“My good child—really now.” He slightly shook her arm. “Pull yourself together. If you’re going to faint like this I shall never be able to trust you with a bear. Come, come.”
Still, the understanding of a thing does not alter it. It remains what it was when it was still uncomprehended. Seventeen hundred and fifty per annum—but at this rate it looked as though that would hardly be enough.
Miss Elver opened her eyes and looked at him. Into their blankness had come that look of anxious, unhappy love with which a child looks at his mother when he thinks that she is going to leave him. Mr. Cardan could not have felt more remorseful if he had committed a murder.
What every weakness, every vice?
Tom Cardan, all were thine.
All the same, there were certain things the doing of which one felt to be an outrage. Still, one had to think of those seventeen hundred and fifty pounds; one had to think of old age in solitude and poverty.
Leaving Miss Elver to play by herself in the garden, Mr. Cardan went indoors. He found his host sitting behind closed jalousies in a greenish twilight, his head on his hand.
“Feeling better?” asked Mr. Cardan cheerfully; and getting no answer, he went on to tell a long, bright story of how he had searched for the grocer’s brother, only to find, at last, that he was away from home and would be away till to-morrow. “So I hope you won’t mind,” he concluded, “if I trespass on your charming hospitality for another night. Your sister has most kindly told me that I might.”
Mr. Elver turned on him a glance of concentrated loathing and averted his eyes. He said nothing.
Mr. Cardan drew up a chair and sat down. “There’s a most interesting little book,” he said, looking at his host with a genial twinkling expression, “by a certain Mr. W. H. S. Jones called ‘Malaria: a factor in the history of Greece and Rome,’ or some such title. He shows how the disease may quite suddenly obtain a footing in countries hitherto immune and in the course of a few generations bring a whole culture, a powerful empire to the ground. Conversely he shows how it is got rid of. Drainage, quinine, wire-netting….” The other stirred uneasily in his chair; but Mr. Cardan went on ruthlessly. When the bell rang for luncheon he was talking to Mr. Elver about the only way in which the Yellow Peril might be permanently averted.