“Why not? the ungrateful wretches! I’ve made Danmouth a prosperous place. I spend thousands a year in wages, and the dogs all turn upon me and are ready to rend the hand that feeds them. If they are not satisfied with their wages, they wait till I have some important contract on the way, and then they strike. I haven’t patience with them.”
“Father!” cried Claude firmly, “Doctor Asher said you were not to excite yourself in any way, or you would be ill.”
“And a good thing, too. Better be ill, and die, and get out of the way. Hated—cursed by every living soul.”
Claude clung more tightly to him, laid her head upon his breast, and placed her hand across his lips as if to keep him from speaking.
A smile came across the grim face, but there was no smile in his words as he went on fiercely, after removing the hand and seeming about to kiss it, but keeping it in his hand without.
“Everything seems to go against me,” he cried. “Mr Glyddyr—just going—I was seeing him to the door, when, like a black ghost, up starts that woman Sarah Woodham. What does she want?”
“I’ll tell you, dear, if you will sit down and be calm.”
“How the devil can I be calm,” he raved, “when I am regularly persecuted by folk like this?”
But he let Claude press him back into an easy chair, while, feeling that she was better away, Mary Dillon crept softly out of the room.
“Well, then,” he said, as if his child’s touch was talismanic, and he lay back and closed his eyes, “I’ll be calm. But you don’t know, Claude, you can’t tell how I’m persecuted. I’m robbed right and left.”