Tony Butler

“Mr. Blount, take down this gentleman’s address, and show him where he is to wait; and don’t – ” Here he lowered his voice, so that the remainder of his speech was inaudible to Tony.

“Not if I can help it, sir,” replied Blount; “but if you knew how hard it is!”

There was something almost piteous in the youth’s face as he spoke; and, indeed, Vance seemed moved to a certain degree of compassion as he said, “Well, well, do your best, – do your best, none can do more.”

“It’s two o’clock. I ‘ll go out and have a cigar with you, if you don’t mind,” said Blount to Tony. “We ‘re quite close to the Park here; and a little fresh air will do me good.”

“Come along,” said Tony, who, out of compassion, had already a sort of half-liking for the much-suffering young fellow.

“I wish Skeffy was here,” said Tony, as they went downstairs.

“Do you know Skeff Darner, then?”

“Know him! I believe he ‘s about the fellow I like best in the world.”

“So do I,” cried the other, warmly; “he hasn’t his equal living; he ‘s the best-hearted and he’s the cleverest fellow I ever met.”

And now they both set to, as really only young friends ever do, to extol a loved one with that heartiness that neither knows limit nor measure. What a good fellow he was, – how much of this, without the least of that, – how unspoiled, too, in the midst of the flattery he met with! “If you just saw him as I did a few days back,” said Tony, calling up in memory Skeffy’s hearty enjoyment of their humble cottage-life.

“If you but knew how they think of him in the Office,” said Blount, whose voice actually trembled as he touched on the holy of holies.

“Confound the Office!” cried Tony. “Yes; don’t look shocked. I hate that dreary old house, and I detest the grim old fellows inside of it.”

“They ‘re severe, certainly,” muttered the other, in a deprecatory tone.

“Severe isn’t the name for it. They insult – they outrage – that’s what they do. I take it that you and the other young fellows here are gentlemen, and I ask, Why do you bear it, – why do you put up with it? Perhaps you like it, however.”

“No; we don’t like it,” said he, with an honest simplicity.

“Then, I ask again, why do you stand it?”

“I believe we stand it just because we can’t help it.”

“Can’t help it!”

“What could we do? What would you do?” asked Blount

“I ‘d go straight at the first man that insulted me, and say, Retract that, or I ‘ll pitch you over the banisters.”

“That’s all very fine with you fellows who have great connections and powerful relatives ready to stand by you and pull you out of any scrape, and then, if the worst comes, have means enough to live without work. That will do very well for you and Skeffy. Skeffy will have six thousand a year one of these days. No one can keep him out of Digby Darner’s estate; and you, for aught I know, may have more.”

“I have n’t sixpence, nor the expectation of sixpence in the world. If I am plucked at this examination I may go and enlist, or turn navvy, or go and sweep away the dead leaves like that fellow yonder.”

“Then take my advice, and don’t go up.”

“Go up where?”

“Don’t go up to be examined; just wait here in town; don’t show too often at the office, but come up of a morning about twelve, – I ‘m generally down here by that time. There will be a great press for messengers soon, for they have made a regulation about one going only so far, and another taking up his bag and handing it on to a third; and the consequence is, there are three now stuck fast at Marseilles, and two at Belgrade, and all the Constantinople despatches have gone round by the Cape. Of course, as I say, they ‘ll have to alter this, and then we shall suddenly want every fellow we can lay hands on; so all you have to do is just to be ready, and I ‘ll take care to start you at the first chance.”

“You ‘re a good fellow,” cried Tony, grasping his hand; “if you only knew what a bad swimmer it was you picked out of the water.”

“Oh, I can do that much, at least,” said he, modestly, “though I’m not a clever fellow like Skeffy; but I must go back, or I shall ‘catch it.’ Look in the day after to-morrow.”

“And let us dine together; that is, you will dine with me,” said Tony. The other acceded freely, and they parted.

