“Take mine, then. Only—go.”
“Good Lord, Clytie! But it’s not serious, eh?”
“Go—d’you hear, you jackass,” she repeated, with a stamp of the foot. “And bring him back with you. None of his—‘look round directly.’ Bring him back with you.”
The old man lay, staring up at them, his red and bloated face showing no sign of recognition; and on the prompt arrival of the doctor they were not long in learning that it never would again, for in less than an hour old Calmour was dead. Stroke, greatly accelerated by intemperate habits, was the medical verdict.
“What’s to be done now, Delia?” remarked Clytie a day or two after the funeral, while she and her sister were holding a serious council of war—or rather of ways and means. “What the very devil is to be done? We can’t go on running Siege House at our rates of pay, and the poor old dad didn’t leave a cent.”
This was a fact. The sale of the furniture would not put them in funds to any great extent. Old Calmour’s pension had died with him, and there were three boys to keep at school. Well, this, of course, was out of the question. Bob would have to live on the by no means princely salary he received from Pownall and Skreet, and very blue did the said Bob look over the prospect. One thing was certain: the household would have to be broken up.
The funeral, as may be imagined, had not been largely attended; in fact, except the dead man’s family, hardly anybody had been present One of these exceptions had been Haldane, and the circumstances had appealed to the girls with a very real sense of appreciation.
“I expect he turned up on your account, Delia,” Clytie had remarked. “But it was brickish of him, all the same. By the way, I suppose there’s a sort of freemasonry among your people. If you hadn’t joined them he wouldn’t have shown up.”
“I don’t know about that; it may have been on account of our acquaintance. But it was just the sort of thing Mr Haldane would do,” answered Delia.
Incidentally, we may remark that, whatever the motive, it was not the last thing that Haldane did for this unfortunate family, now reduced to real straits, after it had been decided to give up Bassingham and remove to the metropolis—that universal, and frequently illusory, refuge for those who “have their way to make.”