To some of the smaller class
of traders he went only for an hour or two, once a week, while others
required their bills and accounts to be made out daily. The pay was
very small, but it sufficed to keep absolute want from the door. When
he told his father of the arrangements he had made, Sir Aubrey at
first raged and stormed; but he had come, during the last year or
two, to recognise the good sense and strong will of his son, and
although he never verbally acquiesced in what he considered a
degradation, he offered no actual opposition to a plan that at least
enabled them to live, and furnished him occasionally with a few
groats with which he could visit a tavern.
So things had gone on for more than a year. Cyril was now sixteen,
and his punctuality, and the neatness of his work, had been so
appreciated by the tradesmen who first employed him, that his time
was now fully occupied, and that at rates more remunerative than
those he had at first obtained. He kept the state of his resources to
himself, and had no difficulty in doing this, as his father never
alluded to the subject of his work. Cyril knew that, did he hand over
to him all the money he made, it would be wasted in drink or at
cards; consequently, he kept the table furnished as modestly as at
first, and regularly placed after dinner on the corner of the mantel
a few coins, which his father as regularly dropped into his pocket.
A few days before the story opens, Sir Aubrey had, late one evening,
been carried upstairs, mortally wounded in a brawl; he only recovered
consciousness a few minutes before his death.
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