Part 7

“Well, I don’t understand Greek and Latin,” said Thorne, “so suppose we talk English. I have been studying you carefully, Bindo, and have come to the conclusion that you look highly picturesque among all that fruit and flowers. I wonder what made you so good looking; was your father particularly lovely?”

“Neither my father nor my mother, Thorne, though she _has_ contrived to marry again; and the consequence is I’m not so well looked after as I ought to have been, else I shouldn’t be here to-night. Fate, I think, must have made a judicious blend of the best points in his face with the best features of hers. And the result is me.”

“First class grammar, Bindo. She must have sent you to a good school at any rate.”

“Anything else to ask, old man? You seem to be in an inquisitive mood to-night.”

“Yes; who taught you to sing?”

“Le bon Dieu, I suppose, as Patti said. I had only the training of a country choir boy. By the by, my master’s name was Thorne, a matter full of interest to you. I believe I sang by intuition.”

“A Hamiltonian philosopher,” muttered Andrews, “only he has developed theory into practice.”

“Anyhow, when your voice goes I shall put on mourning,” said Eastonville, “not black, for I don’t believe in it. Purple’s the farthest I can go.”

“You may put on white or canary yellow, like a heathen Chinee, for all I care.”

“Don’t lose your temper, Bindo.”

And Eric, _alias_ Bindo, how shall I describe him? A fair boy, delicate looking, but with lungs that can fill the biggest concert room in London, with wavy golden hair flung back on his forehead, and the long dreamy eyes so dear to the soul of Raphael. In fact, it was Raphael’s picture of Bindo Altoviti (long supposed to be a portrait of the painter) that had won him his name. Framed in the cabin window of a Bournemouth steamer (excursion boats in these days do not condescend to port holes), his arms resting on the sill, the resemblance had struck me irresistibly. From that day he became “Bindo” to all of us, and would scarcely have recognised an appeal to him as “Eric,” if we had lighted on the name by accident. His hair perhaps was one of his most telling points. It reflected under strong lights brilliant flakes of gold, isolated like the motes that are suspended in certain liqueurs.

But after all it was his manner that took so much with all his friends. He had the timid deprecating caress of a half-tamed animal, like Hawthorne’s Donatello before he had won himself a soul. Alas! poor Bindo was hardly allowed time to win it.

“And what was the show like to-night, Bindo?” asked Eastonville.

“Oh, the same old game. Nothing would suit them out of sixty songs but ‘Jerusalem,’ ‘Rags and Tatters,’ and ‘Home, sweet Home.’ They don’t mind ‘A boy’s best friend’ for an encore when they are in a strictly domestic mood. But anything really worth singing they won’t look at.”

“Well, we’ll follow their better mood and have ‘Jerusalem.’ You’ve got back your voice by now, old chap, and we’ve been waiting for you patiently this last half-hour or more.”

Once again that night the glorious voice rang out into the thin air, startling the silent square. Windows were hastily flung up, and the word “Bindo” was passed from sill to sill. Even a drowsy canary was stimulated to try a note or two in emulation of a method more attractive than its own. And through the open window came, for an accompaniment, the voice of London, soft as the murmur of a far-off sea.

With the end of the song a sharp rattle of applause ran round the square, marked by distinctive intervals, like the volley at a soldier’s funeral.

“Bravo, Bindo,” said Eastonville, “it would pay you to send the hat round to-night. Here’s a fiver, young ’un, to open the bank with, though why I should give it you passes my comprehension. A boy who can earn ten pounds a night at sixteen is a sight better off than I am. If you lose it, you’ll have to try the others. I’m pretty well cleared out. After all you’re detestable, Bindo. Just when we want you most, your voice will be gone, and you’ll have spoiled us for all other singing, precisely as the great Sarah has spoiled us for any acting but her own. If we could only forget and start fresh with each week, how nice and pleasant everything would be. I believe Nelly is right in ‘Cometh up,’ when she says that memory is often a cruel gift. No one would choose to remember a feeble show, or to spoil his enjoyment of average singing by a recollection of the best. Why are ‘Jack Sheppard’ and ‘Geneviève de Brabant’ practically withdrawn from the London stage? Because elderly playgoers cannot forget the days when Mrs. Keeley played ‘Jack,’ or when Emily Soldene and the Dolaro drew all Mayfair to Islington by the witchery of a serenade. But now for ‘A boy’s best friend’—we’re all in a domestic mood to-night—and then cards.”

II

Bindo was very docile as a rule, especially in the hands of those who loved and cared for him. But on some points he was obdurate as steel. For instance, I could never persuade him, try what I would, to invest his salary, nor could anything induce him to learn a profession against the day when his voice should fail him. Singing, he said, had come naturally to him; a good voice, a good ear, and a little training had done the trick; and he thought, or pretended to think, that the evil day, when it did come, would bring with it its own resource. “Sufficient unto the day is the _good_ thereof” was Bindo’s motto throughout.

