him,' cried the colonel testily; 'but he is right about Mary; we need not speak of it to her. She never liked the fellow.'

'That was fortunate,' said Dick, 'but you did, father. You thought that Josephs was a gentleman, and you say that Angus is not. Perhaps you have made a mistake in both cases.'

'I say nothing against Angus,' replied the colonel, 'except that I don't want him to marry my daughter.'

'Oh, you and he got on well together, then?'

'He can talk. The man has improved.'

'You did not talk about Mary?' asked Dick.

'We never mentioned her; how could I, when he supposes her engaged to Dowton? I shall talk about him to her, though.'

Two days afterwards Dick asked his father if he had talked to Mary about Angus yet.

'No, Richard,' the old man admitted feebly, 'I have not. The fact is that she is looking so proud and stately just now, that I feel nervous about broaching the subject.'

'That is exactly how I feel,' said Dick, 'but Nell told me to-day that, despite her hauteur before us, Mary is wearing her heart away.'

The colonel's fingers beat restlessly on the mantelpiece.

'I'm afraid she does care for Angus,' he said.

'As much as he cares for her, I believe,' replied Dick. 'Just think,' he added bitterly, 'that these two people love each other for the best that is in them, one of the rarest things in life, and are nevertheless to be kept apart. Look here.'

Dick drew aside his blind, and pointed to a light cast on the opposite wall from a higher window.

'That is Angus's light,' he said. 'On such a night as this, when he is not wanted at the Wire , you will see that light blazing into the morning. Watch that moving shadow; it is the reflection of his arm as he sits there writing, writing, writing with nothing to write for, and only despair to face him when he stops. Is it not too bad?'

'They will forget each other in time,' said the colonel. 'Let Dowton have another chance. He is to be at the Lodge.'

'But if they don't forget each other; if Dowton fails again, and Mary continues to eat her heart in silence, what then?'

'We shall see.'

'Look here, father. I cannot play this pitiful part before Angus for ever. Let us make a bargain. Dowton gets a second chance; if he does not succeed, it is Angus's turn. Do you promise me so much?'

'I cannot say,' replied the colonel thoughtfully. 'It may come to that.'

Rob was as late in retiring to rest that night as Dick had predicted, but he wrote less than usual. He had something to think of as he paced his room, for, unlike her father and brother, he knew that when Mary was a romantic schoolgirl she had dressed the sham baronet, as a child may dress her doll, in the virtues of a hero. He shuddered to think of her humiliation should she ever hear the true story of Josephs—as she never did. Yet many a lady of high degree has given her heart to a baronet who was better fitted to be a barber.

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In a London fog the street-lamps are up and about, running maliciously at pedestrians. He is in love or writing a book who is struck by one without remonstrating. One night that autumn a fog crept through London a month before it was due, and Rob met a lamp-post the following afternoon on his way home from the Wire office. He passed on without a word, though he was not writing a book. Something had happened that day, and, but for Mary Abinger, Rob would have been wishing that his mother could see him now.

The editor of the Wire had called him into a private room, in which many a young gentleman, who only wanted a chance to put the world to rights, has quaked, hat in hand, before now. It is the dusty sanctum from which Mr. Rowbotham wearily distributes glory or consternation, sometimes with niggardly hand, and occasionally like an African explorer scattering largess among the natives. Mr. Rowbotham might be even a greater editor than he is if he was sure that it is quite the proper thing for so distinguished a man as himself to believe in anything, and some people think that his politics are to explain away to-day the position he took up yesterday. He seldom writes himself, and, while directing the line to be adopted by his staff, he smokes a cigar which he likes to probe with their pens. He is pale and thin, and has roving eyes, got from always being on the alert against aspirants.

All the chairs in the editorial room, except Mr. Rowbotham's own, had been converted, like the mantelpiece, into temporary bookcases. Rob tumbled the books off one (your Inquiry into the State of Ireland was among them, gentle reader) much as a coal-heaver topples his load into a cellar, or like a housewife emptying her apron.

'You suit me very well, Angus,' the editor said. 'You have no lurking desire to write a book, have you?'

'No,' Rob answered; 'since I joined the Press that ambition seems to have gone from me.'

'Quite so,' said Mr. Rowbotham, his tone implying that Rob now left the court without a stain upon his character. The editor's cigar went out, and he made a spill of a page from Sonnets of the Woods , which had just come in for review.

'As you know,' the editor continued, 'I have been looking about me for a leader-writer for the last year. You have a way of keeping your head that I like, and your style is not so villainously bad. Are you prepared to join us?'

'I should think so,' said Rob.

'Very well. You will start with £800 a year. Ricketts, as you may have heard, has half as much again as that, but he has been with us some time.'

'All right,' said Rob calmly, though his chest was swelling. He used to receive an order for a sack of shavings in the same tone.

'You expected this, I dare say?' asked the editor.

'Scarcely,' said Rob. 'I thought you would offer the appointment to Marriott; he is a much cleverer man than I am.'

'Yes,' assented Mr. Rowbotham, more readily than Rob thought necessary. 'I have had Marriott in my eye for some time, but I rather think Marriott is a genius, and so he would not do for us.'