“I won’t sleep at night, sir, for worrying about you and your things. You won’t never be able to look after yourself proper.”
“Nonsense,” said Eliphalet. “I shall miss you, of course, but it will come easier after a while. You—you’ve been more than attentive, Potter, and just a little parting gift——” He pressed a five-pound note into the dresser’s hand—a note that Potter secretly replaced in his master’s pocket while helping him, for the last time, into the big fur overcoat.
Eliphalet Cardomay’s great farewell tour, with seventy-five pounds a week spent on advertisement, was over and done with, and out of the wreckage he salved four hundred pounds.
He did not raise a wail over the loss—he was too game; but in his inner self was a tiny cry of disappointment.
He had always cherished the belief that when he retired it would be to go to the first real home he had ever known.
The home, as he pictured it, was a little detached villa at New Brighton. It would face the sea and there would be tamarisk bushes, forming a guard of honour, from the garden gate to the front door. He had worked out how each room would look—just what furniture and pictures there would be—as though it were a scene in a play. Every detail was cut and dried and ordered in his mind. This was to be his compensation for the sacrifice of his profession. And now——!
Four hundred pounds and his lonely self were all that remained.
For about six weeks Eliphalet Cardomay drifted aimlessly. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Late hours having been the habit of his lifetime, it was impossible to go early to bed, and the empty evenings hung like lead upon his hands.
A letter or two came from America, forwarded from his old lodging, and these were the only bright spots on a desolate landscape.
Sunday was a day that bothered him dreadfully. Every Sunday for forty years he had been accustomed to the rush of packing—of cabs—porters and long train-journeys. To sit idle in his rooms and read the Referee, which in the past had often seemed a very desirable thing to do, proved in practice a very trying ordeal. He fretted all the morning with a sense of important duties neglected, and usually finished up by walking to the nearest railway station to watch the theatrical trains pull out. Then he would return and settle down, with a sigh, to an afternoon of irksome inactivity.