“If I could get a good price. Why not?”
Kinsman had never before felt so deeply the disadvantages of poverty. Fate, which had given him an unsuccessful father, which had chained him to a clerk’s stool in a City office, had further cursed him with a fine taste in art. He knew a good thing by instinct. He trifled with bric-à-brac, with Chippendale; he had an eye for the voluptuous coloring of the Empire period; but his best affections he reserved for oak. All the rest was thin, unsatisfying. In oak, despite the poverty which allowed him to criticise, but rarely to buy, he was a connoisseur. He could tell—blindfold—by a caressing turn of his hands about the different members, if a piece of oak furniture were original or if it were some bastard thing built together from old wood for the hoodwinking of people with money and a fashionable desire for the antique. How savagely I’ve heard him disclaim against people of that sort!
He got up. The slim pillars seemed to draw him—to wink and beckon and plead.
“Why don’t you buy it off me?” Harrowsmith asked, idly watching him and looking contemptuously amused.
He spoke with the carelessness of a man to whom money is not of immediate moment. He wheeled round in his chair and took a long, sulky look at the oak. It irritated him. It took up room. More than that, it was reminiscent of disappointment. His Uncle Bob had always promised to remember him in his will. He didn’t consider that a Tudor cabinet was remembrance—enough.
“You shall have it for thirty pounds,” he said.
Kinsman did not answer. He grew pale. The hand that was running about the rich wood twitched nervously.
Harrowsmith misunderstood his silence, and said, with slight asperity:
“Is that too much for you? To get rid of the thing I’ll say twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five!” You may be sure there was a catch in Kinsman’s voice. “It would be cheap at thirty. But you know that I could as easily raise three hundred. How can a poor beggar save out of five pounds a week?”