Uneasy Money | Page 3

sponge on you like this. I keep telling
you not to. I should have thought that if any one needed to keep what
little money he has got it was you.'
Certainly Lord Dawlish would have been more prudent not to have
parted with even eleven shillings, for he was not a rich man. Indeed,

with the single exception of the Earl of Wetherby, whose finances were
so irregular that he could not be said to possess an income at all, he was
the poorest man of his rank in the British Isles.
It was in the days of the Regency that the Dawlish coffers first began to
show signs of cracking under the strain, in the era of the then celebrated
Beau Dawlish. Nor were his successors backward in the spending art. A
breezy disregard for the preservation of the pence was a family trait.
Bill was at Cambridge when his predecessor in the title, his Uncle
Philip, was performing the concluding exercises of the dissipation of
the Dawlish doubloons, a feat which he achieved so neatly that when he
died there was just enough cash to pay the doctors, and no more. Bill
found himself the possessor of that most ironical thing, a moneyless
title. He was then twenty-three.
Until six months before, when he had become engaged to Claire
Fenwick, he had found nothing to quarrel with in his lot. He was not
the type to waste time in vain regrets. His tastes were simple. As long
as he could afford to belong to one or two golf clubs and have
something over for those small loans which, in certain of the numerous
circles in which he moved, were the inevitable concomitant of
popularity, he was satisfied. And this modest ambition had been
realized for him by a group of what he was accustomed to refer to as
decent old bucks, who had installed him as secretary of that aristocratic
and exclusive club, Brown's in St James Street, at an annual salary of
four hundred pounds. With that wealth, added to free lodging at one of
the best clubs in London, perfect heath, a steadily-diminishing golf
handicap, and a host of friends in every walk of life, Bill had felt that it
would be absurd not to be happy and contented.
But Claire had made a difference. There was no question of that. In the
first place, she resolutely declined to marry him on four hundred
pounds a year. She scoffed at four hundred pounds a year. To hear her
talk, you would have supposed that she had been brought up from the
cradle to look on four hundred pounds a year as small change to be
disposed of in tips and cab fares. That in itself would have been enough
to sow doubts in Bill's mind as to whether he had really got all the
money that a reasonable man needed; and Claire saw to it that these
doubts sprouted, by confining her conversation on the occasions of
their meeting almost entirely to the great theme of money, with its

minor sub-divisions of How to get it, Why don't you get it? and I'm sick
and tired of not having it.
She developed this theme to-day, not only on the stairs leading to the
grillroom, but even after they had seated themselves at their table. It
was a relief to Bill when the arrival of the waiter with food caused a
break in the conversation and enabled him adroitly to change the
subject.
'What have you been doing this morning?' he asked.
'I went to see Maginnis at the theatre.'
'Oh!'
'I had a wire from him asking me to call. They want me to call. They
want me to take up Claudia Winslow's part in the number one
company.'
'That's good.'
'Why?'
'Well--er--what I mean--well, isn't it? What I mean is, leading part, and
so forth.'
'In a touring company?'
'Yes, I see what you mean,' said Lord Dawlish, who didn't at all. He
thought rather highly of the number one companies that hailed from the
theatre of which Mr Maginnis was proprietor.
'And anyhow, I ought to have had the part in the first place instead of
when the tour's half over. They are at Southampton this week. He wants
me to join them there and go on to Portsmouth with them.'
'You'll like Portsmouth.'
'Why?'
'Well--er--good links quite near.'
'You know I don't play golf.'
'Nor do you. I was forgetting. Still, it's quite a jolly place.'
'It's a horrible place. I loathe it. I've half a mind not to go.'
'Oh, I don't know.'
'What do you mean?'
Lord Dawlish was feeling a little sorry for himself. Whatever he said
seemed to be the wrong thing. This evidently was one of the days on