Teddy closed the door gently and stole away. Was he really grown up? Had time actually moved forward? The thin and the fat man sat there, as in the days when he had supposed they were murderers, still winning and losing fabulous fortunes in the unconquered land of their imaginations.
Upstairs, in the spare-room, he found Mrs. Sheerug. With a bag of vivid-colored wools beside her, she was busy on a new tapestry. She rose like a little old hen from its nest at the sound of his entrance. Her arms flew up to greet him.
“You’ve come back.”
“I’ve come back.”
That was all. Whatever she had guessed, she asked no questions. Had they all agreed to a kindly conspiracy of silence?
As he sat at her feet, watching her work, she told him philosophically of the loss of their money. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. I wouldn’t be so terribly sorry if it hadn’t given Alonzo sciatica of the back.”
“Do you get sciatica in the back?” he asked.
She peered at him over her spectacles. “Most people don’t, but that’s where he’s got it. He never does any work.—Oh, dear, if he’d only take my lemon cure! I’m sure he’d be better. I don’t think he wants to be better. He can sit about the house all day while he’s got it. Poor man, it doesn’t hurt him very badly.”
It soon became evident to Teddy that she wasn’t so cut up as might have been expected now that her wealth was gone. Straitened means gave her permission to muddle. “Those coachmen and men-servants,” she told him, “they worried me, my dear. Their morals were very lax.”
When he tried to find out what had really occurred to cause the collapse of her affluence, she shook her head. “Shady tricks, my dear—very shady. Unkind things were said.”