After his wife’s death, which came about when he was seventy, he continued to reside alone in the house that he had lived in since his marriage, though it was now too large for him. Every autumn he resolved to make a change next spring; but when spring came, he could not bring himself to tear his old roots up, and put it off till the spring following, with the hope, perhaps, that he might then feel more inclined.
All through the years that he was living there alone, he suffered more and more from those nightly visitations, of monetary doubts. They seemed, indeed, to grow more concrete and insistent with every thousand pounds he put between himself and their reality. They became more owl-like, more numerous, with each fresh investment; they stayed longer at a time. And he grew thinner, frailer, every year; pouches came beneath his eyes.
When he was eighty, his daughter, with her husband and children, came to live with him. This seemed to give him a fresh lease of life. He never missed, if he could help it, a visit to the nursery at five o’clock. There, surrounded by toy bricks, he would remain an hour or more, building—banks or houses, ships or churches, sometimes police-stations, sometimes cemeteries, but generally banks. And when the edifice approached completion, in the glory of its long white bricks, he waited with a sort of secret ecstasy to feel a small warm body climb his back, and hear a small voice say in his ear: “What shall we put in the bank to-day, Granddy?”
The first time this was asked, he had hesitated long before he answered. During the thirty years that had elapsed since he built banks for his own children, he had learned that one did not talk of money now, especially before the young. One used a euphemism for it. The proper euphemism had been slow to spring into his mind, but it had sprung at last; and they had placed it in the bank. It was a very little china dog. They placed it in the entrance hall.
The small voice said: “What is it guarding?”
He had answered: “The bank, my darling.”
The small voice murmured: “But nobody could steal the bank.”
Looking at the little euphemism, he had frowned. It lacked completeness as a symbol. For a moment he had a wild desire to put a sixpence down, and end the matter. Two small knees wriggled against his back, arms tightened round his neck, a chin rubbed itself impatiently against his whisker. He muttered hastily:
“But they could steal the papers.”
“What papers?”