“Pleasant family party!” broke in the voice of Fanny, clear and hard as her eyes.
“Riches have wings! Riches have wings!” repeated the gray old man, drumming with lean white fingers upon his knees.
“Will nobody tell me any thing?” said Fanny, looking sharply round. “What’s going to be done? Are we all beggars?”
“Riches have wings! Riches have wings!” answered the stern voice of the old man, whose eyes were still fixed upon the wall.
Fanny turned toward him half angrily, but her black eyes quailed before the changed figure of her father. She recalled the loud, domineering, dogmatic man, insisting, morning and night, that as soon as he was rich enough he would be all that he wanted to be—the self-important, patronizing, cold, and unsympathetic head of the family. Where was he? Who was this that sat in the parlor, in his chair, no longer pompous and fierce, but bowed, gray, drumming on his thin knees with lean white fingers?
“Father!” exclaimed Fanny, involuntarily, and terrified.
The old man turned his head toward her. The calm, hard eyes looked into hers. There was no expression of surprise, or indignation, or forgiveness—nothing but a placid abstraction and vagueness.
“Father!” Fanny repeated, rising, and half moving toward him.
His head turned back again—his eyes looked at the wall—and she heard only the words, “Riches have wings! Riches have wings!”
As Fanny sank back into her chair, pale and appalled, May took her hand and began to talk with her in a low, murmuring tone. The others fell into a fragmentary conversation, constantly recurring with their eyes to Mr. Newt. The talk went on in broken whispers, and it was quite late in the evening when a stumbling step advanced to the door, which was burst open, and there stood Abel Newt, with his hat crushed, his clothes soiled, his jaw hanging, and his eyes lifted in a drunken leer.