“Petty cash,” he muttered shortly.
Edwin produced the petty cash-book, a volume of very trifling importance.
“Now bring me the till.”
Edwin went out of the cubicle and brought the till, which was a large and battered japanned cash-box with a lid in two independent parts, from its well-concealed drawer behind the fancy-counter. Darius counted the coins in it and made calculations on blotting-paper, breathing stertorously all the time.
“What on earth are you trying to get at?” Edwin asked, with innocent familiarity. He thought that the Club-share crisis had been postponed by one of his father’s swift strange caprices.
Darius turned on him glaring: “I’m trying to get at where ye got the brass from to buy them there books as I saw last night. Where did ye get it from? There’s nowt wrong here, unless ye’re a mighty lot cleverer than I take ye for. Where did ye get it from? Ye don’t mean to tell me as ye saved it up!”
Edwin had had some shocks in his life. This was the greatest. He could feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting; and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief. “Loathsome beast!” he thought savagely.
“I’m waiting,” said his father.
“I’ve drawn my Club money,” said Edwin.
For an instant the old man was at a loss; then he understood. He had entirely forgotten the maturing of the Club share, and assuredly he had not dreamed that Edwin would accept and secrete so vast a sum as fifty pounds without uttering a word. Darius had made a mistake, and a bad one; but in those days fathers were never wrong; above all they never apologised. In Edwin’s wicked act of concealment Darius could choose new and effective ground, and he did so.