"I think not! However, I hope you'll do everything possible to satisfy yourself on that point Mr Green." Carstairs spoke very slowly and very quietly, it was a way he had when his anger was rising.
"That man," Darwen observed, when Carstairs told the story, "is a little rogue. It never pays to be little in anything. It's a sign of intellectual incompetence, lack of courage and general feebleness. I'm glad you told me; we'll have this out in committee. I'll break that man just to encourage the others, eh?" There was a glitter in his eye that Carstairs could not quite understand. Carstairs' brain was somewhat heavy and ponderous, but once on the move in any direction, it rolled onwards with an irresistible sweep; he was a ruthless searcher after truth according to his light. Darwen himself had set the wonderful mechanism of his brain moving in the direction of suspicion, he now began almost unconsciously to suspect his friend.
At the next committee meeting Darwen awaited the attack of Mr Green in smiling affability, but it never came. The little rogue had thought better of it. However, Darwen was not to be baulked. Producing a number of bills, consumers' meter reading, calculations of probable consumption, etc., he attacked Mr Green. The little man arose in his wrath, lost his head and shouted. Darwen smiled and smiled, and played with him, as a cat plays with a mouse; then he squashed him with overwhelming evidence and demanded an apology for personalities. The little man gave in, he almost wept; Darwen was so big, so suave, so very acute, so merciless and so cool; it almost broke his heart; he got up, a shattered, nerveless wreck, and left the room.
"Now, gentlemen, I think we may proceed to business." The talons were sheathed, he was so genial, so pleasant, that it was scarcely possible to grasp the fact that this was the same man who had just crumpled up the little greengrocer like an empty paper bag. Many of the other councillors shifted uneasily in their seats and fear gnawed at their hearts; they cast shifty, uneasy glances at the young handsome engineer. What was this awful thing they had raised up in their midst? Even the massive, grand old doctor at the head of the table was subdued; he gazed straight at Darwen in solemn thought; perhaps he was wondering whether this was, after all, the sort of man he ought to entrust his daughter's happiness to.
That evening the proceedings in the committee room were reported verbatim in the local papers, and more than that, some of the London papers had a short pithy paragraph exaggerating the event. Of course there was nothing for it, the little councillor had to resign.
Darwen's mother had taken a nice house, small, but in a good part of the town, and the day after the eventful committee meeting, Carstairs went there to dinner. The rooms were tastefully furnished. Carstairs commented to himself that the feminine eye and hand were apparent everywhere; he went in with Darwen, and, as he was left in the drawing-room alone for a few minutes while Darwen went to look for his mother, he looked round at the water colour paintings on the walls, the cabinet of old china, the frequent ornaments, statuettes, bronze and marble: he felt somehow that it had a Frenchy tone; at any rate, was unlike any other room he had ever been in; it was the sort of thing he felt that his brother Stephen, the artist, would admire. Darwen's mother he imagined as tall, artistic, graceful (bearing in mind Darwen's face and form), beautiful and brilliant. The poets, that he remembered in their diggings, were scattered over the table; he noted that the bindings of all were beautiful and expensive, too. "The Prince" was not among them.
He heard voices outside, Darwen's he knew; and another, full, rich, contralto.
The door opened. "Let me introduce you to the mater, Carstairs."
Carstairs stood up and held out his hand. His face showed no emotion whatever, but in his brain was deepest wonder. The woman who stood before him, the mother of that graceful, accomplished son, the designer of these rooms, was almost short and very broad, full chested, broad hipped, her hair was light brown and very luxuriant. But the face—probably at one time it had been handsome in a masculine sort of way, now—the skin was of an exceedingly coarse texture, lined with innumerable small wrinkles and of a uniform weather-beaten red; the eyes were bloodshot, clouded; the eyes of a drunkard, or at least a heavy drinker.
"How do you do, Mr Carstairs? Do sit down."