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I only know that outside in the passage I heard the words distinctly, and therefore assume they reached round the table also. A lull in the conversation followed, but Hasluck was not thin-skinned, and the next thing I distinguished was his cheery laugh. "He's quite right," was Hasluck's comment; "that's what I am undoubtedly.
It was the high-water mark of old Hasluck's career, and, if anything, he was a little disappointed that with the dowry he had promised her Barbara had not done even better for herself. "Foreign Counts," he grumbled to me laughingly, one day, "well, I hope they're worth more in Society than they are in the City. A hundred guineas is their price there, and they're not worth that.
I allowed a week to elapse after receiving old Hasluck's letter before presenting myself at Stamford Hill. It was late one afternoon in early summer. Hasluck had not returned from the City, Mrs. Hasluck was out visiting, Miss Hasluck was in the garden. I told the supercilious footman not to trouble, I would seek her there myself.
I heard old Hasluck's smoky voice saying, "My little gell, Barbara," and I went nearer to her, moving unconsciously. "You can kiss 'er," said the smoky voice again; "she won't bite." But I did not kiss her. Nor ever felt I wanted to, upon the mouth. I suppose she must have been about fourteen, and I a little over ten, though tall for my age.
Many folks have I met since, recipients of Hasluck's half-crowns many a man who has slapped his pocket and blessed the day he first met that "Napoleon of Finance," as later he came to be known among his friends but it ever ended so; coloured glass and cut fingers. Is it fairy gold that he and his kind fling round? It would seem to be.
The things I made up my mind to buy and then decided that I wouldn't buy! Even my patient mother began to show signs of irritation. It was rapidly assuming the dimensions of a family curse, was old Hasluck's half-crown. Then one day I made up my mind, and so ended the trouble.
"Well, old Noel Hasluck's not exactly a fool," he assented, "but I'd like myself better if I could talk about something else than business, and didn't drop my aitches. And so would my little gell." "You have a daughter?" asked my mother, with whom a child, as a bond of sympathy with the stranger took the place assigned by most women to disrespectful cooks and incompetent housemaids.
To me personally, old Hasluck's coming and all that followed thereupon made perhaps more difference than to any one else. My father now was busy all the day; if not in his office, then away in the grim city of the giants, as I still thought of it; while to my mother came every day more social and domestic duties; so that for a time I was left much to my own resources.
Our worldly affairs, under the sunshine of old Hasluck's round red face, prospered for awhile; and one afternoon my father, who had been away from home since breakfast time, calling me into his office where also sat my mother, informed me that the long-talked-of school was become at last a concrete thing. "The term commences next week," explained my father.
It was the first money I ever remember having to spend, that half-crown of old Hasluck's; suggestions of the delights to be derived from a new pair of gloves for Sunday, from a Latin grammar, which would then be all my own, and so on, having hitherto displaced all less exalted visions concerning the disposal of chance coins coming into my small hands.
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