If he could have evaded it, General Boldero would have let the question remain unanswered, although it was only Sue, Sue who knew her parent as no one else knew him—before whom he made no pretences, assumed no disguises—who had now to learn an ugly truth;—as it was, he shot it at her with as good an air as he could assume.
"She has no settlement, damn it."
"No settlement?" In her amazement the open letter fell from the listener's hands. She recollected, she could never forget, the glee with which her father had rubbed his hands over the "clinking settlement" he had anticipated from Leonore's wealthy suitor, nor the manner in which it had insinuated itself into every announcement of the match. No settlement? She simply stared in silence.
"If you will have it, it was my doing," owned General Boldero reluctantly; "and I could bite my tongue off now to think of it! But what with four of you on my hands, and the rents going down and everything else going up, I had nothing to settle—that is, I had nothing I could conveniently settle, and it might have been awkward, uncommonly awkward. I could hardly have got out of it if Godfrey had expected a quid pro quo. And he might—he very well might. A man of his class can't be expected to understand how a man of ours has to live decently and keep up appearances while yet he hasn't a brass farthing to spare. I'll say that for Godfrey Stubbs, he seemed sensible on the point when I tried to explain; and—and somehow I was taken in and thought: 'You may be a bounder, but you are a very worthy fellow'."
He paused, and continued. "Then he suggested—it was his own idea, I give you my word for it—that we should have no greedy lawyers lining their pockets out of either of our purses. What he said was—I've as clear a recollection of it as though it were yesterday—'Oh, bother the settlement, I'll make a will leaving everything I possess to Leonore,'—and I, like a numskull, jumped at the notion. It never occurred to me that the will of a business man may be so much waste paper. His creditors can snap their fingers at any will. That's what Leonore means. She's found it out, and flies post haste to her desk to write that she must come back here."
"So she must."
"So she must not. I won't have it. The whole neighbourhood would ring with it."
"By your own showing," said Sue quietly, "in order to free yourself from the necessity of making any provision on your part when the marriage took place, you precluded——" but she got no further.
"Provision on my part?" burst forth her father, who was now himself again, and ready to browbeat anybody; "what need had the girl of any provision on my part? She was marrying a fellow with tenfold my income. The little I could have contrived to spare would have been a mere drop in the bucket to him, and I should have been ashamed to mention it. I can tell you I felt monstrous uncomfortable having to approach the subject at all; and never was more thankful than when the young man, like the decent fellow I took him then to be, pitchforked the whole business overboard."
"All the same, it is quite plain," persevered she, "that it was with your consent and approbation that Leonore had no money settled on her, so that it could not be taken from her now;—and that being the case, you have no choice but to provide for her in the future."