“What rot,” was David’s comment, “but if I felt like that, I jolly well know I’d knock the brute on the head.”
“Would you?” said Edward, and that was all that had passed. Only, when a week later Pellico’s dog was poisoned, David was filled with righteous indignation. He stormed at Edward.
“You did it—you know you did it. You did it with some of that beastly bug-killing stuff that you keep knocking about.”
Edward was pale, but there was an odd gleam of triumph in the eyes that met David’s.
“Well, you said you’d do for him—you said it yourself. So then I just did it.”
David stared at him with all a schoolboy’s crude condemnation of something that was “not the game.”
“I’d have knocked him on the head under old Pellico’s nose—but poison—poison’s beastly.”
He did not reason about it. It was just instinct. You knocked on the head a brute that annoyed you, but you didn’t use poison. And Edward had used poison. That was the beginning of David’s great intimacy with Elizabeth Chantrey. He did not quarrel with Edward, but they drifted out of an inseparable friendship into a relationship of the cool, go-as-you-please order. The thing rankled a little after all these years. David sat there frowning and remembering. Old Mr. Mottisfont laughed.
“Aha, you see I know most things,” he said, “Edward’ll poison me yet. You see, he’s in a fix. He hankers after this house same as I always hankered after it. It’s about the only taste we have in common. He’s got his own house on a seven years’ lease, and here’s Nick Anderson going to be married, and willing to take it off his hands. And what’s Edward to do? It’s a terrible anxiety for him not knowing if I’m going to die or not. If he doesn’t accept Nick’s offer and I die, he’ll have two houses on his hands. If he accepts it and I don’t die, he’ll not have a house at all. It’s a sad dilemma for Edward. That’s why he would enjoy seeing about my funeral so much. He’d do it all very handsomely. Edward likes things handsome. And Mary, who doesn’t care a jot for me, will wear a black dress that don’t suit her, and feel like a Christian martyr. And Elizabeth won’t wear black at all, though she cares a good many jots, and though she’d look a deal better in it than Mary—eh, David?”
But David Blake was exclaiming at the lateness of the hour, and saying good-night, all in a breath.