That magnetism by which young fellows are drawn instantaneously towards each other, and feel something that, if not friendship, is closely akin to it, never repeats itself in after life. We grow more cautious about our contracts as we grow older. I wonder do we make better bargains?

If Tony was then somewhat discouraged by his reception at the Office, he had the pleasure of thinking he was compensated in that new-found friend who was so fond of Skeffy, and who could talk away as enthusiastically about him as himself. “Now for M’Gruder and Cannon Row, wherever that may be,” said he, as he sauntered along; “I ‘ll certainly go and see him, if only to shake hands with a fellow that showed such ‘good blood.’” There was no one quality which Tony could prize higher than this. The man who could take a thrashing in good part, and forgive him who gave it, must be a fine fellow, he thought; and I ‘m not disposed to say he was wrong.

The address was 27 Cannon Street, City; and it was a long way off, and the day somewhat spent when he reached it.

“Mr. M’Gruder?” asked Tony of a blear-eyed man, at a small faded desk in a narrow office.

“Inside!” said he, with a jerk of his thumb; and Tony pushed his way into a small room, so crammed with reams of paper that there was barely space to squeeze a passage to a little writing-table next the window.

“Well, sir, your pleasure?” said M’Gruder, as Tony came forward.

“You forget me, I see; my name is Butler.”

“Eh! what! I ought not to forget you,” said he, rising, and grasping the other’s hand warmly; “how are you? when did you come up to town? You see the eye is all right; it was a bit swollen for more than a fortnight, though. Hech, sirs! but you have hard knuckles of your own.”

It was not easy to apologize for the rough treatment he had inflicted, and Tony blundered and stammered in his attempts to do so; but M’Gruder laughed it all off with perfect good-humor, and said, “My wife will forgive you, too, one of these days, but not just yet; and so we’ll go and have a bit o’ dinner our two selves down the river. Are you free to-day?”

Tony was quite free and ready to go anywhere; and so away they went, at first by river steamer, and then by a cab, and then across some low-lying fields to a small solitary house close to the Thames, – “Shads, chops, and fried-fish house,” over the door, and a pleasant odor of each around the premises.

“Ain’t we snug here? no tracking a man this far,” said M’Grader, as he squeezed into a bench behind a fixed table in a very small room. “I never heard of the woman that ran her husband to earth down here.”

That this same sense of security had a certain value in M’Grader’s estimation was evident, for he more than once recurred to the sentiment as they sat at dinner.

The tavern was a rare place for “hollands,” as M’Grader said; and they sat over a peculiar brew for which the house was famed, but of which Tony’s next day’s experiences do not encourage me to give the receipt to my readers. The cigars, too, albeit innocent of duty, might have been better; but all these, like some other pleasures we know of, only were associated with sorrow in the future. Indeed, in the cordial freedom that bound them they thought very little of either. They had grown to be very confidential; and M’Gruder, after inquiring what Tony proposed to himself by way of a livelihood, gave him a brief sketch of his own rise from very humble beginnings to a condition of reasonably fair comfort and sufficiency.

“I ‘m in rags, ye see, Mr. Butler,” said he, “my father was in rags before me.”

“In rags!” cried Tony, looking at the stout sleek broadcloth beside him.

“I mean,” said the other, “I ‘m in the rag trade, and we supply the paper-mills; and that’s why my brother Sam lives away in Italy. Italy is a rare place for rags, – I take it they must have no other wear, for the supply is inexhaustible, – and so Sam lives in a seaport they call Leghorn; and the reason I speak of it to you is that if this messenger trade breaks down under you, or that ye ‘d not like it, there’s Sam there would be ready and willing to lend you a hand; he ‘d like a fellow o’ your stamp, that would go down amongst the wild places on the coast, and care little about the wild people that live in them. Mayhap this would be beneath you, though?” said he, after a moment’s pause.

“I ‘m above nothing at this moment except being dependent; I don’t want to burden my mother.”

“Dolly told us about your fine relations, and the high and mighty folk ye belong to.”

