Now, at last, however, this old married couple, who were still
almost strangers to one another, had come together in Norwood, where,
if their short day had been chequered and broken, the evening at least
promised to be sweet and mellow. In person Mrs. Hay Denver was tall and
stout, with a bright, round, ruddy-cheeked face still pretty, with a
gracious, matronly comeliness. Her whole life was a round of devotion
and of love, which was divided between her husband and her only son,
Harold.
This son it was who kept them in the neighborhood of London, for the
Admiral was as fond of ships and of salt water as ever, and was as happy
in the sheets of a two-ton yacht as on the bridge of his sixteen-knot
monitor. Had he been untied, the Devonshire or Hampshire coast would
certainly have been his choice. There was Harold, however, and Harold's
interests were their chief care. Harold was four-and-twenty now.
Three years before he had been taken in hand by an acquaintance of his
father's, the head of a considerable firm of stock-brokers, and fairly
launched upon 'Change. His three hundred guinea entrance fee paid, his
three sureties of five hundred pounds each found, his name approved by
the Committee, and all other formalities complied with, he found himself
whirling round, an insignificant unit, in the vortex of the money market
of the world. There, under the guidance of his father's friend, he was
instructed in the mysteries of bulling and of bearing, in the
strange usages of 'Change in the intricacies of carrying over and of
transferring. He learned to know where to place his clients' money,
which of the jobbers would make a price in New Zealands, and which
would touch nothing but American rails, which might be trusted and which
shunned.
All this, and much more, he mastered, and to such purpose that
he soon began to prosper, to retain the clients who had been recommended
to him, and to attract fresh ones. But the work was never congenial.
He had inherited from his father his love of the air of heaven, his
affection for a manly and natural existence. To act as middleman between
the pursuer of wealth, and the wealth which he pursued, or to stand as
a human barometer, registering the rise and fall of the great mammon
pressure in the markets, was not the work for which Providence had
placed those broad shoulders and strong limbs upon his well knit frame.
His dark open face, too, with his straight Grecian nose, well opened
brown eyes, and round black-curled head, were all those of a man who was
fashioned for active physical work. Meanwhile he was popular with his
fellow brokers, respected by his clients, and beloved at home, but his
spirit was restless within him and his mind chafed unceasingly against
his surroundings.