He shook his head.
“How can you ask it? My poor little all—twenty pounds—is gone on twopenny-halfpenny presents during the past week or two. It seemed so little compared to the fortune that was coming. It’s all over. The great day is further off by twenty pounds than it was before that poor drunken old fool lied to me. Yet she didn’t lie either; she only forgot; you can’t swim in brandy for nothing.”
Fear, not disappointment, dominated the woman before him as she heard. Sheer terror made her grip his arm and scream to him hysterically. Then she wept wild, savage tears and called to God to kill her quickly. For a time she parried every question, but an outburst so strangely unlike Chris Blanchard had its roots deeper than the crushing temporary disaster which he had brought with him. Clement, suspecting, importuned for the truth, gathered it from her, then passed away into the dusk, faced with the greatest problem that existence had as yet set him. Crushed, and crushed unutterably, he returned home oppressed with a biting sense of his own damnable fate. He moved as one distracted, incoherent, savage, alone. The glorious palace he had raised for his happiness crumbled into vast ruins; hope was dead and putrid; and only the results of wild actions, achieved on false assumptions, faced him. Now, rising out of his brief midsummer madness, the man saw a ghost; and he greeted it with groan as bitter as ever wrung human heart.
Miller Lyddon sat that night alone until Mr. Blee returned to supper.
“Gert news! Gert news!” he shouted, while yet in the passage; “sweatin’ for joy an’ haste, I be!”
His eyes sparkled, his face shone, his words tripped each other up by the heels.
“Be gormed if ban’t a ’mazin’ world! She’ve left nought—dammy—less than nought, for the house be mortgaged sea-deep to Doctor, an’ theer’s other debts. Not a penny for nobody—nothin’ but empty bottles—an’ to think as I thought so poor o’ God as to say theer weern’t none! What a ramshackle plaace the world is!”
“No money at all? Mrs. Lezzard—it can’t be!” declared Mr. Lyddon.
“But it is, by gum! A braave tantara ’mongst the fam’ly, I tell ’e. Not a stiver—all ate up in a ’nuity, an’ her—artful limb!—just died on the last penny o’ the quarter’s payment. An’ Lezzard left at the work’us door—poor auld zawk! An’ him fourscore an’ never been eggicated an’ never larned nothin’!”
“To think it might have been your trouble, Blee!”