A Sovereign Remedy. Flora Annie Webster Steel
picked it up and put it in his pocket. His companion stared at him.
"Look here," he said, holding out his hand. "You've made a mistake--that letter belongs to me--I'm Edward Cruttenden."
It was the other's turn to stare. "The deuce you are! Why!--my name is Edward Cruttenden!"
They stood thus staring at each other with a sudden dim sense of their own similarity, until the shorter of the two shook his head whimsically.
"This is confusing," he remarked in a tone of argument. "Let's sit down and have a pipe over it--we shall have to differentiate ourselves before we start out into the world together."
Almost at their feet a tiny trickle of water, scarcely heard in its soft bed of sphagnum moss, told that already the descent had begun; but this was stayed a few feet further by a rocky hollow in which the stream gathered and brimmed, so that as you looked out over the shallowing pool, the rushes which fringed it stood out against the far distant blue of the sea beyond, and there seemed no reason why the little lakelet should not take one wild leap into the ocean, and so save itself many miles of weary journeying through unseen valleys.
On the brink of this pool, their backs against a convenient boulder, their legs on the short sweet turf that was kept like a lawn by the hungry nip of mountain sheep, the two Edward Cruttendens rested, smoked, and compared notes; somewhat dilatorily, since the afternoon was fine and the effect of a sinking sun on moor and fell absolutely soul-satisfying.
"Let's differentiate our names somehow," said the pleasant-voiced one lazily--"Did your godfathers, etc., do anything more for you than Edward--mine didn't."
The other shook his head. Something in his handsome face had already differentiated itself from the amused curiosity on his companion's.
"That's awkward--we shall be driven to abbreviations. You shall be Ted, and I Ned--both dentals but philologically uninterchangeable; so they'll do for the present. Well, Ted, since you are twenty-seven and I'm gone twenty-nine, and my father died before I was born, we can't be complicated up as long--lost brothers--can we?"
Ted turned to him frowning sharply--"No! but--but what put that into your head. I----"
Ned laughed; a laugh as musical as his voice, but with a quaint aloofness about it as if he himself were standing aside to listen.
"The position is--romantic; and novels have it so always. As if it were not frankly impossible in this England of ours to dissociate one man from another by breed--we're hopeless mongrels, kin to each other all round. Birth counts for nothing; so let's quit it--Upbringing?"
Ted interrupted shortly--"I--I never knew my father, and my mother died when I was born."
"So did mine," said Ned softly.
There was a pause in which the luring wail of a circling plover who deemed the intruders too near her nest, became insistent, and seemed to fill the mountain solitude with a sense of motherhood, until, once more, the musical, critical laugh struck in on it.
"'Come!' as Shakespeare says, 'there's sympathy for you!' So far we start fair. Education?--I was at Eton, and----"
"I was a Blue-Coat boy," interrupted Ted again, and something in his tone made Ned look the other way, and idly busy himself in trying to dissociate a tender trail of ivy-leaved mountain campanula from its coarser companions in the turf.
"A better education, I expect," he said at last, "though I admit the yellow stockings must be devilish; still"--he paused, settled himself yet more comfortably in his cleft, and with clasped hands behind his head, relapsed into smoke and silence. Even the plover, convinced of their innocence, had ceased her wheeling, luring wail.
So desultorily, sometimes in thought only, sometimes by question and answer, they sat trying to dissociate themselves from the tie of a common name. And before them the afternoon sun, slowly sinking towards extinction in the sea, began to send level rays of light to fill up the valley with a golden haze in which all things lost their individuality.
Finally Ned sat up, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"About equal, I should say; except, of course, for money."
"That means we are unequal in all things," remarked Ted shortly. "You can't deny it. A clerk as I am, out for a Whitsun holiday with ten pounds to spend on it in his pocket, isn't--isn't in the same week with--well! what shall I say----"
"A man who employs clerks," suggested Ned with a smile.
Ted gave an impatient shrug. "As you will. However you come by it, you admit having a hundred pounds."
"A hundred and ten I should say," interrupted Ned, who was counting a handful of loose gold and silver. "I've a hundred in notes besides. However! That needn't be a difficulty!"
The level, golden sun-rays flashed on a curved gold flight, as a bright new sovereign flitted duck-and-drake fashion over the brimming pool at their feet, then disappeared, leaving a circled series of ripples like a smoke wreath on its shiny surface.
"Hold hard! I say--you know--here! stop that, will you--don't be such a blamed fool!" ...
There was imminent danger of a struggle in reality when a voice from the road behind them said with a mixture of appeal and authority:
"Do not quarrel, see you, my good fellows, but tell me the cause of your disagreement, and I will advise to the best of my ability."
The speaker, also a young man of some thirty years, was tall and dark with a jaw which should have been strong from its length, but was curiously marred by the almost feminine softness of contour which belied the blue shadow of a hard-shaven beard. For the rest he had a fine pair of fiery dark eyes, set close to the thick eyebrows which almost met on his high, narrow forehead. It was the face of a saint or a sinner, preferably the former; but whichever way, the face of an enthusiast.
"You're a parson," said Ned, ceasing from horseplay and eyeing the rusty black suit. "So we will refer to you, sir, since you are bound by your cloth to agree with me, and say that money is the root of all evil."
Apprised of the cause of dispute, the Reverend Morris Pugh, of the Calvinistic Methodist Church in the valley below, sat and looked doubtfully first at the loose gold and silver, then at Ned Cruttenden's critical blue eyes. Both appealed to him strongly; the poetry of his race leapt up to meet the one, the inordinate valuation of even a penny, also typical of his race, reached out to the other.
"Don't say it might be sold and given to the poor," said Ned with a sudden smile--"To begin with, the remark has been appropriated by Judas, and then, it's such a rank begging of the question! Poor or rich, the point at issue between us--my friend over there being a bit of a socialist is, of course, a bit of a mammon worshipper also--is whether gold is--is a sovereign remedy! I say not. It doesn't touch the personal equation, which is all we have--if we have that! So I contend that neither I, nor the world at large, would suffer if I made ducks and drakes like this ..."
Another curving flight of gold ended in a swift whit-whitter of lessening leaps and a final disappearance; but this time the detaining hand was Morris Pugh's. His eager face held no doubt as to his desire, though his mind evidently hesitated over a reason for it.
"You really, sir, ought not," he began; then paused.
"Why?" asked Ned quietly.
Ted answered. "Because it isn't really yours. You never earned it, I'll bet, and the wealth of the world is labour----"
Ned emptied his handful on the turf and interrupted him.
"I give them up! There they are, your sovereign remedies! What are you going to do with them? Why! spend them to please yourselves, of course, as I was doing, as every one does! So I repeat, it wouldn't matter a hang to the world or any of us three here present if I were to make----"
A third sovereign would have followed the other two, but for the arresting power of a new voice.
"Perhaps not; but it would be a most distinct injury to one