Book: In Luck at Last

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"You?" asked Joe. "I never thought of you. But why not? Why not, I
say? Why not you as well as anybody else?"

"Nobody but me, Mr. Joseph, knows what the business is, and how it
might be improved; and I could make arrangements for paying by regular
instalments."

"Well, we'll talk about it when the time comes. I won't forget.
Sailors, you know, can't be expected to understand the value of shops.
Say, James, what does the commodore do all day?"

"Sits in there and adds up his investments."

"Always doing that--eh? Always adding 'em up? Ah, and you've never got
a chance of looking over his shoulder, I suppose?"

"Never."

"You may find that chance, one of these days. I should like to know,
if only for curiosity, what they are and where they are. He sits in
there and adds 'em up. Yes--I've seen him at it. There must be
thousands by this time."

"Thousands," said the assistant, in the belief that the more you add
up a sum the larger it grows.

Joe walked into the back shop and tried the safe.

"Where are the keys?" he asked.

"Always in his pocket or on the table before him. He don't leave them
about."

"Or you'd ha' known pretty sharp all there is to know--eh, my lad?
Well, you're a foxy one, you are, if ever there was one. Let's be
pals, you and me. When the old man goes, you want the shop--well, I
don't see why you shouldn't have the shop. Somebody must have the
shop; and it will be mine to do what I please with. As for his
savings, he says they are all for Iris--well, wills have been set
aside before this. Do you think now, seriously, do you think, James
that the old man is quite right--eh? Don't answer in a hurry. Do you
think, now, that he is quite right in his chump?"

James laughed.

"He's right enough, though he throws away his chances."

"Throws away his chances. How the deuce can he be all right then? Did
you ever hear of a bookseller in his right mind throwing away his
chances?"

"Why--no--for that matter--"

"Very well, then; for that matter, don't forget that you've seen him
throw away all his chances--all his chances, you said. You are ready
to swear to that. Most important evidence, that, James." James had not
said "all," but he grunted, and the other man went on: "It may come in
useful, this recollection. Keep your eyes wide-open, my red haired
pirate. As for the moldy old shop, you may consider it as good as your
own. Why, I suppose you'll get somebody else to handle the paste-brush
and the scissors, and tie up the parcels, and water the shop--eh?
You'll be too proud to do that for yourself, you will."

Mr. James grinned and rubbed his hands.

"All your own--eh? Well, you'll wake 'em up a bit, won't you?"

Mr. James grinned again--he continued grinning.

"Go on, Mr. Joseph," he said; "go on--I like it."

"Consider the job as settled, then. As for terms they shall be easy;
I'm not a hard man. And--I say, Foxy, about that safe?"

Mr. James suddenly ceased grinning, because he observed a look in his
patron's eyes which alarmed him.

"About that safe. You must find out for me where the old man has put
his money, and what it is worth. Do you hear? Or else--"

"How can I find out? He won't tell me any more than you."

"Or else you must put me in the way of finding out." Mr. Joseph
lowered his voice to a whisper. "He keeps the keys on the table before
him. When a customer takes him out here, he leaves the keys behind
him. Do you know the key of the safe?"

"Yes, I know it."

"What is to prevent a clever, quick-eyed fellow like you, mate,
stepping in with a bit of wax--eh? While he is talking, you know. You
could rush it in a moment."

"It's--it's dangerous, Mr. Joseph."

"So it is--rather dangerous--not much. What of that?"

"I would do anything I could to be of service to you, Mr. Joseph; but
that's not honest, and it's dangerous."

"Dangerous! There's danger in the briny deep and shipwreck on the
blast, if you come to danger. Do we, therefore, jolly mariners afloat
ever think of that? Never. As to honesty, don't make a man sick."

"Look here, Mr. Joseph. If you'll give me a promise in writing, that
I'm to have the shop, as soon as you get it, at a fair valuation and
easy terms--say ten per cent down, and--"

"Stow it, mate; write what you like, and I'll sign it. Now about that
key?"

"Supposing you was to get a duplicate key, and supposing you was to
get into trouble about it, Mr. Joseph, should you--should you--I only
put it to you--should you up and round upon the man as got you that
key?"

"Foxy, you are as suspicious as a Chinaman. Well, then, do it this
way. Send it me in a letter, and then who is to know where the letter
came from?"

The assistant nodded.

"Then I think I can do the job, though not, perhaps, your way. But I
think I can do it. I won't promise for a day or two."

