“Old fellows got sons--sometimes,” said Sir Charles, “City men, rolling in money, don’t you know?”
“One knows all those sort of people,” said Lady Jane; “you could count them on your fingers; and they go in for rank, &c., not for other millionaires. No, Charlie, I don’t see any call you have to be so discouraged. Why did you come in looking such a whipped dog? It will be all over the island in no time and through the regiment that you have been refused by Stella Tredgold. The father’s nothing. The father was quite sure to refuse. Rather picturesque that about laying down pound for pound, isn’t it? It makes one think of a great table groaning under heaps of gold.”
“Jove!” said Sir Charles. “Old beggar said shillin’ for shillin’. Had a heap of silver--got it like a fool--didn’t see what he was driving at--paid it out on the table.” He pulled his moustache to the very roots and uttered a short and cavernous laugh. “Left it there, by Jove!--all my change,” he cried; “not a blessed thruppenny to throw to little girl at gate.”
“Left it there?” said Lady Jane--“on the table?” Her gravity was overpowered by this detail. “Upon my word, Charlie Somers, for all your big moustache and your six feet and your experiences, I declare I don’t think there ever was such a simpleton born.”
Somers bore her laughter very steadily. He was not unused to it. The things in which he showed himself a simpleton were in relation to the things in which he was prematurely wise as three to a hundred; but yet there were such things. And he was free to acknowledge that leaving his seventeen shillings spread out on the millionaire’s table, or even taking the millionaire’s challenge _au pied de la lettre_, was the act of a simpleton. He stood tranquilly with his back to the fire till Lady Jane had got her laugh out. Then she resumed with a sort of apology:
“It was too much for me, Charlie. I could not help laughing. What will become of all that money, I wonder? Will he keep it and put it to interest? I should like to have seen him after you were gone. I should like to have seen him afterwards, when Stella had her knife at his throat, asking him what he meant by it. You may trust to Stella, my dear boy. She will soon bring her father to reason. He may be all sorts of queer things to you, but he can’t stand against her. She can twist him round her little finger. If it had been Katherine I should not have been so confident. But Stella--he never has refused anything to Stella since ever she was born.”