The Price of Love | Page 9

murmured, with obvious emotion--
"You can't imagine what a relief it is to me!" Tears shone in her dark, mild eyes.
"Look ye!" exclaimed the trustee curtly.
He drew from his breast pocket a bank envelope of linen, and then, glancing at the table, pushed cups and saucers abruptly away to make a clear space on the white cloth. The newspaper slipped rustling to the floor on the side near the window. Already his gloves were abominable in the slop-basin, and now with a single gesture he had destroyed the symmetry of the set table. Mrs. Maldon with surpassing patience smiled sweetly, and assured herself that Mr. Batchgrew could not help it. He was a coarse male creature at large in a room highly feminized. It was his habit thus to pass through orderly interiors, distributing havoc, like a rough soldier. You might almost hear a sword clanking in the scabbard.
"Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty," he began in his heavily rolling voice to count out one by one a bundle of notes which he had taken from the envelope. He generously licked his thick, curved-back thumb for the separating of the notes, and made each note sharply click, in the manner of a bank cashier, to prove to himself that it was not two notes stuck together. "... Five-seventy, five-eighty, five-ninety, six hundred. These are all tens. Now the fives: Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five." He counted up to three hundred and sixty-five. "That's nine-sixty-five altogether. The odd sixty-five's arrear of interest. I'm investing nine hundred again to-morrow, and th' interest on th' new investment is to start from th' first o' this month. So instead of being out o'pocket, you'll be in pocket, missis."
The notes lay in two irregular filmy heaps on the table.
Having carefully returned the empty envelope to his pocket, Mr. Batchgrew sat back, triumphant, and his eye met the delighted yet disturbed eye of Mrs. Maldon, and then wavered and dodged.
Mr. Batchgrew with all his romantic qualities, lacked any perception of the noble and beautiful in life, and it could be positively asserted that his estimate of Mrs. Maldon was chiefly disdainful. But of Mrs. Maldon's secret opinion about John Batchgrew nothing could be affirmed with certainty. Nobody knew it or ever would know it. I doubt whether Mrs. Maldon had whispered it even to herself. In youth he had been the very intimate friend of her husband. Which fact would scarcely tally with Mrs. Maldon's memory of her husband as the most upright and perspicacious of men--unless on the assumption that John Batchgrew's real characteristics had not properly revealed themselves until after his crony's death; this assumption was perhaps admissible. Mrs. Maldon invariably spoke of John Batchgrew with respect and admiration. She probably had perfect confidence in him as a trustee, and such confidence was justified, for the Councillor knew as well as anybody in what fields rectitude was a remunerative virtue, and in what fields it was not.
Indeed, as a trustee his sense of honour and of duty was so nice that in order to save his ward from loss in connection with a depreciating mortgage security, he had invented, as a Town Councillor, the "Improvement" known as the "Brougham Street Scheme." If this was not said outright, it was hinted. At any rate, the idea was fairly current that had not Councillor Batchgrew been interested in Brougham Street property, the Brougham Street Scheme, involving the compulsory purchase of some of that property at the handsome price naturally expected from the munificence of corporations, would never have come into being.
Mrs. Maldon knew of the existence of the idea, which had been obscurely referred to by a licensed victualler (inimically prejudiced against the teetotaller in Mr. Batchgrew) at a Council meeting reported in the Signal. And it was precisely this knowledge which had imparted to her glance the peculiar disturbed quality that had caused Mr. Batchgrew to waver and dodge.
The occasion demanded the exercise of unflinching common sense, and Mrs. Maldon was equal to it. She very wisely decided that she ought not to concern herself, and could not concern herself, with an aspect of the matter which concerned her trustee alone. And therefore she gave her heart entirely up to an intense gladness at the integral recovery of the mortgage money.
For despite her faith in the efficiency of her trustee, Mrs. Maldon would worry about finance; she would yield to an exquisitely painful dread lest "anything should happen"--happen, that is, to prevent her from dying in the comfortable and dignified state in which she had lived. Her income was not large--a little under three hundred pounds a year--but with care it sufficed for her own wants, and for gifts, subscriptions, and an occasional carriage. There would have been a small margin but for the constant rise