Or some one with an immense air of innocence would remark to the world generally, "They're talkin' of rebuildin' Wimblehurst all over again, I'm told. Anybody heard anything of it? Going to make it a reg'lar smartgoin', enterprisin' place--kind of Crystal Pallas."
"Earthquake and a pestilence before you get that," my uncle would mutter, to the infinite delight of every one, and add something inaudible about "Cold Mutton Fat."...
III
We were torn apart by a financial accident to my uncle of which I did not at first grasp the full bearings. He had developed what I regarded as an innocent intellectual recreation which he called stock-market meteorology. I think he got the idea from one use of curves in the graphic presentation of associated variations that he saw me plotting. He secured some of my squared paper and, having cast about for a time, decided to trace the rise and fall of certain lines and railways. "There's something in this, George," he said, and I little dreamt that among other things that were in it, was the whole of his spare money and most of what my mother had left to him in trust for me.
"It's as plain as can be," he said. "See, here's one system of waves and here's another! These are prices for Union Pacifics--extending over a month. Now next week, mark my words, they'll be down one whole point. We're getting near the steep part of the curve again. See? It's absolutely scientific. It's verifiable. Well, and apply it! You buy in the hollow and sell on the crest, and there you are!"
I was so convinced of the triviality of this amusement that to find at last that he had taken it in the most disastrous earnest overwhelmed me.
He took me for a long walk to break it to me, over the hills towards Yare and across the great gorse commons by Hazelbrow.
"There are ups and downs in life, George," he said--halfway across that great open space, and paused against the sky...."I left out one factor in the Union Pacific analysis."
"DID you?" I said, struck by the sudden chance in his voice.
"But you don't mean?"
I stopped and turned on him in the narrow sandy rut of pathway and he stopped likewise.
"I do, George. I DO mean. It's bust me! I'm a bankrupt here and now."
"Then--?"
"The shop's bust too. I shall have to get out of that."
"And me?"
"Oh, you!--YOU'RE all right. You can transfer your apprenticeship, and--er--well, I'm not the sort of man to be careless with trust funds, you can be sure. I kept that aspect in mind. There's some of it left George--trust me!--quite a decent little sum."
"But you and aunt?"
"It isn't QUITE the way we meant to leave Wimblehurst, George; but we shall have to go. Sale; all the things shoved about and ticketed--lot a hundred and one. Ugh!... It's been a larky little house in some ways. The first we had. Furnishing--a spree in its way.... Very happy..." His face winced at some memory. "Let's go on, George," he said shortly, near choking, I could see.
I turned my back on him, and did not look round again for a little while.
"That's how it is, you see, George." I heard him after a time.
When we were back in the high road again he came alongside, and for a time we walked in silence.
"Don't say anything home yet," he said presently. "Fortunes of War. I got to pick the proper time with Susan--else she'll get depressed. Not that she isn't a first-rate brick whatever comes along."
"All right," I said, "I'll be careful"; and it seemed to me for the time altogether too selfish to bother him with any further inquiries about his responsibility as my trustee. He gave a little sigh of relief at my note of assent, and was presently talking quite cheerfully of his plans.... But he had, I remember, one lapse into moodiness that came and went suddenly.
"Those others!" he said, as though the thought had stung him for the first time.
"What others?" I asked.
"Damn them!" said he.
"But what others?"
"All those damned stick-in-the-mud-and-die-slowly tradespeople:
Ruck, the butcher, Marbel, the grocer. Snape! Gord! George, HOW they'll grin!"
I thought him over in the next few weeks, and I remember now in great detail the last talk we had together before he handed over the shop and me to his successor. For he had the good luck to sell his business, "lock, stock, and barrel"--in which expression I found myself and my indentures included. The horrors of a sale by auction of the furniture even were avoided.
I remember that either coming or going on that occasion, Ruck, the butcher, stood in his doorway and regarded us with a grin that showed his long teeth.
"You half-witted hog!" said my uncle. "You grinning hyaena"; and then, "Pleasant day, Mr. Ruck."
"Goin' to make your fortun' in London, then?" said Mr. Ruck, with slow enjoyment.
That last excursion took us along the causeway to Beeching, and so up the downs and round almost as far as Steadhurst, home. My moods, as we went, made a mingled web. By this time I had really grasped the fact that my uncle had, in plain English, robbed me; the little accumulations of my mother, six hundred pounds and more, that would have educated me and started me in business, had been eaten into and was mostly gone into the unexpected hollow that ought to have been a crest of the Union Pacific curve, and of the remainder he still gave no account. I was too young and inexperienced to insist on this or know how to get it, but the thought of it all made streaks of decidedly black anger in that scheme of interwoven feelings. And you know, I was also acutely sorry for him--almost as sorry as I was for my aunt Susan. Even then I had quite found him out. I knew him to be weaker than myself; his incurable, irresponsible childishness was as clear to me then as it was on his deathbed, his redeeming and excusing imaginative silliness. Through some odd mental twist perhaps I was disposed to exonerate him even at the cost of blaming my poor old mother who had left things in his untrustworthy hands.
