'I was very much afraid that I should not see you to-day,' he said, as they glided softly by Chelsea Embankment.
'But I promised to come if it was fine.'
'Yes. I feared something might prevent you. You are very kind to give me your company.' He was looking at the tips of her little boots. 'I can't say how I thank you.'
Much embarrassed, Monica could only gaze at one of the sculls, as it rose and fell, the water dripping from it in bright beads.
'Last year,' he pursued, 'I went on the river two or three times, but alone. This year I haven't been in a boat till to-day.'
'You prefer driving?'
'Oh, it's only chance. I do drive a good deal, however. I wish it were possible to take you through the splendid country I saw a day or two agodown in Surrey. Perhaps some day you will let me. I live rather a lonely life, as you see. I have a housekeeper; no relative lives with me. My only relative in London is a sister-in-law, and we very seldom meet.'
'But don't you employ yourself in any way?'
'I'm very idle. But that's partly because I have worked very hard and hopelessly all my lifetill a year and a half ago. I began to earn my own living when I was fourteen, and now I am forty-fourto-day.'
'This is your birthday?' said Monica, with an odd look the other could not understand.
'YesI only remembered it a few hours ago. Strange that such a treat should have been provided for me. Yes, I am very idle. A year and a half ago my only brother died. He had been very successful in life, and he left me what I regard as a fortune, though it was only a small part of what he had.'
The listener's heart throbbed. Without intending it, she pulled the tiller so that the boat began to turn towards land.
'The left hand a little,' said Widdowson, smiling correctly. 'That's right. Many days I don't leave home. I am fond of reading, and now I make up for all the time lost in years gone by. Do you care for books?'
'I never read very much, and I feel very ignorant.'
'But that is only for want of opportunity, I'm sure.'
He glanced at the brown-paper parcel. Acting on an impulse which perturbed her, Monica began to slip off the loosely-tied string, and to unfold the paper.
'I thought it was a book!' exclaimed Widdowson merrily, when she had revealed a part of her present.
'When you told me your name,' said Monica, 'I ought perhaps to have told you mine. It's written here. My sisters gave me this to-day.'
She offered the little volume. He took it as though it were something fragile, andthe sculls fixed under his elbowsturned to the fly-leaf.
'What? It is your birthday?'
'Yes. I am twenty-one.'
'Will you let me shake hands with you?' His pressure of her fingers was the lightest possible. 'Now that's rather a strange thingisn't it? Oh, I remember this book very well, though I haven't seen it or heard of it for twenty years. My mother used to read it on Sundays. And it is really your birthday? I am more than twice your age, Miss Madden.'
The last remark was uttered anxiously, mournfully. Then, as if to reassure himself by exerting physical strength, he drove the boat along with half a dozen vigorous strokes. Monica was rustling over the pages, but without seeing them.
'I don't think,' said her companion presently, 'you are very well contented with your life in that house of business.'
'No, I am not.'
'I have heard a good deal of the hardships of such a life. Will you tell me something about yours?'
Readily she gave him a sketch of her existence from Sunday to Sunday, but without indignation, and as if the subject had no great interest for her.
'You must be very strong,' was Widdowson's comment.
'The lady I went to see this afternoon told me I looked ill.'
'Of course I can see the effects of overwork. My wonder is that you endure it at all. Is that lady an old acquaintance?'
Monica answered with all necessary detail, and went on to mention the proposal that had been made to her. The hearer reflected, and put further questions. Unwilling to speak of the little capital she possessed, Monica told him that her sisters might perhaps help her to live whilst she was learning a new occupation. But Widdowson had become abstracted; he ceased pulling, crossed his arms on the oars, and watched other boats that were near. Two deep wrinkles, rippling in their course, had formed across his forehead, and his eyes widened in a gaze of complete abstraction at the farther shore.
'Yes,' fell from him at length, as though in continuation of something he had been saying, 'I began to earn my bread when I was fourteen. My father was an auctioneer at Brighton. A few years after his marriage he had a bad illness, which left him completely deaf. His partnership with another man was dissolved, and as things went worse and worse with him, my mother started a lodging-house, which somehow supported us for a long time. She was a sensible, good, and brave woman. I'm afraid my father had a good many faults that made her life hard. He was of a violent temper, and of course the deafness didn't improve it. Well, one day a cab knocked him down in the King's Road, and from that injury, though not until a year after, he died. There were only two children; I was the elder. My mother couldn't keep me at school very long, so, at fourteen, I was sent into the office of the man who had been my father's partner, to serve him and learn the business. I did serve him for years, and for next to no payment, but he taught me nothing more than he could help. He was one of those heartless, utterly selfish men that one meets too often in the business world. I ought never to have been sent there, for my father had always an ill opinion of him; but he pretended a friendly interest in mejust, I am convinced, to make the use of me that he did.'
He was silent, and began rowing again.
'What happened them?' asked Monica.
'I mustn't make out that I was a faultless boy,' he continued, with the smile that graved wrinkles about his eyes; 'quite the opposite. I had a good deal of my father's temper; I often behaved very badly to my mother; what I needed was some stern but conscientious man to look after me and make me work. In my spare time I lay about on the shore, or got into mischief with other boys. It needed my mother's death to make a more sensible fellow of me, and by that time it was too late. I mean I was too old to be trained into profitable business habits. Up to nineteen I had been little more than an errand and office boy, and all through the after years I never got a much better position.'
'I can't understand that,' remarked Monica thoughtfully.
'Why not?'
'You seem toto be the kind of man that would make your way.'
'Do I?' The description pleased him; he laughed cheerfully. 'But I never found what my way was to be. I have always hated office work, and business of every kind; yet I could never see an opening in any other direction. I have been all my life a clerklike so many thousands of other men. Nowadays, if I happen to be in the City when all the clerks are coming away from business, I feel an inexpressible pity for them. I feel I should like to find two or three of the hardest driven, and just divide my superfluous income between. A clerk's lifea life of the office without any hope of risingthat is a hideous fate!'
'But your brother got on well. Why didn't he help you?'
'We couldn't agree. We always quarrelled.'
'Are you really so ill-tempered?'
It was asked in Monica's most naive tone, with a serious air of investigation which at first confused Widdowson, then made him laugh.
'Since I was a lad,' he replied, 'I have never quarrelled with any one except my brother. I think it's only very unreasonable people that irritate me. Some men have told me that I was far too easy-going, too good-natured. Certainly I desire to be good-natured. But I don't easily make friends; as a rule I can't talk to strangers. I keep so much to myself that those who know me only a little think me surly and unsociable.'