"Miss Polly hopes you"ll take a gla.s.s of wine, Mr. Joe," said a maid-servant, as she appeared with a decanter in her hand.
"No! Thanks--thanks to Miss Polly; many thanks--and to you Margaret; not to-day. I have a good deal to do." And he resumed his work with that air of determination the girl well knew brooked no interruption.
It was full an hour after sunset when he ceased writing; and then, laying his head down between his hands, he slept,--the sound, heavy sleep that comes of weariness. Twice or thrice had the servant to call him before he could awake, and hear that "Miss Polly was waiting tea for him."
"Waiting for me!" cried he, in mingled shame and astonishment. "How forgetful I am; how very wrong of me! Is Mr. Crowther here, Margaret?"
"He came an hour ago, sir."
"Dear me, how I have forgotten myself!" And he began gathering up his papers, the hard task of the day, in all haste. "Say I"m coming, Margaret; tell Miss Polly I"m so sorry." And thus with many an excuse, and in great confusion, Raper hurried out of the office, and upstairs into the drawing-room.
f.a.gan"s house was, perhaps, the oldest in the street, and was remarkable for possessing one of those quaint, old-fashioned windows, which, projecting over the door beneath,-formed a species of little boudoir, with views extending on either side. Here it was Polly"s pleasure to sit, and here she now presided at her tea-table; while in a remote corner of the room her father and Mr. Crowther were deep in conversation.
"Have you finished the statement? Where "s the account?" cried f.a.gan, roughly interrupting the excuses that Raper was making for his absence.
"Here it is,--at least, so far as I was able to make it. Many of our memoranda, however, only refer to verbal arrangements, and allude to business matters transacted personally between you and Mr. Carew."
"Listen to him, Crowther; just hear what he says," said f.a.gan, angrily.
"Is not that a satisfactory way to keep accounts?"
"Gently, gently; let us go quietly to work," said Crowther, a large, fat, unwieldy man, with a bloated, red face, and an utterance rendered difficult from the combined effects of asthma and over-eating. "Raper is generally most correct, and your own memory is admirable. If Miss Polly will give me a cup of her strongest tea, without any sugar, I "ll answer for it I "ll soon see my way."
When Raper had deposited the ma.s.s of papers on the table, and presented the cup of tea to Crowther, he stole, half timidly, over to where Polly sat.
"You must be hungry, Papa Joe,"--it was the name by which she called him in infancy,--"for you never appeared at dinner. Pray eat something now."
"I have no appet.i.te, Polly,--that is, I have eaten already. I "m quite refreshed," said he, scarcely thinking of what he said, for his eyes were directed to the table where Crowther was seated, and where a kind of supercilious smile on the attorney"s face seemed evoked by something in the papers before him.
"Some cursed folly of his own,--some of that blundering nonsense that he fills his brains with!" cried f.a.gan, as he threw indignantly away a closely written sheet of paper, the lines of which unmistakably proclaimed verse.
Joe eyed the unhappy doc.u.ment wistfully for a second or two, and then, with a stealthy step, he crept over, and threw it into the hearth.
"I found out the pa.s.sage, Polly," said he, in a whisper, so as not to disturb the serious conference of the others; and he drew a few well-thumbed leaves from his pocket, and placed them beside her, while she bent over them till her glossy ringlets touched the page.
"This is the Medea," said she; "but we have not read that yet."
"No, Polly; you remember that we kept it for the winter nights; we agreed Tieck and Chamisso were better for summer evenings--"Quando ridono i prati," as Petrarch says;" and her eyes brightened, and her cheek glowed as he spoke. "How beautiful was that walk we took on Sunday evening last! That little glen beside the river, so silent, so still, who could think it within a mile or two of a great city? What a delightful thing it is to think, Polly, that they who labor hard in the week--and there are so many of them!--can yet on that one day of rest wander forth and taste of the earth"s freshness.
""L; oro e le perle--i fior vermegli ed i bianchi.""
"Confound your balderdash!" cried f.a.gan, pa.s.sionately; "you"ve put me out in the tot--seventeen and twelve, twenty-nine--two thousand nine hundred pounds, with the accruing interest. I don"t see that he has added the interest."
