“My uncle! I never had an uncle,” cried Stella with a shriek.
“But there is such a person. He is not a very creditable relation. Still he ought not to be left to starve.”
“I never heard of any uncle! Papa never spoke of anyone. He said he had no relations, except some far-off cousins. How can I tell that this is not some old imposition trumped up for the sake of getting money? Oh, I am not going to allow myself to be fleeced so easily as that!”
“It is no imposition. Bob Tredgold has been in my office for a long number of years. I knew him as I knew your father when we were boys together. The one took the right turning, the other the wrong—though who can tell what is right and what is wrong with any certainty? One has gone out of the world with great injustice, leaving a great deal of trouble behind him; the other would be made quite happy with two pounds a week till he dies.”
“Two pounds a week—a hundred pounds a year!” cried Stella. “Mr. Sturgeon, I suppose you must think we are made of money. But I must assure you at once that I cannot possibly undertake at the very first outset such heavy responsibility as that.”
Sir Charles said nothing, but pulled his moustache. He had no habit of making allowances or maintaining poor relations, and the demand seemed overwhelming to him too.
“These are things which concern your father’s credit, Lady Somers. I think it would be worth your while to attend to them for his sake. The other is for your own. You cannot allow your sister, Miss Katherine, to go out into the world on five hundred a year while you have sixty thousand. I am a plain man and only an attorney, and you are a beautiful young lady, full, I have no doubt, of fine feelings. But I don’t think, if you consider the subject, that for your own credit you can allow this singular difference in the position of two sisters to be known.”
Stella was silent for a moment. She was struck dumb by the man’s grave face and his importance and the confidence of his tone. She said at last, almost with a whimper, “It was none of my doing. I was not here; I could not exercise any influence,” looking up at the old executor with startled eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “I am aware you were far away, and your sister ought to have been the person to exercise influence. She did not, however,” he added with a little impatience. “There are some people who are too good for this world.”
Too ineffectual—capable of neither good nor evil! Was it the same kind of incapacity as the others were discussing in the other room?