Part 58 (2/2)

”Clara and your aunt have both been at me since tea. Some tale as Albert can amalgamate into partners.h.i.+p with Hope and Carters if he can put down a thousand. Then Albert's said naught to ye?”

”No, he hasn't!” Edwin exclaimed, emphasising each word with a peculiar fierceness. It was as if he had said, ”I should like to catch him saying anything to me about it!”

He was extremely indignant. It seemed to him monstrous that those two women should thus try to s.n.a.t.c.h an advantage from his father's weakness, pitifully mean and base. He could not understand how people could bring themselves to do such things, nor how, having done them, they could ever look their fellows in the face again. Had they no shame? They would not let a day pa.s.s; but they must settle on the old man instantly, like flies on a carca.s.s! He could imagine the plottings, the hushed chatterings; the acting-for-the-best demeanour of that cursed woman Auntie Hamps (yes, he now cursed her), and the candid greed of his sister.

”You wouldn't do it, would ye?” Darius asked, in a tone that expected a negative answer; but also with a rather plaintive appeal, as though he were depending on Edwin for moral support against the formidable forces of attack.

”I should not,” said Edwin stoutly, touched by the strange wistful note and by the glance. ”Unless of course you really want to.”

He did not care in the least whether the money would or would not be really useful and reasonably safe. He did not care whose enmity he was risking. His sense of fair play was outraged, and he would salve it at any cost. He knew that had his father not been struck down and defenceless, these despicable people would never have dared to demand money from him. That was the only point that mattered.

The relief of Darius at Edwin's att.i.tude in the affair was painful.

Hoping for sympathy from Edwin, he yet had feared in him another enemy.

Now he was rea.s.sured, and he could hide his feelings no better than a child.

”Seemingly they can't wait till my will's opened!” he murmured, with a scarcely successful affectation of grimness.

”Made a will, have you?” Edwin remarked, with an elaborate casualness to imply that he had never till then given a thought to his father's will, but that, having thought of the question, he was perhaps a very little surprised that his father had indeed made a will.

Darius nodded, quite benevolently. He seemed to have forgotten his deep grievance against Edwin in the matter of cheque-signing.

”Duncalf's got it,” he murmured after a moment. Duncalf was the town clerk and a solicitor.

So the will was made! And he had submissively signed away all control over all monetary transactions. What more could he do, except expire with the minimum of fuss? Truly Darius, in the local phrase, was now 'laid aside'! And of all the symptoms of his decay the most striking and the most tragic, to Edwin, was that he showed no curiosity whatever about business. Not one single word of inquiry had he uttered.

”You'll want shaving,” said Edwin, in a friendly way.

Darius pa.s.sed a hand over his face. He had ceased years ago to shave himself, and had a subscription at d.i.c.k Jones's in Aboukir Street, close by the shop.

”Aye!”

”Shall I send the barber up, or shall you let it grow?”

”What do you think?”

”Oh!” Edwin drawled, characteristically hesitating. Then he remembered that he was the responsible head of the family of Clayhanger. ”I think you might let it grow,” he decided.

And when he had issued the verdict, it seemed to him like a sentence of sequestration and death on his father... 'Let it grow! What does it matter?' Such was the innuendo.

”You used to grow a full beard once, didn't you?” he asked.

”Yes,” said Darius.

That made the situation less cruel.

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