Another time, in another of your undiscriminating platform rushes, you would punish the sober for the drunken. I claim consideration for the comfort, convenience, and refreshment of the sober; and you presently make platform proclamation that I have a depraved desire to turn Heaven's creatures into swine and wild beasts! In all such cases your movers, and your seconders, and your supporters - your regular Professors of all degrees, run amuck like so many mad Malays; habitually attributing the lowest and basest motives with the utmost recklessness (let me call your attention to a recent instance in yourself for which you should blush), and quoting figures which you know to be as wilfully onesided as a statement of any complicated account that should be all Creditor side and no Debtor, or all Debtor side and no Creditor. Therefore it is, Mr.
Honeythunder, that I consider the platform a sufficiently bad example and a sufficiently bad school, even in public life; but hold that, carried into private life, it becomes an unendurable nuisance.'
'These are strong words, sir!' exclaimed the Philanthropist.
'I hope so,' said Mr. Crisparkle. 'Good morning.'
He walked out of the Haven at a great rate, but soon fell into his regular brisk pace, and soon had a smile upon his face as he went along, wondering what the china shepherdess would have said if she had seen him pounding Mr. Honeythunder in the late little lively affair. For Mr. Crisparkle had just enough of harmless vanity to hope that he had hit hard, and to glow with the belief that he had trimmed the Philanthropic Jacket pretty handsomely.
He took himself to Staple Inn, but not to P. J. T. and Mr.
Grewgious. Full many a creaking stair he climbed before he reached some attic rooms in a corner, turned the latch of their unbolted door, and stood beside the table of Neville Landless.
An air of retreat and solitude hung about the rooms and about their inhabitant. He was much worn, and so were they. Their sloping ceilings, cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a prisoner. Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had a penthouse to itself thrust out among the tiles; and on the cracked and smoke-blackened parapet beyond, some of the deluded sparrows of the place rheumatically hopped, like little feathered cripples who had left their crutches in their nests; and there was a play of living leaves at hand that changed the air, and made an imperfect sort of music in it that would have been melody in the country.
The rooms were sparely furnished, but with good store of books.
Everything expressed the abode of a poor student. That Mr.
Crisparkle had been either chooser, lender, or donor of the books, or that he combined the three characters, might have been easily seen in the friendly beam of his eyes upon them as he entered.
'How goes it, Neville?'
'I am in good heart, Mr. Crisparkle, and working away.'
'I wish your eyes were not quite so large and not quite so bright,'
said the Minor Canon, slowly releasing the hand he had taken in his.
'They brighten at the sight of you,' returned Neville. 'If you were to fall away from me, they would soon be dull enough.'
'Rally, rally!' urged the other, in a stimulating tone. 'Fight for it, Neville!'
'If I were dying, I feel as if a word from you would rally me; if my pulse had stopped, I feel as if your touch would make it beat again,' said Neville. 'But I HAVE rallied, and am doing famously.'
Mr. Crisparkle turned him with his face a little more towards the light.
'I want to see a ruddier touch here, Neville,' he said, indicating his own healthy cheek by way of pattern. 'I want more sun to shine upon you.'
Neville drooped suddenly, as he replied in a lowered voice: 'I am not hardy enough for that, yet. I may become so, but I cannot bear it yet. If you had gone through those Cloisterham streets as Idid; if you had seen, as I did, those averted eyes, and the better sort of people silently giving me too much room to pass, that Imight not touch them or come near them, you wouldn't think it quite unreasonable that I cannot go about in the daylight.'
'My poor fellow!' said the Minor Canon, in a tone so purely sympathetic that the young man caught his hand, 'I never said it was unreasonable; never thought so. But I should like you to do it.'
'And that would give me the strongest motive to do it. But Icannot yet. I cannot persuade myself that the eyes of even the stream of strangers I pass in this vast city look at me without suspicion. I feel marked and tainted, even when I go out - as I do only - at night. But the darkness covers me then, and I take courage from it.'
Mr. Crisparkle laid a hand upon his shoulder, and stood looking down at him.
'If I could have changed my name,' said Neville, 'I would have done so. But as you wisely pointed out to me, I can't do that, for it would look like guilt. If I could have gone to some distant place, I might have found relief in that, but the thing is not to be thought of, for the same reason. Hiding and escaping would be the construction in either case. It seems a little hard to be so tied to a stake, and innocent; but I don't complain.'
'And you must expect no miracle to help you, Neville,' said Mr.
Crisparkle, compassionately.
'No, sir, I know that. The ordinary fulness of time and circumstances is all I have to trust to.'
'It will right you at last, Neville.'
'So I believe, and I hope I may live to know it.'
But perceiving that the despondent mood into which he was falling cast a shadow on the Minor Canon, and (it may be) feeling that the broad hand upon his shoulder was not then quite as steady as its own natural strength had rendered it when it first touched him just now, he brightened and said:
'Excellent circumstances for study, anyhow! and you know, Mr.