"There you spoke like an honest pal and a friendly shipmate.
Dangerous! Of course it is. When the roaring winds do blow--Hands upon
it, brother. Foxy, you've never done a better day's work. You are too
crafty for any sailor--you are, indeed. Here, just for a little key--"

"Hush, Mr. Joseph! Oh, pray--pray don't talk so loud! You don't know
who may be listening. There's Mr. Lala Roy. You never hear him
coming."

"Just for a trifle of a key, you are going to get possession of the
best book-shop in all Chelsea. Well, keep your eyes skinned and the
wax ready, will you? And now, James, I'll be off."

"Oh, I say, Mr. Joseph, wait a moment!" James was beginning to realize
what he had promised. "If anything dreadful should come of this? I
don't know what is in the safe. There may be money as well as papers."

"James, do you think I would steal? Do you mean to insinuate that I am
a thief, sir? Do you dare to suspect that I would take money?"

James certainly looked as if he had thought even that possible.

"I shall open the safe, take out the papers, read them, and put them
back just as I found them. Will that do for you?"

He shook hands again, and took himself off.

At seven o'clock Mr. Emblem came down-stairs again.

"Has any one been?" he asked as usual.

"Only Mr. Joseph."

"What might Mr. Joseph want?"

"Nothing at all."

"Then," said his grandfather, "Mr. Joseph might just as well have kept
away."

* * * * *

Let us anticipate a little. James spent the next day hovering about in
the hope that an opportunity would offer of getting the key in his
possession for a few moments. There was no opportunity. The bunch of
keys lay on the table under the old man's eyes all day, and when he
left the table he carried them with him. But the day afterward he got
his chance. One of the old customers called to talk over past bargains
and former prizes. Mr. Emblem came out of the back shop with his
visitor, and continued talking with him as far as the door. As he
passed the table--James's table--he rested the hand which carried the
keys on it, and left them there. James pounced upon them and slipped
them into his pocket noiselessly. Mr. Emblem returned to his own chair
and thought nothing of the keys for an hour and a half by the clock,
and during this period James was out on business. When Mr. Emblem
remembered his keys, he felt for them in their usual place and missed
them, and then began searching about and cried out to James that he
had lost his bunch of keys.

"Why, sir," said James, bringing them to him, after a little search,
and with a very red face, "here they are; you must have left them on
my table."

And in this way the job was done.




CHAPTER III.

IRIS THE HERALD.


By a somewhat remarkable coincidence it was on this very evening that
Iris first made the acquaintance of her pupil, Mr. Arnold Arbuthnot.
These coincidences, I believe, happen oftener in real life than they
do even on the stage, where people are always turning up at the very
nick of time and the critical moment.

I need little persuasion to make me believe that the first meeting of
Arnold Arbuthnot and Iris, on the very evening when her cousin was
opening matters with the Foxy one, was nothing short of Providential.
You shall see, presently, what things might have happened if they had
not met. The meeting was, in fact, the second of the three really
important events in the life of a girl. The first, which is seldom
remembered with the gratitude which it deserves, is her birth; the
second, the first meeting with her future lover; the third, her
wedding-day; the other events of a woman's life are interesting,
perhaps, but not important.

Certain circumstances, which will be immediately explained, connected
with this meeting, made it an event of very considerable interest to
Iris, even though she did not suspect its immense importance. So much
interest that she thought of nothing else for a week beforehand; that
as the appointed hour drew near she trembled and grew pale; that when
her grandfather came up for his tea, she, who was usually so quick to
discern the least sign of care or anxiety in his face, actually did
not observe the trouble, plainly written in his drooping head and
anxious eyes, which was due to his interview with Mr. David Chalker.

She poured out the tea, therefore, without one word of sympathy. This
would have seemed hard if her grandfather had expected any. He did
not, however, because he did not know that the trouble showed in his
face, and was trying to look as if nothing had happened. Yet in his
brain were ringing and resounding the words, "Within three
weeks--within three weeks," with the regularity of a horrid clock at
midnight, when one wants to go to sleep.

"Oh," cried Iris, forced, as young people always are, to speak of her
own trouble, "oh, grandfather, he is coming to-night."

"Who is coming to-night, my dear?" and then he listened again for the
ticking of the clock: "Within three weeks--within three weeks." "Who
is coming to-night, my dear?"

