“And this is what we pay good wages for!” she cried. “These men must be spoken to about it, my dear, immediately.”
The gardener’s wife, who opened for us the hall door, was astonished at our numbers.
“Why, what a crowd of you!” she said.
The old lady passed her haughtily.
“Come, Tom!” she cried to Mr. Thatcher. “We’ll go up-stairs and have tea in my room. Come, Lucy!”
And up-stairs, up the bare stone staircase, they went, for, as I whispered to Thatcher, it was just as well the ladies should be out of the way while we did our business.
In the great empty drawing-room we found old Crage ready waiting for us. He had dressed himself up in rusty attorney black for the occasion, and the plain kitchen-table was neatly spread with bundles of documents, title-deeds, and so forth.
As the woman showed us in, she told me he had been up all night rummaging in his old tin boxes, talking and mumbling to himself. Now he seemed quite spry and well again. I could scarcely believe, as he sat there alert and attentive, he was the same stricken, shambling old hunks I had seen the previous afternoon, dragging himself about, senile and dying. Such is the power of the will and the business instinct, prolonged even to the verge of the grave!
Brentin, who, as usual, took everything into his own hands, adopted the simplest method of dealing with him. Crage received us in complete silence, and no one spoke a word, while Brentin opened his grip and took out the notes and two or three little bags of gold. The gold he emptied into heaps and piled them round the notes.
Then, “Thirty thousand pounds,” he said, with a smile—“thirty thousand pounds! Is it a deal?”