Chapter 25 Miles Harding's Story

Miles knew Roy at once.

"This is Miles, isn't it?" said Roy in his pleasant way, and he put out his hand.

"Yes, but wait a minute."

Miles hurried to the pump near the kitchen door. He gave his hands a douse¹ of water, dried them quickly on a roller towel in the woodshed, and then came back to greet the brother of the boy of whom he was so fond.

"You got the telegram all right then?" he said. "Rex was so weak when he told me where to send it, I wasn't sure I'd get it quite right."

"I want to thank you for all you did for him," went on Roy. "He's told me about it, except the details. He said you'd do that-- about what happened to him after he got out of the train. But don't let me keep you from your dinner."

"I'd rather talk to you than eat," said Miles frankly².

Mrs. Raynor appeared at this moment and compromised matters by bringing Miles' dinner to him out on the side porch. Roy sat by and listened to the recital³, most modestly given, of the facts with which the reader is already acquainted.

It was time for Miles to return to his work when it was finished, and Florence came to summon Roy to their own dinner.

"Isn't he queer?" she said, referring to Miles. "He seems so quiet and talks so well for a man who was-- well, a tramp. I don't know what else you could call him. You ought to have seen the clothes he had on when he first came. Mamma made him burn them."

"He looks as if he might have an interesting story to tell," commented Roy.

"We'll get him to tell it to-night if your brother is well enough," said Mrs. Raynor. "He promised that we should hear it as soon as Rex was able to listen too."

Roy took Rex's dinner up to him, and the twins had an hour to themselves, during which Rex went more into detail concerning his experiences with Harrington and his crowd. They compared notes on Harry⁴ Atkins, and then fell to talking of Miles Harding.

"He's something more than a common tramp," Rex insisted. "He can read a little and write some. Isn't it funny how much he thinks of me, when I haven't done a thing for him? Mrs. Raynor lets him come up and sit with me every evening when his work is done. Of course I didn't know this till yesterday, when I came to my senses."

After the doctor's visit about three, Rex went to sleep and Roy played a game of tennis with Florence.

"I don't want to seem glad that your brother is sick," she said, "but it's awfully⁵ nice to have company. I get so lonely when Bert is away."

That evening they all assembled in Rex's room-- Mrs. Raynor was a widow, so the family at home consisted only of herself and Florence-- and Miles, seated at the foot of the bed, told the story of his life.

"I don't know where I was born," he began. "The first thing I can remember is living in a tenement⁶ house in New York, where I had to sleep three in a bed with the two Morrisey boys. Mr. Morrisey was a truckman, and there was five children of them, and I made six. I always thought I was a Morrisey, too, till one day Jimmy, he got mad at me, and told me I needn't talk so big because I was only living on charity.

"I went to his mother and asked her about it, and she told me that it was true, that I wasn't really her child, but that she thought as much of me as if I was, and that there wasn't any charity about it. But I wanted to know all about myself, and at last she said that I'd been given to Mr. Morrisey when I was a wee baby by a friend of his who couldn't afford to keep me and who made him vow⁷ that he'd never tell where I came from.

"Jimmy only found it out by accident one night, listening to his father and mother talking when they thought he was asleep. She said I wasn't to feel bad about it; because they thought everything of me.

"But I did feel bad about it. It seemed too hard when the Morriseys had all they could do to get along they should have one more mouth-- and that not a Morrisey one-- to feed.

"I studied as hard as I could at school, so as to try and get through sooner and go to work and begin to pay them back, but when I was twelve Mr. Morrisey was kicked to death by a horse and the next year Mrs. Morrisey married a man who took her and the children out to Dakota to live.

"She wanted me to go along, but I knew Mr. Rollings didn't like me, and besides I wanted to stay East where there was some chance of my finding out who my parents were. I got a place as cash boy in a Japanese store and boarded with some people who lived across the hall from where the Morriseys had their rooms.

"But Mr. Benton used to get drunk and when he was that way he'd beat me, just for the fun of it, it seemed to me. Then when they cut down the number of boys employed in the store and I couldn't find another place right away, he growled⁸ so about my not paying my board that I did my things up in a bundle one night and hid myself on a canal boat down at the East River docks.

"The captain was awful mad when he found me after we had got clear up the North River. He gave me a good thrashing and then said he was going to drop me overboard. But he didn't and I stayed on board all that season, driving mules⁹ and being sworn at and kicked and trounced like any other boy on the canal. I sometimes wonder why I didn't wear out.

"When navigation closed I was set adrift, and had a hard scrub of it to get along for a time. I almost starved for a while in Albany, trying to pick up odd jobs. Then I came near freezing to death.

"Finally I got a place as errand boy in a grocery store and kept that till some money was missing and they said I took it. I never stole in my life. Mrs. Morrisey brought me up too well for me to do that. But I couldn't prove I didn't and I had to go. The man said I ought to consider myself lucky I wasn't sent to jail.

