He was angry, and the sight of the flushed meekness of his sister, as
she leaned quietly with her back against an easy-chair, made him
angrier.
"Enough of this!" he said gruffly and peremptorily.
Darius, with scarcely a break, continued.
"I say enough of this!" Edwin cried, with increased harshness.
The old man paused, half intimidated. With his pimpled face and glaring
eyes, his gleaming gold teeth, his frowziness of a difficult invalid,
his grimaces and gestures which were the result of a lifetime devoted to
gain, he made a loathsome object. Edwin hated him, and there was a
bitter contempt in his hatred.
"I'm going to have that spawn, and I'm going to have some change! Give
me some money!" Darius positively hissed.
Edwin grew nearly capable of homicide. All the wrongs that he had
suffered leaped up and yelled.
"You'll have no money!" he said, with brutal roughness. "And you'll
grow no mushrooms! And let that be understood once for all! You've got
to behave in this house."
Darius flickered up.
"Do you hear?" Edwin stamped on the conflagration.
It was extinguished. Darius, cowed, slowly and clumsily directed
himself towards the door. Once Edwin had looked forward to a moment
when he might have his father at his mercy, when he might revenge
himself for the insults and the bullying that had been his. Once he had
clenched his fist and his teeth, and had said, "When you're old, and
I've _got_ you, and you can't help yourself!" That moment had come, and
it had even enabled and forced him to refuse money to his father--refuse
money to his father! As he looked at the poor figure fumbling towards
the door, he knew the humiliating paltriness of revenge. As his anger
fell, his shame grew.
Maggie lifted her eyebrows when Darius banged the door.
"He can't help it," she said.
"Of course he can't help it," said Edwin, defending himself, less to
Maggie than to himself. "But there must be a limit. He's got to be
kept in order, you know, even if he is an invalid." His heart was
perceptibly beating.
"Yes, of course."
"And evidently there's only one way of doing it. How long's he been on
this mushroom tack?"
"Oh, not long."
"Well, you ought to have told me," said Edwin, with the air of a master
of the house who is displeased. Maggie accepted the reproof.
"He'd break his neck in the cellar before he knew where he was," Edwin
resumed.
"Yes, he would," said Maggie, and left the room.
Upon her placid features there was not the slightest trace of the
onslaught of profanity. The faint flush had paled away.
------------------------------------------------------------------------