"Not allowed...? You mean to say you tie Uncle Lester into a lover's knot, shoot him under a cold shower, push a lean chop into him accompanied by water, and then don't even let the poor old devil get his lips around a single gasper?"
"That's right."
"Well, all I can say is," said Hugo, "it's no life for a refined Caucasian."
Dazed by the information he had received, he began to potter aimlessly about the room. He was not particularly fond of his uncle. Mr. Carmody Senior's practice of giving him no allowance and keeping him imprisoned all the year round at Rudge would alone have been enough to check anything in the nature of tenderness, but he did not think he deserved quite all that seemed to be coming to him at Healthward Ho.
He mused upon his uncle. A complex character. A man with Lester Carmody's loathing for expenditure ought by rights to have been a simple liver, existing off hot milk and triturated sawdust like an American millionaire. That Fate should have given him, together with his prudence in money matters, a recklessness as regarded the pleasures of the table seemed ironic.
"I see they've quit," said Doctor Twist, with a glance out of the window. "If you want to have a word with your uncle you could do it now. No bad news, I hope?"
"If there is I'm the one that's going to get it. Between you and me," said Hugo, who had no secrets from his fellow men, "I've come to try to touch him for a bit of money."
"Is that so?" said Doctor Twist, interested. Anything to do with money always interested the well-known American physician and physical culture expert.
"Yes," said Hugo. "Five hundred quid, to be exact."
He spoke a little despondently, for, having arrived at the window again, he was in a position now to take a good look at his uncle. And so forbidding had bodily toil and mental disturbance rendered the latter's expression that he found the fresh young hopes with which he had started out on this expedition rapidly ebbing away. If Mr. Carmody were to burst—and he looked as if he might do so at any moment—he, Hugo, being his nearest of kin, would inherit, but, failing that, there seemed to be no cash in sight whatever.