“I say, I mustn’t keep you here,” said Val; “my dame mightn’t like it. Here’s your half-crown. Have you got anything to do yet? I think you’re a handy fellow, and I shouldn’t mind saying a word for you if I had the chance. What kind of place do you want?”
“I don’t mind what it is,” said Dick. “I’d like a place at the rafts awful, if I was good enough; or anything, sir. I don’t mind, as long as I can make enough to keep me--and mother; that’s all I care.”
“Was that your mother?” said Val. “Do you work for her too?”
“Well, sir, you see she can make a deal in our old way. She is a great one with the cards when she likes, but she won’t never do it except when we’re hard up and she’s forced; for she says she has to tell the things she sees, and they always comes true: but what I want is to stay in one place, and get a bit of an ’ome together--and she ain’t good for gentlemen’s washing or that sort, worse luck,” said Dick, regretfully. “So you see, sir, if she stays still to please me, I’ll have to work for her, and good reason. She’s been a good mother to me, never going on the loose, nor that, like other women do. I don’t grudge my work.”
Val did not understand the curious tingling that ran through his veins. He was not consciously thinking of his own mother, but yet it was something like sympathy that penetrated his sensitive mind. “I wish I could help you,” he said, doubtfully. “I’d speak to the people at the rafts, but I don’t know if they’d mind me. I’ll tell you what, though,” he added, with sudden excitement. “I can do better than that--I’ll get Lichen to speak to them! They might not care for me--but they’ll mind what Lichen says.”
Dick received reverentially and gratefully, but without understanding the full grandeur of the idea, this splendid promise--for how should the young tramp have known, what I am sure the reader must divine, that Lichen was that Olympian demigod and king among men, the Captain of the Boats? If Lichen had asked the Queen for anything, I wonder if her Majesty would have had the courage to refuse him? but at all events nobody about the river dared to say him nay. To be spoken to by Lichen was, to an ordinary mortal, distinction enough to last him half his (Eton) days. Dick did not see the magnificence of the prospect thus opened to him, but Val knew all that was implied in it, and his countenance brightened all over. “I don’t think they can refuse Lichen anything,” he said. “Look here, Brown; meet us at the rafts after six, and I’ll tell you what is done. I wish your mother would tell me my fortune. Lots of fellows would go to her if they knew; but then the masters wouldn’t like it, and there might be a row.”