Amaryllis looked, and saw the old man leaning with both hands on the back of his son's empty chair.
He seemed to cling to it as if it was a spar floating on the barren ocean of life and death into which his withered old body was sinking.
Perhaps he really would have clung like that to his son had but his son come to him, and borne a little, and for a little while, with his ways.
A sorrowful thing to see—the old man of ninety clinging to the back of his son's empty chair. His great grey tottery hat seemed about to tumble on the floor—his back bowed a little more—and he groaned deeply, three times.
We can see, being out of the play and spectators merely, that there was a human cry for help in the old man's groan—his heart yearned for his son's strong arm to lean on.
The crowd of relations were in doubt as to whether they should rejoice, whether the groan was a sign of indignation, of anger too deep ever to be forgotten, or whether they should be alarmed at the possibility of reconciliation.
The Flamma blood was up too much in Amaryllis for her to feel pity for him as she would have done in any other mood; she hated him all the more; he was rich, the five-shilling fare was nothing to him, he could hire a fly from the "Lamb Inn," and drive over and make friends with her father in half an hour. Groaning there—the hideous old monster! and her mother without a decent pair of boots.
In a moment or two Grandfather Iden recovered himself, and continued the distribution, and by-and-by Amaryllis felt him approach her chair. She did not even turn to look at him, so he took her hand, and placed two coins in it, saying in his most gracious way that the sovereign was for her father, and the guinea—the spade-guinea—for herself. She muttered something—she knew not what—she could but just restrain herself from throwing the money on the floor.
It was known in a moment that Amaryllis had the guinea. Conceive the horror, the hatred, the dread of the crowd of sycophants! That the Heiress Apparent should be the favourite!
Yet more. Half-an-hour later, just after they had all got upstairs into the great drawing-room, and some were officiously and reverently admiring the peacock-feather in the screen, and some looking out of the bow window at the fair, there came a message for Amaryllis to put on her hat and go for a walk with her grandfather.