Project Gutenberg's Young Mr. Barter's Repentance, by David Christie Murray

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Title: Young Mr. Barter's Repentance
From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray

Author: David Christie Murray

Release Date: August 8, 2007 [EBook #22272]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUNG MR. BARTER'S REPENTANCE ***

Produced by David Widger

YOUNG MR. BARTER'S REPENTANCE

By David Christie Murray

Author Of 'Aunt Rachel,' 'The Weaker Vessel,' Etc.

I

Mr Bommaney was a British merchant of the highest rectitude and the most
spotless reputation. He traded still under the name of Bommaney, Waite,
and Co., though Waite had been long since dead, and the Company had
gone out of existence in his father's time. The old offices, cramped and
inconvenient, in which the firm had begun life eighty years before,
were still good enough for Mr. Bommaney, and they had an air of solid
respectability which newer and flashier places lacked. The building
of which they formed a part stood in Coalporter's Alley, opposite
the Church of St. Mildred, and the hum of the City's traffic scarcely
sounded in that retired and quiet locality.

Mr. Bommaney himself was a man of sixty, hale and hearty, with a rosy
face and white whiskers. He was a broad-shouldered man, inclining to be
portly, and he was currently accepted as a man of an indomitable
will. There was no particular reason for the popular belief in his
determination apart from the fact that it was a favourite boast of his
that nothing ever got him down. On all occasions and in all companies he
was wont to declare that no conceivable misfortune could really break
a man of spirit. He confessed to a pitying sympathy for mealy-willed
people (and everybody knew that Bommaney, in spite of his own strength
of mind, was one of the kindliest creatures in the world); but, whenever
he met a man in trouble, he would clip him by the shoulder, and would
say, in his own hearty fashion, 'You must look the thing in the face, my
boy. Look it in the face. I'd never let anything break _me_ down.'

Since his reputation for fortitude was as solid and as old-fashioned
amongst the pe