"Why did you come here?" asked his uncle, piteously. "Why did you come here at all? We got on very well without you—very well and comfortably, indeed."
This seemed a feeble sort of bleat. But, in fact, the Bunker's mind was for the moment prostrated. He had no sound resistance left.
"I offered you," he went on, "twenty-five pounds—to go. I'll double it—there. I'll give you fifty pounds to go, if you'll go at once. So that there will be an end to all this trouble."
"Consider," said Harry, "there's the rent of Miss Kennedy's house—sixty-five pounds a year for that; there's the house in Beaumont Square—fifty for that; and the house in Redman's Row at five-and-twenty at least: comes to a hundred and forty pounds a year, which you have drawn, my precious uncle, for twenty-one years at least. That makes, without counting interest, two thousand nine hundred and forty pounds. And you want to buy me off for fifty pounds!"
"Not half the money—not half the money!" his uncle groaned. "There's repairs and painting—and bad tenants; not half the money."
"We will say, then," lightly replied his nephew, as if nine hundred were a trifle, "we will say two thousand pounds. The heir to that property has come back; he says, 'Give me my houses, and give me an account of the discharge of your trust.' Now"—Harry rose from the table on which he had been sitting—"let us have no more bounce: the game is up. I have in my pocket—here," he tapped his coat-pocket, "the original deed itself. Do you want to know where it was found? Behind a safe at the Brewery, where it was hidden by your brother-in-law, Bob Coppin, with all the country notes which got Josephus into a mess. As for the date I will remind you that it was executed about thirty-five years ago, when my mother was still a girl and unmarried, and you had recently married her sister. I have the deed here. What is more, it has been seen by the chief accountant at the Brewery, who gave it me. Bunker, the game is up."
He moved toward the door.
"Have you anything to say before I go? I am now going straight to a lawyer."
"What is the—the—lowest—O good Lord!—the very lowest figure that you will take to square it? Oh! be merciful; I am a poor man, indeed a very poor man, though they think me warm. Yet I must scrape and save to get along at all."
"Two thousand," said Harry.