"After that I had a worse time of it than ever. Whenever I applied¹⁰ for a position they wanted to know why I had left my last place. And when I told them, they wouldn't have anything to do with me.

"Then came the days when sometimes I thought I might as well steal, I was suffering because I was accused of doing it. When I was very hungry and saw chances of sneaking¹¹ apples out of grocery-men's barrels, it seemed as if I had almost a right to do it. But I never did.

"Something always turned up to keep me from starving. Once a woman stopped me in the street and gave me a dollar. She said I looked so hungry she couldn't go by me without doing it.

"Another time I was taken sick in one of the parks, something like Rex. I fell down in a kind of faint, and when I came to I was in a hospital and I stayed there quite a little while.

"After I got out it was spring and I thought I'd try the country. I didn't beg; only asked for work. Sometimes I got it; many more times I didn't.

"Now and then if they didn't give me work they'd offer me milk or a cup of coffee, so I managed to pull through somehow.

"At last I got back to New York. I'd been wanting to get there again ever since the thought came to me one day that perhaps some friends of Mr. Morrisey's might know something about the man who had given me to him when I was a baby.

"With a good deal of trouble I found one of them. He was a bricklayer, and he told me as near as he could remember the man who gave me to Tim Morrisey was from Philadelphia, and that's all he knew.

"Then I wanted to go to Philadelphia.

"'But what good will that do you, Miles?' Mr. Beesley asked. 'You can't find out any more there, nor as much, as you can here.'

"'No,' I told him, 'but if I'm there maybe somebody else'll find out something from passing me in the street.'

"'That's an idea, sure enough,' he said, so I started for Philadelphia, and that's how I came to fall in with Rex."

Miles finished his story with this word. It almost seemed as if he had done it on purpose, planning for it, as it were. He always spoke¹² the name with a little pause before it, as if it were something sacred.

Rex had told him to call him by it the day before when he had started in to address him as "Mr. Pell." All of Reginald's striving after premature¹³ manhood had been left in that past which preceded his experiences in the hotel at New York.

1 douse   

v.把…浸入水中，用水泼；n.泼洒

参考例句：

• Men came with buckets of water and began to douse the flames.人们提来一桶桶水灭火。
• He doused the flames with a fire extinguisher.他用灭火器把火焰扑灭。

2 frankly   

adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说

参考例句：

• To speak frankly, I don't like the idea at all.老实说，我一点也不赞成这个主意。
• Frankly speaking, I'm not opposed to reform.坦率地说，我不反对改革。

3 recital   

n.朗诵，独奏会，独唱会

参考例句：

• She is going to give a piano recital.她即将举行钢琴独奏会。
• I had their total attention during the thirty-five minutes that my recital took.在我叙述的35分钟内，他们完全被我吸引了。

4 harry   

vt.掠夺，蹂躏，使苦恼

参考例句：

• Today,people feel more hurried and harried.今天，人们感到更加忙碌和苦恼。
• Obama harried business by Healthcare Reform plan.奥巴马用医改掠夺了商界。

5 awfully   

adv.可怕地，非常地，极端地

参考例句：

• Agriculture was awfully neglected in the past.过去农业遭到严重忽视。
• I've been feeling awfully bad about it.对这我一直感到很难受。

6 tenement   

n.公寓；房屋

参考例句：

• They live in a tenement.他们住在廉价公寓里。
• She felt very smug in a tenement yard like this.就是在个这样的杂院里，她觉得很得意。

7 vow   

n.誓(言)，誓约；v.起誓，立誓

参考例句：

• My parents are under a vow to go to church every Sunday.我父母许愿，每星期日都去做礼拜。
• I am under a vow to drink no wine.我已立誓戒酒。

8 growled   

v.（动物）发狺狺声， （雷）作隆隆声( growl的过去式和过去分词 )；低声咆哮着说

参考例句：

• \"They ought to be birched, \" growled the old man. 老人咆哮道：“他们应受到鞭打。” 来自《简明英汉词典》
• He growled out an answer. 他低声威胁着回答。 来自《简明英汉词典》

9 mules   

骡( mule的名词复数 )； 拖鞋； 顽固的人； 越境运毒者

参考例句：

• The cart was pulled by two mules. 两匹骡子拉这辆大车。
• She wore tight trousers and high-heeled mules. 她穿紧身裤和拖鞋式高跟鞋。

10 applied   

adj.应用的；v.应用，适用

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• This cream is best applied to the face at night.这种乳霜最好晚上擦脸用。

11 sneaking   

a.秘密的，不公开的

参考例句：

• She had always had a sneaking affection for him. 以前她一直暗暗倾心于他。
• She ducked the interviewers by sneaking out the back door. 她从后门偷偷溜走，躲开采访者。

12 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

13 premature   

adj.比预期时间早的；不成熟的，仓促的

参考例句：

• It is yet premature to predict the possible outcome of the dialogue.预言这次对话可能有什么结果为时尚早。
• The premature baby is doing well.那个早产的婴儿很健康。