After this his wife made no remark, but furtively—her housewifely instincts not permitting her to see it go out before her eyes—stooped to the coal-box standing by to put something on the fire.
“Let it alone!” he said, angrily. “At such a moment to be poking among the coals! Do you know what has happened? Can’t you realize it a little? Here we have Penton on our hands—Penton! That place to be furnished, fitted out, and lived in! How are we to do it? I am in such a perplexity I think as never man was. And instead of helping me, all your thoughts are taken up with mending the fire!”
Mrs. Penton sat down suddenly in the first chair. She put her hand upon her heart, which had begun to jump. “Then you were not in time? Oh, I thought so from the first. To go on wasting day after day, and he such an old man!”
And in the extreme excitement of the moment she began to cry a little, holding her hand upon her fluttering heart: “It was what I always feared: when there is a thing that is troublesome and difficult, that is always the thing that happens,” she cried.
Her husband did not make any immediate reply. He wheeled round in his turn and took up the poker, but presently threw it down again. “It is no use making a fuss over that now. It’s that fellow Rochford’s fault. By the way,” he said, turning round again sharply, “mind, Annie, I won’t have that young fellow coming here so much. It might not have mattered before, but now it’s out of character—entirely out of character. Mind what I say.”
Mrs. Penton took no notice of this. She went on with a little murmur of her own: “No, it is of no use making a fuss. We can’t undo it now. To think it might have been settled yesterday, or any day! and now it never can be settled whatever we may do.”
“I don’t know what you mean by settled,” he said, hastily; “nothing can be more settled; it is as clear as daylight: not that there could be any doubt at any time. The thing we’ve got to think of is what we are to do.”
“With all the children,” said Mrs. Penton, “and that great empty house, and no ready money or anything. Oh, Edward, how can I tell what we are to do? It has been before me for years. And then I thought when your cousin spoke that all was going to be right.”
“There’s no use speaking of that now.”
“No, I don’t suppose there’s any use. Still, when one thinks—which of course I can’t help doing; when your cousin came I thought it was all right. Though you never would listen to me, I knew that you would listen to her. And now here it is again just as if that had never been!”