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Updated: May 23, 2025
David either did not or would not hear, and Mr. Ancrum let him alone. But the news was startling. So the boy had stripped himself, and must begin the world again as before! What had that minx been after? Manchester again. David looked out eagerly from the cab, his hand trembling on his knee, beads of perspiration on his face.
A couple of hours afterwards Ancrum came slowly home to Birmingham Street, where he was still lodging. David had just put up the shop-shutters, John had departed, and his employer was about to retire to supper and his books in the back kitchen.
Barbier whistled, stared, and surrendered. Nay, he went to the other extreme. He loved the absurd, but he loved the romantic more. An hour before, David's adventures had been to him a subject of comic opera. As Ancrum talked, they took on 'the grand style, and at the end he could no more have taken liberties with his old pupil than with the hero of the Nuit de Mai.
Perhaps in his lordly way he felt he could afford himself a few now and then, he was so much cleverer than his neighbours. Upon no one did David's development produce more effect than upon Mr. Ancrum.
From this night of confession and of storm there emerged at least one result the beginnings of a true and profitable bond between David and Ancrum. Hitherto there had been expenditure of interest and affection on the minister's side, and a certain responsiveness and friendly susceptibility on David's; but no true understanding and contact, mind with mind.
David stood silent a moment, every limb trembling. Then his mouth set, and he made a step forward, one arm raised. 'Oh, yes! cried Ancrum, 'you may fling me out of the way. My weakness and deformity are no match for you. Do, if you have the heart! Do you think I don't know that I rescued you from despair that I drew you out of the very jaws of death?
She put down the tray, seemed to invite David's attention to it by her indignant look, and flounced out again like one bursting with forbidden speech. 'Ancrum, this is absurd! cried David, pointing to the tea and morsel of dry bread which were to provide this shrunken invalid with his evening meal. 'You can't live on this stuff now, you know you want something more tempting and more nourishing.
Hannah's knife flashed, and the potato-peelings fell with a rapidity which fairly paralysed Reuben. In his nervousness, he let fall the name of Mr. Ancrum. Then Hannah broke out. 'Some foo', she knew, had been meddling, and she might have guessed that fool was Mr. Ancrum.
Ancrum dropped his half-sarcastic tone, and food, warmth, and talk loosened the lad's fibres, and made him more and more human, handsome, and attractive. Soon his old friend knew all that he wanted to know, the sum David had saved thirty pounds in the savings-bank the sort of stock he meant to set up, the shop he had taken with a stall, of course no beginner need hope to prosper without a stall.
But, substantially, Ancrum was right. Hard labour and natural gift had secured their harvest; but that vivid personal element in success which captivates and excites the bystander seemed, in David's case, to have been replaced by something austere, which pointed attention and sympathy rather to the man's work than to himself.
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