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 partnership 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 ownership 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-furnishing, 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 Shushions: "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 God it'll be my turn!"
And he meant it.
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