“Jove!” said Sir Charles. “Old beggar said shillin’ for shillin’. Had a heap of silver—got it like a fool—didn’t see what he was driving at—paid it out on the table.” He pulled his moustache to the very roots and uttered a short and cavernous laugh. “Left it there, by Jove!—all my change,” he cried; “not a blessed thruppenny to throw to little girl at gate.”
“Left it there?” said Lady Jane—“on the table?” Her gravity was overpowered by this detail. “Upon my word, Charlie Somers, for all your big moustache and your six feet and your experiences, I declare I don’t think there ever was such a simpleton born.”
Somers bore her laughter very steadily. He was not unused to it. The things in which he showed himself a simpleton were in relation to the things in which he was prematurely wise as three to a hundred; but yet there were such things. And he was free to acknowledge that leaving his seventeen shillings spread out on the millionaire’s table, or even taking the millionaire’s challenge au pied de la lettre, was the act of a simpleton. He stood tranquilly with his back to the fire till Lady Jane had got her laugh out. Then she resumed with a sort of apology:
“It was too much for me, Charlie. I could not help laughing. What will become of all that money, I wonder? Will he keep it and put it to interest? I should like to have seen him after you were gone. I should like to have seen him afterwards, when Stella had her knife at his throat, asking him what he meant by it. You may trust to Stella, my dear boy. She will soon bring her father to reason. He may be all sorts of queer things to you, but he can’t stand against her. She can twist him round her little finger. If it had been Katherine I should not have been so confident. But Stella—he never has refused anything to Stella since ever she was born.”
“Think so, really?” said Somers through his moustache. He was beginning to revive a little again, but yet the impression of old Tredgold’s chuckling laugh and his contemptuous certainty was not to be got over lightly. The gloom of the rejected was still over him.
“Yes, I think so,” said Lady Jane. “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, go on in that hang-dog way. There’s nothing happened but what was to be expected. Of course, the old curmudgeon would make an attempt to guard his money-bags. I wish I were as sure of a company for Jack as I am of Stella’s power to do anything she likes with her father. But if you go down in this way at the first touch——”
“No intention of going down,” said Sir Charles, piqued. “Marry her to-morrow—take her out to India—then see what old beggar says.”
“That, indeed,” cried Lady Jane—“that would be a fine revenge on him! Don’t propose it to Stella if you don’t want her to accept, for she would think it the finest fun in the world.”
“By George!” Somers said, and a smile began to lift up the corners of his moustache.
“That would bring him to his senses, indeed,” Lady Jane said reflectively; “but it would be rather cruel, Charlie. After all, he is an old man. Not a very venerable old man, perhaps; not what you would call a lovely old age, is it? but still—— Oh, I think it would be cruel. You need not go so far as that. But we shall soon hear what Stella says.”