‘I know nothing of railways,’ he said, ‘except travelling on them. I don’t know even the meaning of the words on the margin there. How could I be of any use to you,--unless as a navvy?’ he added, holding out his arm; ‘and it would be easy to find a finer development of muscle than mine.’
‘Pshaw!’ said Hillyard, ‘it is no joke. I mean what I say. You may trust to me to find you what you can do. The only question is, Will you do it? Do you want work? or is it only a makebelief about Renton and all that? How can I tell? You bury yourself out of the world, and never throw yourself in the way of anything, so far as one can see. You may be contenting yourself with what you have. You may be above taking a share of one’s good fortune. I say again, how can I tell?’
‘I am ready to work at anything. It is the height of my wishes,’ said Ben, with a huskiness in his voice. Further explanation he could make none; but his heart smote him all the same. What right had he to a share of any one’s good fortune,--and of this man’s above all, for whom he had never done anything? He had not even the gratification of thinking that he had been kind to him in his wealthier days.
‘Then look here,’ said Hillyard, plunging into his work.
The two sat with their heads together over the inarticulate drawing till long past midnight. By degrees it became intelligible to the novice. Shortly it opened up before him into a possibility,--a thing practicable, a new hope. When he went back to Guildford Street in the early morning,--the morning which was still night,--his head was full of the new idea. He was no longer an aimless, half-desperate man, detached from everything but the one absorbing madness which had taken possession of his empty life; he had linked himself on again to fact and nature, recovered his identity, his independence, himself. The change that lay before him,--palpable, visible, unmistakable change from one hemisphere to another, from doing nothing to hard, open-air, undisguisable work,--had dispersed already the mists which made a mystery and vision of all former changes. He stretched out his hands to the past, even as he lifted them to the future. It was but this unwholesome, unreal interval which had made life itself look as a dream and a thing untrue.