Alban had been a disappointment to his employers, the great engineer of the Isle of Dogs, to whom Charity had apprenticed him in his fourteenth year. Faithful attempts to improve his position in the works were met, as it would seem, by indifference and ingratitude. He did his work mechanically but without enthusiasm. Had he confessed the truth, he would have said, "I was not born to labor with my hands." A sense of inherited superiority, a sure conviction, common to youth, that he would become a leader, of men, conduced to a restlessness and a want of interest which he could not master. He had the desire but not the will to please his employers.
To such a lad these excursions to the West End, these pilgrimages to the shrine of the outcast and the homeless were by way of being a mental debauch. He arose from them in the morning as a man may arise to the remembrance of unjustified excess, which leaves the mind inert and the body weary. His daily task presented itself in a revolting attitude. Why had he been destined to this slavery? Why must he set out to his work at an hour of the chilly morning when the West End was still shuttered and asleep and the very footmen still yawned in their beds? If he had any consolation, it was that the others were often before him in that cunning debauch from the caves which the dawn compelled. The Lady Sarah would be at Covent Garden by four o'clock. The Archbishop, who rarely seemed to sleep at all, went off to the Serpentine for his morning ablutions when the clock struck five. "Betty," the pale-faced infant, disappeared as soon as the sun was up--and often, when Alban awoke in the cellar, he found himself the only tenant of that grim abode. Sometimes, indeed, and this morning following upon the promise to little Lois Boriskoff was such an occasion, he overslept himself altogether and was shut out from the works for the day. This had happened before and had brought frequent reprimands. He feared them and yet had not the will to remember them.
Big Ben was striking seven when he quitted the cellar and London was awake in earnest. Alban usually spent twopence in the luxury of a "wash and brush up" before he went down to the river; but he hastened on this morning conscious of his tardiness and troubled at the possible consequences. The bright spring day did little to reassure him. Weather does not mean very much to those who labor in heated atmospheres, who have no profit of the sunshine nor gift of the seasons. Alban thought rather of the fateful clock and of the excuses which might pacify the timekeeper. He had never stooped to the common lies; he would not stoop to them this day. When, at the gate of the works, a heavy jowled man with a red beard asked him what he meant by coming there at such an hour, he answered as frankly that he did not know.