And it was impossible to teach him the value of money. He spent it royally on others, lavishly on himself. “Where have you been, Bindo?” I said to him one Monday, when he hadn’t turned up as usual on the previous afternoon. “Oh, I took Harry out of town. He’s been seedy, you know, and wanted change. So we went to Brighton.” “And you travelled first-class, and put up at the Bedford, and lost money to him at cards in the evening?” “You have hit it _exactly_, old man,” was the reply.

I believe that most of his money went on Quixotic kindnesses of this sort. One night when I was with him at the Queen’s Hall (he liked to run round to me between his “turns” and criticise the show from the front) his salary for two nights went before it was earned to the first violin, a blind little snuff-powdered man, but Bindo’s very particular friend, because he had stumbled in getting down from the stage and damaged his instrument.

When the end did come, it came suddenly. His voice cracked on an upper G—sudden and short like the string of a violin—in the very hall he had so emphatically abused for its acoustic deficiencies. Of course he came to me, if it can be said that he came to me, when he had always been with me for most of his time. But the life bored him. I had my own work to do in the evenings, and couldn’t go with him to restaurants, theatres, and concerts, the excitement of which had become a second nature to Bindo. And so we drifted, little by little, but still very surely, farther and farther apart.

It was about this time that his friend Harry, the same whom he had entertained so royally at Brighton, fell ill. Bindo had been anxious about him for a long while, and never passed a day without seeing him. But it was only quite lately that the doctors had begun to suspect a rapid form of consumption. Bindo was full of trouble. I think he liked Harry best of all his friends, perhaps excepting me.

One day he burst into my room, with something more akin to tears in his eyes than I had ever seen in them before. “What _is_ to be done, Charlie? They’ve given Harry the sack at his office because he’s too ill to do his work properly. They won’t even keep it open for him for a week or two on the chance. What brutes they are! And, poor old chap, he’s got nothing. If it were only this time last year, and I had my voice again, we could do famously. I wish I’d taken your advice, old man, and saved my pile while I had the chance. By the way: happy thought! I have a heap of rings and pins and watches at home that the swells gave me last year for singing at their matinees and concerts—enough of them to stock a pawnshop. By Jove! they _shall_ help to stock Attenborough’s; and we’ll live on the proceeds, at any rate till things look more rosy.” He was off then and there, and for the next six months, till Harry died, I scarcely saw him. One excitement in his case had cast out the others, and while Harry lived he hardly cared to be outside his room. Brother and nurse in one he was to him—with him night and day—and, whatever money or love could do, Bindo did for him.

Afterwards he came back to me, looking a trifle older, a trifle more depressed; but improved, or so it seemed to me, by the experience he had undergone. I forgot that there are natures receptive of vigorous and even intense impressions, but absolutely incapable of retaining them. So soon as one predominant idea has passed from the brain, its place must be occupied by another, for good or else for evil. Which of the two it may be, seems almost a matter of indifference; it is the law, so to speak, of their being that it _should_ be indifferent.

I almost wished in those days that I could fall ill myself. Five or six months of nursing under Bindo’s hand would have been a lazy delight to me, and (selfish as it may seem) better far for him than the life he was leading. Unhappily I never felt fitter, much too fit and too self-occupied to be interesting to Bindo, and so he left me for others, more at liberty and likely to be more amusing.

All this time he was (to quote his own words) “looking about for something”—the Micawber-like expression that does duty for an idle life. Whatever Bindo’s interpretation may have been, I know it made him very late in coming home of an evening. Yet he never asked me for money. His resources seemed boundless, and the stock of rings and watches inexhaustible. But, portable and useful property as they are, you must have a good supply of them in hand to live upon it for a year in the style Bindo was doing. Besides, it occurred to me as strange that I had never had a sight of them; in old days I had always had the first view of any present that was made him. On another point, too, he was inflexible as ever. Advice and help towards securing permanent employment he absolutely and positively refused. “Better that, old boy,” he said, “than do what most people do—bother their friends all round for an opinion when they’ve decided all along to follow their own.”

Your practical and steady-going individual—the one, for example, who can “see nothing” in _Alice in Wonderland_—never admits into his reckoning the influence of excitement. It disturbs and disarranges his equilibrium of life. Yet, disparage it as you may, it is one of the most important factors in shaping life and character, and perhaps the very strongest lever that operates for the development of vice. Fortunately, a fair number of mankind can do with a small and weak modicum of this dangerous stimulant. Individuals like Bindo, who ask for more, are classed among the eccentricities of nature, for whom it is impossible to prescribe. Yet, think what it means for a boy of sixteen, without discipline or experience to steady him, to drop, literally in a moment, from notoriety to neglect, activity to stagnation; almost from life to death.

