Melia didn’t know. Her father didn’t either. He was inclined to think not, but without expressing that opinion he stood with narrowed eyes and pursing his lips somberly. “Where’s the books?” he said abruptly.
The desire uppermost in Melia was to tell him in just a few plain words that the books were no concern of his and that she would be much obliged if he would go about his own affairs. But for some reason she was not able to do so. She was no longer afraid of him; years ago she had learned to hate and despise him; but either she was not strong enough, not a big enough character to be openly rude to him, or the subtle feelings of a daughter, long since rejected and forgotten, may have intervened. For after a horrible moment, in which devils flew round in her, she said impassively, “Don’t keep none.”
“Not books! Don’t keep books!” The man of affairs caught up the admission and treated it almost as a young bull in a paddock might have treated a red parasol. “Never heard the like!” He cast a truculent glance round the half denuded shop. “No wonder the jockey has to make compositions with his creditors.”
Melia flushed darkly. She would have given much had she been able at that moment to order this father of hers out of the shop, but every minute now seemed to bring him an increasing authority. The Dad, the tyrant and the bully whom she had feared, defied and secretly admired, was now in full possession. At bottom, sixteen years had not changed him and it had not changed her. Had the man for whom she had wrecked her life had something of her father’s quality she might have forgiven his inefficiency, his tragic failure as a human being, or at any rate have been more able to excuse herself for an act which, look at it as one would, was simply unforgivable.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Her hard voice trembled and then broke harshly—but anger and defiance could not go beyond that. “He paid the quarter’s rent before he went. He owes a few pounds but he’s going to send me a bit every week until it’s paid.”
“I suppose you’ve got a list of his liabilities.” Even his voice shook a little, but he treated the scorn, the anger, the hard defiance in her eyes as if they were not there.
Again the paramount desire was to insult this father of hers, had it been humanly possible to do so. But again was she bereft of the power even to make the attempt. “Yes, I have,” she said sullenly.
“Let me see it, gel.”
For nearly a minute she stood biting her lips and looking at him, while for his part he coolly surveyed the shop in all its miserable inadequacy. She still wanted to order him out. His proprietary air enraged her. Yet she could not repress a sneaking admiration for it and that enraged her even more. But she suddenly gave up fighting and retired in defeat to the mysterious region beyond the curtained door, whence she returned very soon with a piece of paper in her hand.
Josiah impressively put on his gold-rimmed eyeglasses, a recent addition to his greatness, and examined the paper critically. The amount of William Hollis’s indebtedness, declared in hurried, rather illiterate pencil, as if the heart of the writer had not been in his task, came to rather less than twenty pounds.