Harold looked kind and simple. “She HAS come in, I know. She’ll be with you in a moment.”
He was halfway to the door, but Mr. Cashmore, though so easy, had not done with him. “I suppose you mean that if it’s only your mother who’s told, you may depend on her to shield you.”
Harold turned this over as if it were a questionable sovereign, but on second thoughts he wonderfully smiled. “Do you think that after you’ve let me have it you can tell? You could, of course, if you hadn’t.” He appeared to work it out for Mr. Cashmore’s benefit. “But I don’t mind,” he added, “your telling mamma.”
“Don’t mind, you mean really, its annoying her so awfully?”
The invitation to repent thrown off in this could only strike the young man as absurd—it was so previous to any enjoyment. Harold liked things in their proper order; but at the same time his evolutions were quick. “I dare say I AM selfish, but what I was thinking was that the terrific wigging, don’t you know?—well, I’d take it from HER. She knows about one’s life—about our having to go on, by no fault of our own, as our parents start us. She knows all about wants—no one has more than mamma.”
Mr. Cashmore soundlessly glared his amusement. “So she’ll say it’s all right?”
“Oh no; she’ll let me have it hot. But she’ll recognise that at such a pass more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to something—indirectly, don’t you see? for she won’t TELL my father, she’ll only, in her own way, work on him—that will put me on a better footing and for which therefore at bottom I shall have to thank YOU!”
The eye assisted by Mr. Cashmore’s glass had with a discernible growth of something like alarm fixed during this address the subject of his beneficence. The thread of their relations somehow lost itself in the subtler twist, and he fell back on mere stature, position and property, things always convenient in the presence of crookedness. “I shall say nothing to your mother, but I think I shall be rather glad you’re not a son of mine.”
Harold wondered at this new element in their talk. “Do your sons never—?”
“Borrow money of their mother’s visitors?” Mr. Cashmore had taken him up, eager, evidently, quite to satisfy him; but the question was caught on the wing by Mrs. Brookenham herself, who had opened the door as her friend spoke and who quickly advanced with an echo of it.