Solemn steps came in at the other end, slowly advancing over the waxed and slippery floor; a solemn figure in black, more grave than ever mourner was, holding its hands folded. “Sir,” the butler said, “my mistress has sent me to tell you all is over, about a quarter of an hour ago.”
“Sir Walter Penton died, sir, about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour ago, at twenty-five minutes past three.”
The butler took out his watch and looked at it with solemnity. “Just twelve minutes since, sir, by the clock, sir.”
It cost the man a great effort not to say Sir Edward. Sir Edward it had been for twelve minutes by his watch; but the decorum and a sense that he was himself on the other side restrained him. He paused a minute, waiting for anything that might be said to him, then went back again, his footsteps sounding solemnly all the way upon the uncarpeted floor. Edward Penton sat down on one of the red chairs against the wall which the dancers had used. A more forlorn picture could not have been made. The day breaking in through the shutters, the drooping decorations, the waxed floor reflecting faintly those lines of pale light, and the man against the wall with his face hidden in his hands. He might have been a ruined spendthrift hearing of the final catastrophe of his fortune, hearing it with metaphorical propriety, amid the relics of feasting and merry-making. But no one would have recognized that picture to represent a man who had just come into his inheritance.
He met Rochford going away as he returned to the inhabited parts of the house. “I suppose I need not hesitate to congratulate you,” the lawyer said. “Sir Edward, it is not as if the poor old gentleman had been a nearer relation.”
“I don’t know what you call near. My uncle was the nearest relation I had of my name; nor why you should call him poor because he has just died.”
“I beg your pardon. I meant nothing; it is the ordinary way of talking,” said the lawyer, somewhat abashed.
“And a very inappropriate one, I think,” Edward Penton said. He had relapsed into his usual manner, in which there was always a little suppressed irritation. “I suppose there never was any possibility of producing--” He looked at the bag which Rochford carried.