Jack Raymond

She put a hand over his mouth to stop him.

"Hush! It was to set God's creature free, and Theo's father died to set God's people free. Whose child should you be but mine?"

Early next morning, when he came into Helen's room, awkward and sullen, to say good-bye, she greeted him in a cheerful, matter-of-fact way, as if their new relation­ship were years old.

"Then you'll spend all your holidays here, if your people don't object. I'll run down to Cornwall and see them, and try to arrange matters; perhaps they'll let me adopt you altogether. And about pocket-money, of course you'll share whatever Theo has, and I'll make the amount a little larger. It's rather a tiny income for three, so we shall all have to be careful till my two sons are grown, and can support themselves."

Jack muttered something sulkily about its being "beastly slow" not to be twenty-one. He was near to breaking down again, and his speech was proportionately curt and slangy. There were tears in Helen's eyes as she kissed him.

"And you'll take care of Theo. Since I was left alone I have been anxious about him, having no one near that I could trust. He will be a musician when he grows up, and musicians are not always the happiest people. But I shall feel quite safe now that I have you, who are so good to singing-birds. God keep you, my other son!"

It was the last time that the story of the mavis was referred to.

CHAPTER IX

The year in which Jack came of age was to him one of trial. He grew up, and entered into life; a difficult matter commonly, and in his case a grievous one.

He was studying medicine in London, and the more observant among the professors had begun to watch his development with interest. When he could get sufficiently far out of himself to throw off the laboured accuracy, the painful over-conscientiousness which usually marred his work, he would show a certain breadth of conception and sureness of intellectual grasp quite unusual at his age. More than once a professor, demonstrating in the dissecting room, had looked up in surprise at his questions, and asked him quickly: "How did you guess that?" But these flashes of sudden insight never came to help him out at examinations. At such times he always relapsed into the dull and docile pupil whom

Dr. Cross had known. He was too steady and diligent a worker to fail; but would pass ingloriously, by sheer perseverance, show­ing no trace of the special capacities which marked him as a born physician.

His heart's desire, never mentioned to any one except Helen, and to her but half-ex­pressed, was to become a great specialist in the diseases of children. Even to himself he scarcely formulated this, his one ambition; but, hidden deep under the diffidence which af­flicted him lay an abiding sense that he was called to this vocation; rather, that he held a claim for it upon the gods, as justification for faith. In his dumb way, half-consciously, he demanded this satisfaction of them, not repin­ing nor in anger, but as a fair right, bought and paid for. Surely they would be honest for this once, and not repudiate so clear a title-deed. Seeing that he had accepted the curse of childhood as they had laid it on him, and had neither blasphemed against their ruling nor fallen by the way and died, it seemed but just that they should grant him, in return, a spe­cial understanding of the wrongs and griefs of children, a special right to help and heal. If Dr. Jenkins had but understood...

In other respects his childhood had marked him less than Helen had feared. The trace of it showed chiefly in a certain soberness of judgment, the serious moderation of a too early maturity. Yet he seemed to her freer than she had dared to hope from any morbid taint of bitterness, and, if not so young as his years warranted, still, far younger than he had been at fourteen.

Of Molly he seldom spoke, even to Helen; and she had often grieved over his reticence, dreading lest it might be the cloak for secret brooding. But, well as she had learned to read his character, she was mistaken here. He had trained himself not to waste his strength on barren yearning before the coming of the time for action. To rescue his sister was with him a purpose, not a craving; when he should have hewn a foothold for himself it would be time to turn and stretch a hand to her; till then he could do nothing for her but keep his face averted, lest the sight of her, defenceless in the enemy's hands, might distract him from his work. He had not seen her for seven years. She had been put to school in Truro, he knew; and, being now sixteen and tall for her age, was counted a young woman grown. "Next summer," Aunt Sarah had written in her Christmas letter, "she is to come home for good, and help in the parish work; for I am not so active as I used to be, and your uncle is troubled with rheumatism in the damp weather. She had a fancy to learn hospital nursing; but your uncle decided that she would be more useful and safer from tempta­tion at home, so she has said no more about it. She has always been a good girl and very obedient, and he is pleased with her."

The Christmas letters, one from Aunt Sarah and one from Molly herself, had been, for all these seven years, the only link be­tween Jack and his old life; except, indeed, the formal quarterly reports of his progress which he had sent, as stipulated, to the Vicar, and the long replies to them, each containing a meagre cheque and much sound advice and pious exhortation. The admonitions troubled him little; the remittances were the blackest shadow left upon his youth; a shadow of which Helen scarcely dared to speak, since she could do nothing to remove it. Once only, the Easter when he was sixteen, the look on his face, as he laid the cheque beside her, had made her break silence, put­ting up a thin hand to touch his cheek.

"My dear, you need never see him again, at least until you are a man."

"I have to eat his bread," he had answered in his slow, tense way. "The stray cats in the street are luckier; they're not told who throws the scraps."

After his return to school, Helen, with her failing health, had made again the weary journey to Porthcarrick, and repeated her ineffectual entreaty that she might be per­mitted to adopt the lad altogether.

"I could afford to keep him till he can keep himself," she urged; "and it would settle many difficulties. Once you have consented to let him live with me, why should you pay his schooling? It is only right and just that I, who have the privilege of his affection, should cover his expenses. It's small return for the benefit that his companionship has been to my own child. And the boy himself would be happier, too."

Beyond a little more compression of the lips there was no sign in the Vicar's face that she had pained him.

"It is not a question of happiness," he said, "but of right and wrong. My dead brother's son has a claim upon me for food and clothing, and for an adequate and Christian education, and I will not shirk my responsibilities. It is enough that I have consented to be set aside and to let a stranger take the place which belongs in God's sight to me and to my wife. That the boy has proved unworthy, and that he repays me with vindictiveness and hatred, are considerations off the point. It is my duty to provide for him."

Helen submitted; to press him further would have been to risk awakening his com­bative instincts: and if he should choose at any time to call the lad back home, she could not resist.

"I have tried again, my dear," she said to Jack on her next visit to the school; "and failed again. You will have to bear it as best you can."

As she looked up, and saw the line in which his mouth had set, it struck upon her suddenly how like the Vicar he was. There was a likeness in his speech too, when he answered.