He took the cup of tea from her, and sat down with an old man's
deliberation, which springs less from wisdom and the fullness of
thought that from respect to rheumatism.

The iteration of that refrain, "Within three weeks," made him forget
everything, even the trouble of his granddaughter's mind.

"Oh, grandfather, you cannot have forgotten!"

She spoke with the least possible touch of irritation, because she had
been thinking of this thing for a week past, day and night, and it was
a thing of such stupendous interest to her, that it seemed impossible
that anyone who knew of it could forget what was coming.

"No, no." The old man was stimulated into immediate recollection by
the disappointment in her eyes. "No, no, my dear, I have not
forgotten. Your pupil is coming. Mr. Arbuthnot is coming. But, Iris,
child, don't let that worry you. I will see him for you, if you like."

"No; I must see him myself. You see, dear, there is the awful
deception. Oh, how shall I tell him?"

"No deception at all," he said stoutly. "You advertised in your own
initials. He never asked if the initials belonged to a man or to a
woman. The other pupils do not know. Why should this one? What does it
matter to him if you have done the work for which he engaged your
services?"

"But, oh, he is so different! And the others, you know, keep to the
subject."

"So should he, then. Why didn't he?"

"But he hasn't. And I have been answering him, and he must think that
I was drawing him on to tell me more about himself; and now--oh, what
will he think? I drew him on and on--yet I didn't mean to--till at
last he writes to say that he regards me as the best friend and the
wisest adviser he has ever had. What will he think and say?
Grandfather, it is dreadful!"

"What did you tell him for, Iris, my dear? Why couldn't you let things
go on? And by telling him you will lose your pupil."

"Yes, of course; and, worse still, I shall lose his letters. We live
so quietly here that his letters have come to me like news of another
world. How many different worlds are there all round one in London? It
has been pleasant to read of that one in which ladies go about
beautifully dressed always, and where the people have nothing to do
but to amuse themselves. He has told me about this world in which he
lives, and about his own life, so that I know everything he does, and
where he goes; and"--here she sighed heavily--"of course it could not
go on forever; and I should not mind so much if it had not been
carried on under false pretenses."

"No false pretenses at all, my dear. Don't think it."

"I sent back his last check," she said, trying to find a little
consolation for herself. "But yet--"

"Well, Iris," said her grandfather, "he wanted to learn heraldry, and
you have taught him."

"For the last three months"--the girl blushed as if she was confessing
her sins--"for the last three months there has not been a single word
in his letters about heraldry. He tells me that he writes because he
is idle, or because he wants to talk, or because he is alone in his
studio, or because he wants his unknown friend's advice. I am his
unknown friend, and I have been giving him advice."

"And very good advice, too," said her grandfather benevolently. "Who
is so wise as my Iris?"

"I have answered all his letters, and never once told him that I am
only a girl."

"I am glad you did not tell him, Iris," said her grandfather; but he
did not say why he was glad. "And why can't he go on writing his
letters without making any fuss?"

"Because he says he must make the acquaintance of the man--the man, he
says--with whom he has been in correspondence so long. This is what he
says."

She opened a letter which lay upon a table covered with papers, but
her grandfather stopped her.

"Well, my dear, I do not want to know what he says. He wishes to make
your acquaintance. Very good, then. You are going to see him, and to
tell him who you are. That is enough. But as for deceiving"--he
paused, trying to understand this extreme scrupulosity of
conscience--"if you come to deceiving--well, in a kind sort of a way
you did allow him to think his correspondent a man. I admit that. What
harm is done to him? None. He won't be so mean, I suppose, as to ask
for his money back again."

"I think he ought to have it all back," said Iris; "yes, all from the
very beginning. I am ashamed that I ever took any money from him. My
face burns when I think of it."

To this her grandfather made no reply. The returning of money paid for
services rendered was, to his commercial mind, too foolish a thing to
be even talked about. At the same time, Iris was quite free to manage
her own affairs. And then there was that roll of papers in the safe.
Why, what matter if she sent away all her pupils? He changed the
subject.

"Iris, my dear," he said, "about this other world, where the people
amuse themselves; the world which lives in the squares and in the big
houses on the Chelsea Embankment here, you know--how should you like,
just for a change, to belong to that world and have no work to do?"

"I don't know," she replied carelessly, because the question did not
interest her.

"You would have to leave me, of course. You would sever your
connection, as they say, with the shop."

"Please, don't let us talk nonsense, grandfather."

