II
Father broke up the breakfast party with getting up and going out. As a rule nobody dared push back his or her chair until he had finished, and when he took it into his head to read one of the leaders in the Times aloud to us, we had to make up our minds to spend the afternoon. But as a rule he went to the library as soon as he’d done, and worked until lunch. He usually worked leaning back in his armchair, with his feet on a footstool, and a silk handkerchief thrown over his head. He went to the library now, to meet the Squire, whose gruff “Good-morning� Roddy and I heard as father opened the door. He didn’t quite shut it afterward, and as Roddy and I stood by the hall table, carefully sewing up the sleeves of the Squire’s covert coat—for Podge had given us each a neat pocket needle-and-thread case, to teach us to be tidy, she said, and a taste for practical joking isn’t incompatible with lofty lineage—we couldn’t help hearing some of the conversation.
It was most of it on the Squire’s side, and the words “title deeds,� “unentailed,� and “mortgage� occurred over and over again. Then “unpaid,� “due notice,� “neglected,� and, finally, “foreclosure.� Perhaps it was father’s giving a hollow groan at this, and being seen by me through the crack of the library door to tear his hair, beautifully white, without tearing any of it out, that made me listen. At any rate, I left Roddy busy with the coat, and—any other boy, even a Parksop by birth, would have done as much under the circumstances.
Well, I made out that Squire Braddlebury had got father on toast. It became quite plain to me, boy as I was, that he could, whenever he chose, strip us of the last remaining hundreds of our old acres, and send us, generally, packing to Old Gooseberry—with a word. Then he asked father why he thought he didn’t say the word then and there? and father said something about respect for ancient title and hereditary something or other; and Squire Braddlebury, who had made his vulgar money in trade, said ancient title and hereditary something or other might be dee’d. And then——
“I’ll tell you why, Parksop,� he blustered. “It’s because of your girl! When you came to me for money to waste on your gobbling, selfish old self, caring, not you, not one snap whether your family went bare for the rest o’ their lives, so long as you got what you wanted for the rest of yours, I lent you the cash on your title deeds, signed by Edward Plantagenet—and more fool he to waste good land on you! I lent you the cash, I say, because I knew you’d not come up to the mark when pay day came, and I wanted your girl. What’s that you say? Belle! Not if I know it! Sandy hair and aquiline profiles don’t agree with me. I mean Miss Charlotte. She’s a fine, full figure of a woman; she’s a good ’un, too! Don’t I know how she keeps your house a-going? Don’t I know how she makes and mends, plans and contrives, teaches the children when your foreign governesses take French leave, because they can’t get their wages out of you, Parksop, and does the Lord knows what besides! I shouldn’t have spoken so soon, but another fellow’s got his eye on her—Noel, the parson—you know who I mean. I believe they’re secretly engaged, or something.�
“Gracious Heavens!� cried father.
“If they are,� growled the Squire, “it don’t matter. We’ll soon put the curate to the right-about, and on the day I take her to church you’ll get your title deeds back. You’re reasonable, I see. It’s a bargain. So go and fetch her, Parksop; go and fetch her.�
There was a scroop and shriek of overstrained springs and tortured leather. The Squire had thrown himself into father’s armchair. I had only time to drag Roddy behind the green baize door that shuts off the servants’ wing from the rest of the house, when father came out of the library.