“And there will be you and your dear mother always there,” he concluded. “It is so long since I had a home.”
To his mother the rise from Snelling’s Row to Bridlington Street was a great event. It brought tears of happiness to her eyes. Also she approved of Mr. Tetteridge.
“It will be so good for you,” she said to Anthony, “living with a gentleman.”
There was the furnishing. Mr. Tetteridge’s study, into which parents would have to be shown, must breathe culture, dignified scholasticism. Mr. Tetteridge’s account at Her Majesty’s savings bank was a little over twenty pounds. That must not be touched. Sickness, the unexpected, must be guarded against. Anthony went to see his aunt. That with the Lord’s help she had laid by a fair-sized nest-egg she had in a rash moment of spiritual exaltation confided to him. Loans of half a sovereign, and even of a five-pound note, amply secured and bearing interest at the rate of a shilling in the pound per week, she was always prepared to entertain. Anthony wanted a hundred pounds at ten per cent. per annum, to be repaid on the honour of a gentleman.
The principal required frightened her almost into a fit. Besides she hadn’t got it. The rate of interest, which according to complicated calculations of her own worked out at considerably less than halfpenny a pound per week, did not tempt her. About the proposed security there seemed to her a weakness.
In years to come the things without a chance that Anthony Strong’nth’arm pulled off, the impracticable schemes that with a wave of his hand became sound business propositions, the hopeless enterprises into which he threw himself and carried through to victory, grew to be the wonder and bewilderment of Millsborough. But never in all his career was he called upon again to face such an absolutely impossible stone waller as his aunt’s determination on that Friday afternoon not to be bamboozled out of hard-won savings by any imp of Satan, even if for her sins he happened to be her own nephew.
How he did it Mrs. Newt was never able to explain. It was not what he said, though heaven knows there was no lack of that. Mrs. Newt’s opinion was that by words alone he could have got it out of a stone. It was some strange magic he seemed to possess that made her—to use her own simile—as clay in the hands of the potter.
She gave him that one hundred pounds in twenty five-pound notes, thanking God from the bottom of her heart that he hadn’t asked for two. In exchange he drew from his pocket, and pressed into her hand a piece of paper. What it was about and what she had done with it she never knew. She remembered there was a stamp on it.
She also remembered, when she came to her senses, that he had put his arms about her and had hugged her, and that she had kissed him good-bye and had given him a message to his mother. At the end of the first twelve months he brought her thirty pounds, explaining to her that that left eighty still owing. And what astonished her most was that she wasn’t surprised. It was just as if she had expected it.
The pupils came in. Mrs. Strong’nth’arm, knowing many folk, was of much help.