“Never mind! You shall see! And you shall have five per cent. for pin money as we go along.”
Nancy smiled, not realising what damage that runaway sigh had done her, not suspecting the volcanic anger that was hidden beneath her husband’s smooth words.
“Do as you like,” she said. “Leave me a couple of hundreds in the bank and you can have the rest.”
It was better than he had expected, but he veiled his gratification and appeared to hesitate.
“I shall be able to manage,” he said finally. “I should like to launch out, but we’ll talk it over again when I’ve had a chat with the bank manager. It ’ud pay you to sell your investments; but there’s always the property for additional security, of course. Besides, I’m not captain yet. Baldwin’s still on the bridge.”
He laughed and stretched himself. Nancy wondered if he would kiss her if only on the forehead, as he had been wont to do when she had happened to please him, though not since his child had come. She half hoped he would not; yet when he left the room with no word of farewell her spirits sank.
“He does hate me,” she said to herself. “Well, after all, it makes no difference. We must live as well as we can!”
A month later the business became Inman’s. He had not spared his master in the evidence he had been called upon to give, and Baldwin had been severely lectured by Registrar, Official Receiver and various crabbed lawyers, each of whom was at pains to point out that by refusing to take the advice of such a counsellor as his foreman—a counsellor, who, as the Official Receiver remarked, had been a veritable god-out-of-the-machine if Baldwin had not been too pig-headed and intemperate to make use of him—he had brought himself and his creditors into this unenviable position. The Registrar complimented Inman on his devotion to duty and expressed his sympathy with him in the loss of so much of his savings. It was true, he said, that bills of sale were not regarded with favour by the Court, but he quite recognised that in this case it had been regarded more or less as a formality, and the readiest, if not the only method of partially securing the loan.
Baldwin, too broken already on the wheel of fortune to suffer any further pain from the hard blow he received, left the Court an undischarged bankrupt, and Inman by arrangement with the Official Receiver, obtained the goodwill of the business at a merely nominal figure, and the goodwill of the unsecured creditors for nothing at all.
It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve before the last formality was completed that left Inman master of the wrecked ship, and he hurried home to deal promptly with his predecessor.