"You would have to be ashamed, perhaps, of ever having taught for your
living."

"Now that I never should be--never, not if they made me a duchess."

"You would go dressed in silk and velvet. My dear, I should like to
see you dressed up just for once, as we have seen them at the
theater."

"Well, I should like one velvet dress in my life. Only one. And it
should be crimson--a beautiful, deep, dark crimson."

"Very good. And you would drive in a carriage instead of an omnibus;
you would sit in the stalls instead of the upper circle; you would
give quantities of money to poor people; and you would buy as many
second hand books as you pleased. There are rich people, I believe,
ostentatious people, who buy new books. But you, my dear, have been
better brought up. No books are worth buying till they have stood the
criticism of a whole generation at least. Never buy new books, my
dear."

"I won't," said Iris. "But, you dear old man, what have you got in
your head to-night? Why in the world should we talk about getting
rich?"

"I was only thinking," he said, "that perhaps, you might be so much
happier--"

"Happier? Nonsense! I am as happy as I can be. Six pupils already. To
be sure I have lost one," she sighed; "and the best among them all."

When her grandfather left her, Iris placed candles on the
writing-table, but did not light them, though it was already pretty
dark. She had half an hour to wait; and she wanted to think, and
candles are not necessary for meditation. She sat at the open window
and suffered her thoughts to ramble where they pleased. This is a
restful thing to do, especially if your windows look upon a tolerably
busy but not noisy London road. For then, it is almost as good as
sitting beside a swiftly-running stream; the movement of the people
below is like the unceasing flow of the current; the sound of the
footsteps is like the whisper of the water along the bank; the echo of
the half heard talk strikes your ear like the mysterious voices wafted
to the banks from the boats as they go by; and the lights of the shops
and the street presently become spectral and unreal like lights seen
upon the river in the evening.

Iris had a good many pupils--six, in fact, as she had boasted; why,
then, was she so strangely disturbed on account of one?

An old tutor by correspondence may be, and very likely is, indifferent
about his pupils, because he has had so many; but Iris was a young
tutor, and had as yet known few. One of her pupils, for instance, was
a gentleman in the fruit and potato line, in the Borough. By reason of
his early education, which had not been neglected so much as entirely
omitted, he was unable to personally conduct his accounts. Now a
merchant without his accounts is as helpless as a tourist without his
Cook. So that he desired, in his mature age, to learn book keeping,
compound addition, subtraction, and multiplication. He had no
partners, so that he did not want division. But it is difficult--say,
well-nigh impossible--for a middle-aged merchant, not trained in the
graces of letter-writing, to inspire a young lady with personal
regard, even though she is privileged to follow the current of his
thoughts day by day, and to set him his sums.

Next there was a young fellow of nineteen or twenty, who was beginning
life as an assistant-teacher in a commercial school at Lower Clapton.
This way is a stony and a thorny path to tread; no one walks upon it
willingly; those who are compelled to enter upon it speedily either
run away and enlist, or they go and find a secluded spot in which to
hang themselves. The smoother ways of the profession are only to be
entered by one who is the possessor of a degree, and it was the
determination of this young man to pass the London University
Examinations, and to obtain the degree of Bachelor. In this way his
value in the educational market would be at once doubled, and he could
command a better place and lighter work. He showed himself, in his
letters, to be an eminently practical, shrewd, selfish, and
thick-skinned young man, who would quite certainly get on in the
world, and was resolved to lose no opportunities, and, with that view,
he took as much work out of his tutor as he could get for the money.
Had he known that the "I.A." who took such a wonderful amount of
trouble with his papers was only a woman, he would certainly have
extorted a great deal more work for his money. All this Iris read in
his letters and understood. There is no way in which a man more surely
and more naturally reveals his true character than in his
correspondence, so that after awhile, even though the subject of the
letters be nothing more interesting than the studies in hand, those
who write the letters may learn to know each other if they have but
the mother wit to read between the lines. Certainly this young
schoolmaster did not know Iris, nor did he desire to discover what she
was like, being wholly occupied with the study of himself. Strange and
kindly provision of Nature. The less desirable a man actually appears
to others, the more fondly he loves and believes in himself. I have
heard it whispered that Narcissus was a hunchback.

