FullReads

The little fellow pulled such a handful of sovereigns out of his pocket as might have made the tallest scholar feel a pang of envy. “Uncle Hobson,” says he, “gave me two; Aunt Hobson gave me one–no, Aunt Hobson gave me thirty shillings; Uncle Newcome gave me three pound; and Aunt Ann gave me one pound five; and Aunt Honeyman sent me ten shillings in a letter. And Ethel wanted to give me a pound, only I wouldn’t have it, you know; because Ethel’s younger than me, and I have plenty.”

“And who is Ethel?” I ask, smiling at the artless youth’s confessions.

“Ethel is my cousin,” replied little Newcome; “Aunt Ann’s daughter. There’s Ethel and Alice, and Aunt Ann wanted the baby to be called Boadicea, only uncle wouldn’t; and there’s Barnes and Egbert and little Alfred, only he don’t count; he’s quite a baby, you know. Egbert and me was at school at Timpany’s; he’s going to Eton next half. He’s older than me, but I can lick him.”

“And how old is Egbert?” asks the smiling senior.

“Egbert’s ten, and I’m nine, and Ethel’s seven,” replied the little chubby-faced hero, digging his hands deep into his trousers, and jingling all the sovereigns there. I advised him to let me be his banker; and, keeping one out of his many gold pieces, he handed over the others, on which he drew with great liberality till his whole stock was expended. The school hours of the upper and under boys were different at that time; the little fellows coming out of their hall half an hour before the Fifth and Sixth Forms; and many a time I used to find my little blue-jacket in waiting, with his honest square face, and white hair, and bright blue eyes, and I knew that he was come to draw on his bank. Ere long one of the pretty blue eyes was shut up, and a fine black one substituted in its place. He had been engaged, it appeared, in a pugilistic encounter with a giant of his own form whom he had worsted in the combat. “Didn’t I pitch into him, that’s all?” says he in the elation of victory; and, when I asked whence the quarrel arose, he stoutly informed me that “Wolf Minor, his opponent, had been bullying a little boy, and that he, the gigantic Newcome, wouldn’t stand it.”

So, being called away from the school, I said “Farewell and God bless you,” to the brave little man, who remained a while at the Grey Friars, where his career and troubles had only just begun, and lost sight of him for several years. Nor did we meet again until I was myself a young man occupying chambers in the Temple.

Meanwhile the years of Clive’s absence had slowly worn away for Colonel Newcome, and at last the happy time came which he had been longing more passionately than any prisoner for liberty, or schoolboy for holiday. The Colonel had taken leave of his regiment. He had travelled to Calcutta; and the Commander-in-Chief announced that in giving to Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Newcome, of the Bengal Cavalry, leave for the first time, after no less than thirty-four years’ absence from home, he could not refrain from expressing his sense of the great services of this most distinguished officer, who had left his regiment in a state of the highest discipline and efficiency.

This kind Colonel had also to take leave of a score, at least, of adopted children to whom he chose to stand in the light of a father. He was forever whirling away in post-chaises to this school and that, to see Jack Brown’s boys, of the Cavalry; or Mrs. Smith’s girls, of the Civil Service; or poor Tom Hick’s orphan, who had nobody to look after him now that the cholera had carried off Tom and his wife, too. On board the ship in which he returned from Calcutta were a dozen of little children, some of whom he actually escorted to their friends before he visited his own, though his heart was longing for his boy at Grey Friars. The children at the schools seen, and largely rewarded out of his bounty (his loose white trousers had great pockets, always heavy with gold and silver, which he jingled when he was not pulling his moustaches, and to see the way in which he tipped children made one almost long to be a boy again) and when he had visited Miss Pinkerton’s establishment, or Doctor Ramshorn’s adjoining academy at Chiswick, and seen little Tom Davis or little Fanny Holmes, the honest fellow would come home and write off straightway a long letter to Tom’s or Fanny’s parents, far away in the country, whose hearts he made happy by his accounts of their children, as he had delighted the children themselves by his affection and bounty. All the apple and orange-women (especially such as had babies as well as lollipops at their stalls), all the street-sweepers on the road between Nerot’s and the Oriental, knew him, and were his pensioners. His brothers in Threadneedle Street cast up their eyes at the cheques which he drew.