And yet he could oddly contrast his present knowledge of what he had been and was with those few months in which every surrounding experience was so strange, ugly, tortured, and the whole of his life before the accident cut away as though it had never been: his associates share-shufflers, and for society a glimpse of the abominable smart.
There was a duality in his vision of these last few months that made him shudder as though his present memory, revived and sane, was living side by side with that vile period in which he was himself and yet not himself. But the mood did not last long. There was too much comedy to relieve it.
He traveled along each episode. He saw step by step the prodigious increase of fortune, and in spite of his weakness he could have laughed aloud. He, the permanently embarrassed, had had a dream of millions, evil millions. He could sit still no longer at the desk. He stood up and steadied himself by the mantelpiece, and did laugh slightly at last. As he did so, the recent reality of stocks and deals and sales which had stood apart in his mind as an ended, exceptional episode returned as an enormity: he was now, he was still, an immensely wealthy man.
He began to realize it. He, standing there in that cozy, shabby room which was part of himself; he, Peter Blagden of Harrington, a poor gentleman, insufficiently provided, embarrassed—had an immense lump of money; over three million pounds.
What it would mean to him; what he would do with his opportunities; whether indeed he desired to do anything with them (he did not think he did, unless it were to travel—anywhere except across the Atlantic) troubled him little. What he chuckled over was the high comedy of this immense fortune in his hands. He looked round the little dusty room, the dear little familiar room of twenty years, all telling of his modest (and declining, encumbered) country gentleman’s income, of his lineage, of his affections, most of them now with the dead; he remembered the Bank Parlor and he laughed again, aloud. He had for a moment the boyish impulse to do something really amusing—to go out there and then, that morning, pick up a telephone and give some critical order which should shake a wobbling market. He might sell half a million Moulters, and wreck them; Lord! What fun! He held his head back to laugh once more, but his weakness came upon him again and he sank down into his chair.
Martin knocked at the door; his visage recalled to Mr. Blagden an imperative precaution.
“Martin,” he said, “my name is Blagden—Peter Blagden. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir—of course, sir.” Nor did Martin flinch. He was of country training and had feudal knowledge that gentlemen were free to be quite unaccountable if they chose.
“Does our landlord know that I’m back?”
“No, sir.”