Then there was another pupil, a girl who was working her very hardest
in order to become, as she hoped, a first-class governess, and who,
poor thing! by reason of her natural thickness would never reach even
the third rank. Iris would have been sorry for her, because she worked
so fiercely, and was so stupid, but there was something hard and
unsympathetic in her nature which forbade pity. She was miserably
poor, too, and had an unsuccessful father, no doubt as stupid as
herself, and made pitiful excuses for not forwarding the slender fees
with regularity.

Everybody who is poor should be, on that ground alone, worthy of pity
and sympathy. But the hardness and stupidity, and the ill-temper, all
combined and clearly shown in her letters, repelled her tutor. Iris,
who drew imaginary portraits of her pupils, pictured the girl as plain
to look upon, with a dull eye, a leathery, pallid cheek, a forehead
without sunshine upon it, and lips which seldom parted with a smile.

Then there was, besides, a Cambridge undergraduate. He was neither
clever, nor industrious, nor very ambitious; he thought that a
moderate place was quite good enough for him to aim at, and he found
that his unknown and obscure tutor by correspondence was cheap and
obliging, and willing to take trouble, and quite as efficacious for
his purposes as the most expensive Cambridge coach. Iris presently
discovered that he was lazy and luxurious, a deceiver of himself, a
dweller in Fool's Paradise and a constant shirker of work. Therefore,
she disliked him. Had she actually known him and talked with him, she
might have liked him better in spite of these faults and shortcomings,
for he was really a pleasant, easygoing youth, who wallowed in
intellectual sloth, but loved physical activity; who will presently
drop easily, and comfortably, and without an effort or a doubt, into
the bosom of the Church, and will develop later on into an admirable
country parson, unless they disestablish the Establishment: in which
case, I do not know what he will do.

But this other man, this man who was coming for an explanation, this
Mr. Arnold Arbuthnot, was, if you please, a very different kind of
pupil. In the first place he was a gentleman, a fact which he
displayed, not ostentatiously, in every line of his letters; next, he
had come to her for instruction--the only pupil she had in that
science, in heraldry, which she loved. It is far more pleasant to be
describing a shield and settling questions in the queer old language
of this queer old science, than in solving and propounding problems in
trigonometry and conic sections. And then--how if your pupil begins to
talk round the subject and to wander into other things? You cannot
very well talk round a branch of mathematics, but heraldry is a
subject surrounded by fields, meadows, and lawns, so to speak, all
covered with beautiful flowers. Into these the pupil wandered, and
Iris not unwillingly followed. Thus the teaching of heraldry by
correspondence became the most delightful interchange of letters
imaginable, set off and enriched with a curious and strange piquancy,
derived from the fact that one of them, supposed to be an elderly man,
was a young girl, ignorant of the world except from books, and the
advice given her by two old men, who formed all her society. Then, as
was natural, what was at first a kind of play, became before long a
serious and earnest confidence on the one side, and a hesitating
reception on the other.

Latterly he more than once amused himself by drawing an imaginary
portrait of her; it was a pleasing portrait, but it made her feel
uneasy.

"I know you," he said, "from your letters, but yet I want to know you
in person. I think you are a man advanced in years." Poor Iris! and
she not yet twenty-one. "You sit in your study and read; you wear
glasses, and your hair is gray; you have a kind heart and a cheerful
voice; you are not rich--you have never tried to make yourself rich;
you are therefore little versed in the ways of mankind; you take your
ideas chiefly from books; the few friends you have chosen are true and
loyal; you are full of sympathy, and quick to read the thoughts of
those in whom you take an interest." A very fine character, but it
made Iris's cheek to burn and her eyes to drop. To be sure she was not
rich, nor did she know the world; so far her pupil was right, but yet
she was not gray nor old. And, again, she was not, as he thought, a
man.

Letter-writing is not extinct, as it is a commonplace to affirm, and
as people would have us believe. Letters are written still--the most
delightful letters--letters as copious, as charming, as any of the
last century; but men and women no longer write their letters as
carefully as they used to do in the old days, because they were then
shown about, and very likely read aloud. Our letters, therefore,
though their sentences are not so balanced nor their periods so
rounded, are more real, more truthful, more spontaneous, and more
delightful than the laborious productions of our ancestors, who had to
weigh every phrase, and to think out their bon mots, epigrams, and
smart things for weeks beforehand, so that the letter might appear
full of impromptu wit. I should like, for instance, just for once, to
rob the outward or the homeward mail, in order to read all the
delightful letters which go every week backward and forward between
the folk in India and the folk at home.

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