"Cousin Steven, if you'll just listen a minute," Gwynne began with an effort.
"You can't stop me—I've got a right—I'm not a minor," cried the old man; the words might have been ludicrous but for his pitiful earnestness. "I'm going to know where my money's gone to—I'm going to have an accounting. That Pallinder fellow——"
"I say you shall not go there," said Gwynne doggedly. "Your money's all right. If you'll only have a little patience, I'll attend to it, and you'll get your share——"
"You said that before—you've said it two or three times," said Steven, his face working. He was evidently striving with all his might for self-control; there was a painful dignity in the effort. Doctor Vardaman was strangely touched to observe him; it seemed as if the battle were too one-sided, whatever its cause; as if the strong and sane young man had too much the advantage. "I'm tired of hearing that, Gwynne. You don't know how to get the money, or you don't try. 'If you want your business done, go and do it yourself; if not, send!' That's a pretty good motto, seems to me. I'm going to attend to this now, myself——"
"Cousin Steven, you can't possibly do anything—you'll only make matters worse. Ask Templeton, ask anybody——"
"It's no use asking you, that's plain," said Steven bitterly. "I want my money." In spite of him, his voice raised and cracked on the last words. He turned to the doctor pleadingly. "John," he said, "it ain't right—it ain't right. You'll say it ain't right, when you hear. Tell him it ain't right, John, tell him it ain't." He pointed to Gwynne with his shaking hand. The younger man scowled back with a resentment touched by some feeling not far removed from shame; Doctor Vardaman looked at him in open inquiry, and was confounded to see that Gwynne avoided his eye.
"You'd better sit down here quietly, Steve, old man," he said kindly. "Now what is it you want me to tell Gwynne? Let's thrash it all out. We'll put it straight in five minutes, I've no doubt." He shook his head warningly at Gwynne behind the other's back; and Gwynne set his lips ominously and looked away.
Old Steven began to fumble in his pockets; in his excitement he could not command his stiff trembling fingers, and cursed with impatience as he sought. "I've got it here—I've got a statement, Jack," he explained twice or thrice. "I put it all down. I may not be a pin-headed, pettifogging little know-it-all attorney," he said with a withering side-glance at Gwynne standing against the mantelpiece in a morose silence. "But I guess I can add up a column of figures and make it come out right just the same." Doctor Vardaman might have laughed at another time; but now he was too concerned for the outcome, feeling instinctively that, at its core, this was no laughing matter. The presentiment chilled him into gravity as he watched Steven turn out a collection of rubbish such as any schoolboy might have owned—broken bits of slate-pencil, a disabled toothbrush, hanks of cotton string, a handful of Indian corn and one of loose tobacco, numerous buttons, a large red apple—"I brought that for Gwynne, but now I'll give it to you, John," said the old man severely. Finally from the midst of this dunnage he produced a creased and soiled paper and spread it out triumphantly. "There, Jack, there, I wrote it all out. 'William Pallinder, Esquire'—no, I'll be damned if I call him 'esquire,' it's too good for him—lend me your pen-knife, Jack, I'll scratch it out when I get through reading—'William Pallinder in account with Steven Gwynne et al.—I remember that out of the books when I was studying law—et al., for house-rent due from November, 1881, to March, 1883, sixteen months, at one hundred and fifty dollars a month, twenty-four hundred dollars—ain't that correct? And there's twenty of us, you know, John, counting Eleanor and Mollie's share as one, twenty goes into twenty-four once and four over—I put that down on another piece of paper—I can't find it, but I remember anyhow—twenty into twenty-four once and four over, twenty into forty goes twice, and ought's ought, and ought's ought. That's a hundred and twenty apiece that's coming to us, John, ain't that correct?" He looked into the doctor's face eagerly; momentarily it seemed as if the gravity of the scene were about to evaporate in a cheap burlesque. In the variegated patchwork of Steven's mental processes, theories about the superfluousness of money, and laboured calculations as to how much was coming to him found an equal place, and were matched side by side with no sense of incongruity.
"Yes, that's perfectly correct, Steven," said the doctor, somewhat illuminated.
Steven eyed Gwynne vindictively. "I guess I can figger all right if I ain't a pin-head——"