‘I will run down and see my mother before I go,’ he said; ‘and I suppose, so will you: but we must meet at Liverpool on the 1st, and go out in the _Africa_. If I do not keep the ball in my hands now I have got the thread, never trust me! Ben, you will think it strange when I say it, but it is this I have been trying for all my life.’
‘I don’t think it the least strange,’ said Ben; ‘though, if I were to say it was the same thing with myself----’
‘Oh, you!’ said Hillyard, ‘you have not been so many weeks on the world as I have been years; and, besides, you don’t know what awaits you at the end of your probation. The money must come to some one,--and, even if it were divided among the three of you, your share would be more than enough to make a man happy;--whereas, for me this is the only chance in life.’
‘I wonder what made you think of me,’ said Ben, simply. ‘It was very good of you. I was at the end of my resources and my hopes when I came out last night.’ Hillyard looked at him keenly, and in spite of himself a little colour rose to Ben’s face. ‘It was kind of you to think of me,’ he added hastily. ‘I do not know,--had it been me----’
‘That you would have been so forgiving?’ said his friend; ‘but I had done you no injury, Ben,--unless in taking you there. I suppose I must not ask what you have been doing with yourself all this time, nor what they are to you now, these--ladies?’
‘The railway is a safer subject,’ said Ben, clearing up his countenance with an effort; and then he added, after a little pause, ‘Mrs. Tracy and her daughter have just gone off to one of the German baths.’
Hillyard eyed his companion with a curious look, restraining with difficulty the whistle of wonder which rose to his lips. He, much-experienced man, had seen through the mother and daughter at a glance; though, to be sure, he had been pre-instructed by his acquaintance with Fitzgerald Tracy. He could not understand how it was that they had allowed Ben to slip through their finders. ‘If he had but a third of the property he would still be a prize,’ he said to himself, casting a rapid engineering glance, as it were, along the line of his friend’s life, and jumping over the intervening seven years. ‘It was strange they should have let him go.’ But the news of their departure explained how it was that he found Ben so disengaged, so ready to enter into his plans; and curious as he was, he could go no farther. A certain preoccupation that came into the young man’s eyes, a wavering breath of colour on his face, and, at the same time, a strain of the lines about his mouth, his lips shutting, as it were, upon his secret, warned Hillyard off the unprofitable inquiry. He went back to the paper on the table, and began to describe the new life they would lead,--the voyage,--all the novel circumstances before them. He was himself so much of an adventurer that the sudden change of scene from St. James’s to Ohio excited him, and gave a zest to his good fortune. But, curiously enough, this did not tell on Ben. His interest was in the work, and nothing else,--the work as a means to his end. The small excitement of the journey, or the new world which he was about to enter, Ben at this moment of exaltation contemplated almost with contempt. After all, crossing the Atlantic, except in the mere point of duration, was little more than crossing the Channel; and that naturally he would do without even thinking of it. And what was America to him? There was not even the difficulty of a new language to contend with. He was not moved by that; at least, not now. What did excite him was the new profession he was going to enter; the necessity of knowing it and mastering the tool which was to carve out his fortune;--a necessity which Hillyard, to tell the truth, had not realised.