“A terror, mamma?”
She found another place, sinking sadly down and opening her book, and the next moment he got up and came over to kiss her, on which she drew her cheek wearily aside. “You bore me quite to death,” she coldly said, “and I give you up to your fate.”
“What do you call my fate?”
“Oh something dreadful—if only by its being publicly ridiculous.” She turned vaguely the pages of her book. “You’re too selfish—too sickening.”
“Oh dear, dear!” he wonderingly whistled while he wandered back to the hearth-rug, on which, with his hands behind him, he lingered a while. He was small and had a slight stoop which somehow gave him character—character of the insidious sort carried out in the acuteness, difficult to trace to a source, of his smooth fair face, where the lines were all curves and the expression all needles. He had the voice of a man of forty and was dressed—as if markedly not for London—with an air of experience that seemed to match it. He pulled down his waistcoat, smoothing himself, feeling his neat hair and looking at his shoes.
“I took your five pounds. Also two of the sovereigns,” he went on. “I left you two pound ten.” His mother jerked up her head at this, facing him in dismay, and, immediately on her feet, passed back to the secretary. “It’s quite as I say,” he insisted; “you should have locked it BEFORE, don’t you know? It grinned at me there with all its charming brasses, and what was I to do? Darling mummy, I COULDN’T start—that was the truth. I thought I should find something—I had noticed; and I do hope you’ll let me keep it, because if you don’t it’s all up with me. I stopped over on purpose—on purpose, I mean, to tell you what I’ve done. Don’t you call that a sense of honour? And now you only stand and glower at me.”
Mrs. Brookenham was, in her forty-first year, still charmingly pretty, and the nearest approach she made at this moment to meeting her son’s description of her was by looking beautifully desperate. She had about her the pure light of youth—would always have it; her head, her figure, her flexibility, her flickering colour, her lovely silly eyes, her natural quavering tone, all played together toward this effect by some trick that had never yet been exposed. It was at the same time remarkable that—at least in the bosom of her family—she rarely wore an appearance of gaiety less qualified than at the present juncture; she suggested for the most part the luxury, the novelty of woe, the excitement of strange sorrows and the cultivation of fine indifferences. This was her special sign—an innocence dimly tragic. It gave immense effect to her other resources. She opened the secretary with the key she had quickly found, then with the aid of another rattled out a small drawer; after which she pushed the drawer back, closing the whole thing. “You terrify me—you terrify me,” she again said.
“How can you say that when you showed me just now how well you know me? Wasn’t it just on account of what you thought I might do that you took out the keys as soon as you came in?” Harold’s manner had a way of clearing up whenever he could talk of himself.
“You’re too utterly disgusting—I shall speak to your father,” with which, going to the chair he had given up, his mother sank down again with her heavy book. There was no anger, however, in her voice, and not even a harsh plaint; only a detached accepted disenchantment. Mrs. Brookenham’s supreme rebellion against fate was just to show with the last frankness how much she was bored.
“No, darling mummy, you won’t speak to my father—you’ll do anything in the world rather than that,” Harold replied, quite as if he were kindly explaining her to herself. “I thank you immensely for the charming way you take what I’ve done; it was because I had a conviction of that that I waited for you to know it. It was all very well to tell you I’d start on my visit—but how the deuce was I to start without a penny in the world? Don’t you see that if you want me to go about you must really enter into my needs?”