For an Old Debt.
So, hush! I will give you this leaf to keep;
See, I shut it inside the sweet, cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.
LD Sim was the name they gave him, but he was by no means old—thirty at the most. He had an old-fashioned way with him; that, I suppose, was the reason of it. He had a slow, methodical way of setting about his business; but whatever he did, tardy though its accomplishment, was well done. He had a slow way, too, of taking to people—looked at first with suspicion upon everyone and everything, but once he had taken to a man he stuck to him through thick and thin.
Phil was a different creature. He had none of those premature wrinkles which disfigured—yes, disfigured—his brother's face. Why should he? Life was serious enough, in all conscience, without making it more serious.
"Old Sim—dear old Sim!" He really must have followed the line, by right divine, of Methusaleh, some people thought, and there criticism stopped. Adverse tongues could say no more than that, and Heaven forbid that Phil should be on their side. Sim had earned his living almost from the time he had cut his teeth; so, at least, it was averred. His father, who had a carpenter's shop in Hadlow, had died, leaving the business in difficulties, from which Sim, by dogged perseverance, had extricated it.
"Called him vagabond."
Phil admired his brother, but frankly confessed he was unable to imitate him. Perseverance was not in his blood, and what isn't in the blood—well, you know the proverb. He had been of a restless turn; could not settle down, for the life or him, to any one thing long. When a boy he had run away to sea; but had come back, after a couple of years, with much less enthusiasm for the nautical profession than when he started. Then he evinced a love for the drama. He joined a strolling company. His experience on the stage was much shorter than his experience on the ocean. Six months sufficed. He came back hungry, ragged, and footsore. Sim was his refuge at all times. He stood between him and the father when the latter, after one of his early escapades, called him vagabond, and would have turned him out of doors. And when the time came that there was no father or mother in the homestead, Sim occupied the place of both. As Phil put it, in the stage slang he sometimes affected, Sim was a sort of "combination company," or "general utility man."
It was hard to discover what precise object Sim had in life. His brother could never make out. He hadn't even a hobby.
