Part 46 (2/2)

”And what about getting orders?” Darius questioned grimly. ”Didn't I offer you two and a half per cent on all new customers you got yourself?

And how many have you got? Not one. I give you a chance to make extra money and you don't take it. Ye'd sooner go running about after girls.”

This was a particular grievance of the father against the son: that the son brought no grist to the mill in the shape of new orders.

”But how can I get orders?” Edwin protested.

”How did I get 'em? How do I get 'em? Somebody has to get 'em.” The old man's lips were pressed together, and he waved ”The Christian News”

slightly in his left hand.

FOUR.

In a few minutes both their voices had risen. Darius, savage, stooped to replace with the shovel a large burning coal that had dropped on the tiles and was sending up a column of brown smoke.

”I tell you what I shall do,” he said, controlling himself bitterly.

”It's against my judgement, but I shall put you up to a pound a week at the New Year, if all goes well, of course. And it's good money, let me add.”

He was entirely serious, and almost sincere. He loathed paying money over to his son. He was convinced that in an ideal world sons would toil gratis for their fathers who lodged and fed them and gifted them with the reversion of excellent businesses.

”But what good's a pound a week?” Edwin demanded, with the querulousness of one who is losing hope.

”What good's a pound a week!” Darius repeated, hurt and genuinely hurt.

”Let me tell you that in my time young men married on a pound a week, and glad to! A pound a week!” He finished with a sardonic exclamation.

”I couldn't marry Miss Lessways on a pound a week,” Edwin murmured, in despair, his lower lip hanging. ”I thought you might perhaps be offering me a partners.h.i.+p by this time!” Possibly in some mad hour a thought so wild had indeed flitted through his brain.

”Did you?” rejoined Darius. And in the fearful grimness of the man's accents was concealed all his intense and egoistic sense of possessing in absolute owners.h.i.+p the business which the little boy out of the Bastille had practically created. Edwin did not and could not understand the fierce strength of his father's emotion concerning the business. Already in tacitly agreeing to leave Edwin the business after his own death, Darius imagined himself to be superbly benevolent.

”And then there would be house-furnis.h.i.+ng, and so on,” Edwin continued.

”What about that fifty pounds?” Darius curtly inquired.

Edwin was startled. Never since the historic scene had Darius made the slightest reference to the proceeds of the Building Society share.

”I haven't spent all of it,” Edwin muttered.

Do what he would with his brain, the project of marriage and house-tenancy and a separate existence obstinately presented itself to him as fantastic and preposterous. Who was he to ask so much from destiny? He could not feel that he was a man. In his father's presence he never could feel that he was a man. He remained a boy, with no rights, moral or material.

”And if as ye say she's got money of her own--” Darius remarked, and was considerably astonished when the boy walked straight out of the room and closed the door.

It was his last grain of common sense that took Edwin in silence out of the room.

Miserable, despicable baseness! Did the old devil suppose that he would be capable of asking his wife to find the resources which he himself could not bring? He was to say to his wife: ”I can only supply a pound a week, but as you've got money it won't matter.” The mere notion outraged him so awfully that if he had stayed in the room there would have been an altercation and perhaps a permanent estrangement.

As he stood furious and impotent in the hall, he thought, with his imagination quickened by the memory of Mr Shus.h.i.+ons: ”When you're old, and I've got you”--he clenched his fists and his teeth--”when I've got you and you can't help yourself, by G.o.d it'll be my turn!”

And he meant it.

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