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He perceived too that although Iver would not have forced his daughter's inclination, yet the marriage was very good in his eyes, the proper end and the finest crown to his own career. This had never come home to Neeld with any special force before. Iver was English of the English in his repression, in his habit of meeting both good and bad luck with well, with something like a grunt.
"It's enough to make all the difference to you," said Neeld. "It makes the action you took in giving up your position unnecessary and wrong. It restores the state of things which existed " "Before you and Mina Zabriska came to Blent and brought Mr Cholderton?" He sat smiling a moment. "Forgive me; I'm very inhospitable," he said, and offered them cigarettes and whiskey.
He looked at Neeld and found ready acquiescence in the old gentleman's approving nod. But Mina broke out impatiently "No, no, that had nothing to do with it. He never meant to speak. Blent was all the world to him. He never meant to speak." A quick remembrance flashed across her. "Were you with him in the Long Gallery last night?" she cried. "With him there for hours?" "Yes, we were there."
There was a perceptible pause; then Neeld answered primly: "I'm afraid you won't find your mother's name mentioned in Mr. Cholderton's Journal, Madame Zabriska." "How horrid!" remarked Mina, greatly disappointed; she regarded Mr Neeld with a new interest all the same.
"You have my promise," said Wilmot Edge. "And mine. But but I shall feel very awkward," sighed poor Mr Neeld. He might have added that he did feel a sudden and poignant pang of disappointment. Lived there the man who would not have liked to carry that bit of news in his portmanteau when he went out of town? At least that man was not Mr Jenkinson Neeld.
What are we to do to make her take it properly?" She gave another sob. "Oh, I'm an idiot!" she cried. "Haven't you anything to suggest, Mr Neeld?" He shrugged his shoulders peevishly. Her spirits fell again. "I see! Yes, if she if she doesn't take it properly, he'll go away again, and I'm to be ready to stay here." Another change in the barometer came in a flash.
Iver told of his life and doings, and Neeld found himself drawn to the man: he listened with interest and appreciation; he seemed brought into touch with life; he caught himself sighing over the retired inactive nature of his own occupations. He forgave Iver the hoardings about the streets; he could not forgive himself the revenge he had taken for them.
Going on, he met the Iver carriage; Iver and Neeld sat in it, side by side; they waved their hands in careless greeting and went on talking earnestly. On the outskirts of the town he came on Miss Swinkerton and Mrs Trumbler walking together.
I remember exactly how she looked and the very words that Mr Cholderton uses. 'Think of the difference it makes, the enormous difference! she said. Oh, it might have been yesterday, Mr Neeld!" Harry leapt over the window-sill and burst into the room with a laugh. "Oh, you dear silly people, you're at it again!" said he.
Neeld wore a restless, timid, uneasy air, in strong contrast to the resolute intensity of Mina's manner; she seemed to have taken and to keep the upper hand of him. "And you know what it would mean to him?" she asked. Neeld nodded; of course he knew that. "What are you going to do?" He raised his hands and let them drop again in a confession that he did not know. "I knew, and I told," she said.
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