No wonder Bindo pined and drooped. I knew the alternative that lay before him: life and death—not in metaphor this time, but in sober earnest. Yet I let him go, for he had taught me himself, if I had wanted the knowledge, that no man can cage a human will. So from the very moment I had become more hopeful about him, the gulf widened between us. But only in companionship; never in spirit—

“For, till the thunder in the trumpet be, Soul may divide from body, but not we, One from the other.”

Meanwhile he had retained all his old friends—no one who had known Bindo was in a hurry to part company with him—but he had made other and less reputable ones. The strange and (to me) disquieting element in the situation was that he never, even now, seemed to be in want of money. Yet Harry’s illness alone must have cost him a fortune. All his old luxuries were resumed. Dinners to his friends, at which Bindo was always paymaster, with periodical trips to Brighton and Bournemouth for change, succeeded one another with the same regularity as when the boy was earning £10 a night. “Where _does_ the money come from?” I asked myself again and again. Alas! the knowledge was to come soon.

Late one evening, as I was finishing an article for the editor who employed me, Thorne and Eastonville called at my rooms. That they had come on no pleasant errand was written on their faces. “Charlie,” said Thorne, “we are here on a disagreeable business. I hope it may prove less disagreeable than it looks. The fact is we’ve been losing a lot of things for some time past; at least we’ve tried our level best to _think_ we’ve lost them. But it won’t do. The thing is far too systematic to be accidental. Sometimes it has been money—a sovereign or two at a time; then it was a diamond ring of Eastonville’s that went, and then some valuable scarf-pins of mine. So the thing must be stopped. But who has done it? I may as well out with it at once, though it burns my throat to tell it. We can’t help fancying it’s Bindo. No one but he has had access to our rooms at all hours, and you know how suspicious he has made us all by the pile of money he’s been spending.”

“Yes: it _is_ Bindo, Thorne.”

What was the good of attempting to deny it, when it flashed across me in a moment where all his jewellery had come from? No, not all perhaps. Probably—for I never asked him—he had started with articles that were legitimately his own, and then, when these had failed him, had been tempted to supplement them less creditably in the time of Harry’s need.

Of course we found the things, as I anticipated, at Attenborough’s; all of them, that is, but one. Bindo was not the boy to try and hide his work, as an expert would have done, by distributing the articles at different shops, or even by signing under an assumed name. On the contrary, there was a contemptuous candour in his method of dealing that actually surprised and puzzled us for a moment at starting.

I would allow no one but myself to liquidate on behalf of Bindo. But I as steadily refused to be the bearer to him of the discovery we had made. None of the others volunteered for the office, or showed the faintest ambition to be the one selected for the murder of a friendship. So we cast lots for the office, whose it should be, in true melodramatic style, and the lot fell upon me.

“Cheer up, old fellow,” said Eastonville. “Bindo’s a deal fonder of you than he is of the rest of us, and won’t take it so hardly if it comes through you. The fact is we’ve spoiled him; all of us, that is, but you. And he knew it too, and I believe he liked the preaching you gave him better than all my five-pound notes; not that he showed any objection to the notes, I’m bound to say. Now, don’t look so savage, old man. I’m bound to try and laugh over it, because, if I didn’t, I feel sure I should do the other thing. And after all this business may be the making of Bindo.”

But he didn’t know Bindo as I did. The boy came to me with outstretched hand, and with the old frank look in his eyes. But I could not trust myself to return it. What I did, must, I felt, be done quickly. If I waited for words in which to break the news to him; above all, if I gave him the chance of speaking first, I knew it was all up with me. So I just put the things on the table in front of him—how I hated the sight of them!—and said, “These things have come into my hands, no matter by what means.” He looked at them, and the faintest flush imaginable crept over his face. “Before you leave me to-night we will do them up for the post, and you will address them to the respective owners and leave them in my hands.” I did not dare to look at him, but turned away to another table, making up the parcels one by one and handing them to him where he stood behind my back. He addressed each parcel as he received it, never betraying by a word or sign what I knew the effort must have cost him.

“And now, Eric, you and I part company.” I saw him wince at the name; almost as if he had received a blow. No doubt it implied to him, far more plainly than I had intended, that the Bindo of the past was lost beyond recall. It was not said in heedlessness, still less in heartlessness; it was simply loss of self-control. The old familiar name _could_ not be forced past my lips. In a moment I saw what I had done, and would have given worlds to repair it. “Bindo,” I cried impulsively, “come back.” But it was too late; the mischief was done. I had lost my last chance by that one word.

“Good-bye,” he answered, and was gone.

III

The characters we meet with in this world are composite, all of them—not saint or sinner; not this or else that, but something betwixt and between; the good in them not permanent, the bad in them not hopeless; and Bindo’s short life had exemplified the fact with startling clearness.

