She ran upstairs, and the two men, the younger still holding the club, were left face to face on the little square half-landing.
The look of veiled malignity on the old man’s face was as strong as ever.
“You had better not indulge any thoughts of my ward, Bartlett,” said he, drily, as soon as the last sound of the girl’s light footsteps had died away in the gallery above. “For she will marry money, money, money. There’s no satisfaction in anything but money, and money she must have. Not mine. I have other uses for mine.”
“Of course, sir,” said the young man, more disgusted than ever with his old relation, in whom avarice appeared to have swallowed up every feeling of good-nature, of affection, and of ordinary human kindness, “you have a right to do as you please with your own property, and to entertain what opinions you please about the value of money and its place in the world, but I should have thought you might make allowance for the difference between the feelings of an old man and those of a young girl. Surely if she doesn’t think money the one thing needful she might have a voice in her own destiny?”
“She’ll think as I do when she’s as old as I,” retorted the amiable old gentleman, promptly. “And in the meantime I’m going to save her from doing anything foolish. So be warned. Come along.”
As the young man declined to go first, his uncle led the way into the great shadowy hall, where their footsteps echoed in dark recesses and among the tall pillars which supported the staircase.
“You’ll remember what I’ve said?” said the old man as he drew back the bolts of the heavy front door, which was not that by which visitors were usually admitted, but was a state entrance now apparently unused.
“Yes, and I’m much obliged to you for that and—all your other kind acts.”
Old Mr Bayre, with his hand still on the bolts, laughed again boisterously.
“Oh, you’re thin-skinned,” said he. “And nervous, I suppose. You don’t seem to understand that you had no more right to make a forced entrance into my house, as I caught you doing, than if you were a common tramp. And you well deserve the fright I gave you when you thought—you thought—Ha, ha! you thought, I suppose, that I was going to brain you with that club!”