“Ay, but they don’t belong to me, – there ‘s the difference,” said Tony, laughing; then added, in a more thoughtful tone, “I never suspected that Dolly spoke of me.”

“That she did, and very often too. Indeed, I may say that she talked of very little else. It was Tony this and Tony that; and Tony went here and Tony went there; till one day Sam could bear it no longer – for you see Sam was mad in love with her, and said over and over again that he never met her equal. Sam says to me, ‘Bob,’ says he, ‘I can’t bear it any more.’ ‘What is it,’ says I, ‘that you can’t bear?’ – for I thought it was something about the drawback duty on mixed rags he was meaning. But no, sirs; it was that he was wild wi’ jealousy, and couldn’t bear her to be a-talkin’ about you. ‘I think,’ says he, ‘if I could meet that same Tony, I ‘d crack his neck for him.’”

“That was civil, certainly!” said Tony, dryly.

“‘And as I can’t do that, I ‘ll just go and ask her what she means by it all, and if Tony’s her sweetheart?’”

“He did not do that!” Tony cried, half angrily.

“Yes, but he did, though; and what for no? You would n’t have a man lose his time pricing a bale of goods when another had bought them? If she was in treaty with you, Mr. Butler, where was the use of Sam spending the day trying to catch a word wi’ her? So, to settle the matter at once, he overtook her one morning going to early meeting with the children, and he had it out.”

“Well, well?” asked Tony, eagerly.

“Well, she told him there never was anything like love between herself and you; that you were aye like brother and sister; that you knew each other from the time you could speak; that of all the wide world she did not know any one so well as you; and then she began to cry, and cried so bitterly that she had to turn back home again, and go to her room as if she was taken ill; and that’s the way Mrs. M’Gruder came to know what Sam was intending. She never suspected it before; but, hech sirs! if she did n’t open a broadside on every one of us! And the upshot was, Dolly was packed off home to her father; Sam went back to Leghorn; and there’s Sally and Maggie going back in everything ever they learned; for it ain’t every day you pick up a lass like that for eighteen pounds a year, and her washing.”

“But did he ask her to marry him?” cried Tony.

“He did. He wrote a letter – a very good and sensible letter too – to her father. He told him that he was only a junior, with a small share, but that he had saved enough to furnish a house, and that he hoped, with industry and care and thrifty ways, he would be able to maintain a wife decently and well; and he referred to Dr. Forbes of Auchterlonie for a character of him; and I backed it myself, saying, in the name of the house, it was true and correct.”

“What answer came to this?”

“A letter from the minister, saying that the lassie was poorly, and in so delicate a state of health it would be better not to agitate her by any mention of this kind for the present; meanwhile he would take up his information from Dr. Forbes, whom he knew well; and if the reply satisfied him, he ‘d write again to us in the course of a week or two; and Sam’s just waiting patiently for his answer, and doing his best, in the mean while, to prepare, in case it’s a favorable one.”

Tony fell into a revery. That story of a man in love with one it might never be his destiny to win had its own deep significance for him. Was there any grief, was there any misery, to compare with it? And although Sam M’Gruder, the junior partner in the rag trade, was not a very romantic sort of character, yet did he feel an intense sympathy for him. They were both sufferers from the same malady, – albeit Sam’s attack was from a very mild form of the complaint.

“You must give me a letter to your brother,” said he at length. “Some day or other I ‘m sure to be in Italy, and I’d like to know him.”

“Ay, and he like to know you, now that he ain’t jealous of you. The last thing he said to me at parting was, ‘If ever I meet that Tony Butler, I ‘ll give him the best bottle of wine in my cellar.’”

“When you write to him next, say that I ‘m just as eager to take him by the hand, mind that. The man that’s like to be a good husband to Dolly Stewart is sure to be a brother to me.”

And they went back to town, talking little by the way, for each was thoughtful, – M’Grader thinking much over all they had been saying; Tony full of the future, yet not able to exclude the past.