From that day forward my influence over him was gone. He must have kept studiously out of my path—an easy thing for him to do, as he knew all my habits and places of resort. I used to try and persuade myself that I was guiltless of the result, whatever it might be; that “unstable as water” his character was past all guidance, and would in any case have drifted to the end that seemed to be in view. Yet it was hard to feel all the while that a strong, kind word from me that night might have nerved him to fresh energy.

“And what about Bindo?” I asked of Eastonville one day.

“Going to the dogs, and pretty rapidly, too, I’m afraid. The last time I saw him, he was with Hutchinson and all that crew. You know what comes of mixing with loafers like that. He wouldn’t look at me, though I tried hard to get a talk with him. He’d had more to drink, too, than a boy of seventeen can carry. The pity of it all. What a voice he had, and what a good fellow, too, at heart! How he nursed poor Harry! Few Samaritans of the present day would have given up six months of their time to spend them in a sick room. But I’m afraid it’s all up with him.”

“Can’t Thorne do anything?”

“No; Bindo fights shy of us all, and no wonder either. I am sure I should do the same in his place. If _you_ could only have got hold of him, and made him feel that we were rather glad than otherwise that our useless belongings had gone towards nursing Harry, he’d have got back his self-respect and been less shy of us. But our last hope went when _you_ failed. What the plague made you call him Eric instead of Bindo?”

“Heaven only knows,” I answered, “or its Antipodes.”

I told Thorne one day of Eastonville’s report, and asked him what he thought of it.

“Just nothing at all,” he said. “He knows no more of what Bindo’s doing than all the rest of us. For myself, I believe he’s got work of some kind. I grant he’s seen sometimes at shady music halls with shady companions; and that’s what Eastonville means. But, after all, a fellow must have some one to speak to in the evening, especially if he’s at work all day; and if he’s lost his old friends he must fill up their places with the best he can. Besides, it’s quite possible that Bindo has grown wise enough by this time to make sure they do him no harm.”

A few months later Thorne dropped in again. “Now you’ll be happy, I suppose; at least I am. Bindo starts to-morrow for Brazil in the _Magdalena_. We came across him to-day. He’s had work on hand all the year, though he kept it quietly to himself; and now he’ll be quit of all his old associations and be able to make another, and, I hope, a better start.”

I made up my mind, of course, that I must see him before he sailed. But how to do it? Fortunately I knew the name of the boat he was to travel by, unless he had wilfully put Thorne off the scent. But it was too late to get a train that night, and, as the boat I knew sailed at two o’clock, it gave me none too much time to hunt him up at Southampton.

When a letter came to me next morning by the early post, requiring an article at once for the afternoon papers, it was only what I expected. Fate had come between me and Bindo every time I had wished to help him, and she was at her old games again. So I sat down and wrote off my article—doggedly rather than savagely—in the spirit of one who gives up the game against chance, yet knowing, all the time I was writing, that I was losing my train, and that it was doubtful whether the next one would catch the _Magdalena_ at all. The official at the Dock entrance told me that she was already throwing off from the quay wall, and it would be quite impossible to get on board. “Far and away your best chance,” he added, “is to run round this way to the Dock gates. You’ll be there before she is, for it takes a lot of time to back and turn her. Then if you want to say good-bye to anyone _very_ particularly (and he smiled), you’ll get a word with her perhaps. For the vessel’s loaded deep, and her portholes won’t stand very high above the quay wall. Besides, she’ll only creep through the gates, but you’ve no time to lose.”

I hardly stopped to thank him _then_. On my way back he got, not only thanks, but, to his great astonishment, a five-shilling piece. “Well; he must have wanted to see her badly,” I heard him whisper to his mate.

The preliminaries of throwing off, backing, warping, were all over by the time I reached the gates, and the big vessel was beginning to make a move under her own steam. I looked eagerly for Bindo among the passengers. Fate had been kind to me, and given me yet another chance. What if I missed it like the last? But she favoured me this time. He was leaning over the deck-rail, watching the leave-takings as the great vessel swept slowly past the wall. His cap was thrown back and his hair blown off his forehead. What a boy he looked to be starting a new life in a new world, without a friend and with worse than failure for the past!

Just then he caught sight of me. For a moment he hesitated—I could _see_ him hesitate; then he left the deck and re-appeared at a port-hole in the aft part of the ship, framed once more (and it was my last picture of him) as the very Bindo of old. “Good-bye,” he said, “old man; it was good of you to come, after the way I’ve treated you. Thanks again, most faithful of friends, and good-bye. Forgive and forget. This time, believe me, I’ll go straight. By the way,” he added, “just give this parcel for me to Fred—naming one of his chums—I had intended it for the pilot, but it will be safer in your hands.”

A wave of the hand, as the ship headed for the open water, was the last I saw of Bindo. But a load was off my mind as I walked back to the station. I could look forward hopefully now and patiently to our next meeting.