Mr. Crowther bent patiently over the doc.u.ment for a few minutes, and then, taking off his spectacles, and wiping them slowly, said, in his blandest voice: "It appears to me that Mr. Raper has omitted to calculate the interest. Perhaps he would kindly vouchsafe us his attention for a moment."
Raper was, however, at that moment deaf to all such appeals; his spirit was as though wandering free beneath the shade of leafy bowers or along the sedgy banks of some clear lake.
"You remember Dante"s lines, Polly, and how he describes--
""La divina foresta-- Che agli occhi tempera va il nuovo giorno, Senza piu aspettar lasciai la riva, Preudendo la campagna lento lento."
How beautiful the repet.i.tion of the word "lento;" how it conveys the slow reluctance of his step!"
"There is, to my thinking, even a more graceful instance in Metastasio,"
said Polly:--
""L" onda che mormora, Fra sponda e sponda, L" aura che tremola, Fra fronda e fronda."
"Raper, Raper,--do you hear me, I say?" cried f.a.gan, as he knocked angrily with his knuckles on the table.
"We are sorry, Miss f.a.gan," interposed Crowther, "to interrupt such intellectual pleasure, but business has its imperative claims."
"I "m ready--quite ready, sir," said Joe, rising in confusion, and hastening across the room to where the others sat.
"Take a seat, sir," said f.a.gan, peremptorily; "for here are some points which require full explanation. And I would beg to remind you that if the cultivation of your mind, as I have heard it called, interferes with your attention to office duties, it would be as well to seek out some more congenial sphere for its development than my humble house. I"m too poor a man for such luxurious dalliance, Mr. Raper." These words, although spoken in a whisper, were audible to him to whom they were addressed, and he heard them in a state of half-stupefied amazement.
"For the present, I must call your attention to this. What is it?"
Raper was no sooner in the midst of figures and calculations than all his instincts of office-life recalled him to himself, and he began rapidly but clearly to explain the strange and confused-looking doc.u.ments which were strewn before him, and Crowther could not but feel struck by the admirable memory and systematic precision which alone could derive information from such disorderly materials. Even f.a.gan himself was so carried away by a momentary impulse of enthusiasm as to say, "When a man is capable of such a statement at this, what a disgrace that he should fritter away his faculties with rhymes and legends!"
"Mr. Raper is a philosopher, sir; he despises the base pursuits and grovelling ambitions of us lower mortals," said Crowther, with a well-feigned humility.
"We must beg of him to lay aside his philosophy, then, for this evening, for there is much to be done yet," said f.a.gan, untying a large bundle of letters. "This is the correspondence of the last year,--the most important of all."
"Large sums! large sums, these!" said Crowther, glancing his eyes over the papers. "You appear to have placed a most unlimited confidence in this young gentleman,--a very well merited trust, I have no doubt."
f.a.gan made no reply, but a slight contortion of his mouth and eyebrows seemed to offer some dissent to the doctrine.
"I have kept the tea waiting for you, Papa Joe," said Polly, who took the opportunity of a slight pause to address him; and Raper, like an escaped schoolboy, burst away from his task at a word.
"I have just remembered another instance, Polly," said he, "of what we were speaking; it occurs in Schiller,--
""Es bricht sich die Wellen mit Macht--mit Macht.""
"Take your books to your room, Polly," said f.a.gan, harshly; "for I see that as long as they are here, we have little chance of Mr. Raper"s services."
Polly rose, and pressed Joe"s hand affectionately, and then, gathering up the volumes before her, she left the room. Raper stood for a second or two gazing at the door after her departure, and then, heaving a faint sigh, muttered to himself:--
"I have just recalled to mind another,--
""Eine Bluth", eine Bluth" mir brich, Vom den Baum im Garten."
Quite ready, sir," broke he in suddenly, as a sharp summons from f.a.gan"s knuckles once more admonished him of his duty; and now, as though the link which had bound him to realms of fancy was snapped, he addressed himself to his task with all the patient drudgery of daily habit.
CHAPTER VI. TWO FRIENDS AND THEIR CONFIDENCES
By the details of my last two chapters, I have been obliged to recede, as it were, from the due course of my story, and speak of events which occurred prior to those mentioned in a former chapter; but this irregularity was a matter of necessity, since I could not pursue the narrative of my father"s life without introducing to the reader certain characters who, more or less, exerted an influence on his fortunes.