“Yes. Times are bad just at present, so he has had to lower me to a hundred and ten.”
The collected jaws of the family fell as one jaw. Muriel herself seemed to be bearing the blow with fortitude, but the rest were stunned. Frank and Percy might have been posing for a picture of men who had lost their fountain pens.
Beneath the table the hand of Albert Potter found the hand of Muriel Coppin, and held it; and Muriel, we regret to add, turned and bestowed upon Albert a half-smile of tender understanding.
“I suppose,” said Roland, “we couldn’t get married on a hundred and ten?”
“No,” said Percy.
“No,” said Frank.
“No,” said Albert Potter.
They all spoke decidedly, but Albert the most decidedly of the three.
“Then,” said Roland regretfully, “I’m afraid we must wait.”
It seemed to be the general verdict that they must wait. Muriel said she thought they must wait. Albert Potter, whose opinion no one had asked, was quite certain that they must wait. Mrs. Coppin, between sobs, moaned that it would be best to wait. Frank and Percy, morosely devouring bread and jam, said they supposed they would have to wait. And, to end a painful scene, Roland drifted silently from the room, and went up-stairs to his own quarters.
There was a telegram on the mantel.
“Some fellows,” he soliloquized happily, as he opened it, “wouldn’t have been able to manage a little thing like that. They would have given themselves away. They would–-“
The contents of the telegram demanded his attention.
For some time they conveyed nothing to him. The thing might have been written in Hindustani.
It would have been quite appropriate if it had been, for it was from the promoters of the Calcutta Sweep, and it informed him that, as the holder of ticket number 108,694, he had drawn Gelatine, and in recognition of this fact a check for five hundred pounds would be forwarded to him in due course.
Roland’s first feeling was one of pure bewilderment. As far as he could recollect, he had never had any dealings whatsoever with these open-handed gentlemen. Then memory opened her flood-gates and swept him back to a morning ages ago, so it seemed to him, when Mr. Fineberg’s eldest son Ralph, passing through the office on his way to borrow money from his father, had offered him for ten shillings down a piece of cardboard, at the same time saying something about a sweep. Partly from a vague desire to keep in with the Fineberg clan, but principally because it struck him as rather a doggish thing to do, Roland had passed over the ten shillings; and there, as far as he had known, the matter had ended.
And now, after all this time, that simple action had borne fruit in the shape of Gelatine and a check for five hundred pounds.
Roland’s next emotion was triumph. The sudden entry of checks for five hundred pounds into a man’s life is apt to produce this result.
For the space of some minutes he gloated; and then reaction set in. Five hundred pounds meant marriage with Muriel.
His brain worked quickly. He must conceal this thing. With trembling fingers he felt for his match-box, struck a match, and burnt the telegram to ashes. Then, feeling a little better, he sat down to think the whole matter over. His meditations brought a certain amount of balm. After all, he felt, the thing could quite easily be kept a secret. He would receive the check in due course, as stated, and he would bicycle over to the neighboring town of Lexingham and start a bank-account with it. Nobody would know, and life would go on as before.
He went to bed, and slept peacefully.
It was about a week after this that he was roused out of a deep sleep at eight o’clock in the morning to find his room full of Coppins. Mr. Coppin was there in a nightshirt and his official trousers. Mrs. Coppin was there, weeping softly in a brown dressing-gown. Modesty had apparently kept Muriel from the gathering, but brothers Frank and Percy stood at his bedside, shaking him by the shoulders and shouting. Mr. Coppin thrust a newspaper at him, as he sat up blinking.
These epic moments are best related swiftly. Roland took the paper, and the first thing that met his sleepy eye and effectually drove the sleep from it was this headline:
ROMANCE OF THE CALCUTTA SWEEPSTAKES
And beneath it another in type almost as large as the first:
POOR CLERK WINS L40,000
His own name leaped at him from the printed page, and with it that of the faithful Gelatine.
Flight! That was the master-word which rang in Roland’s brain as day followed day. The wild desire of the trapped animal to be anywhere except just where he was had come upon him. He was past the stage when conscience could have kept him to his obligations. He had ceased to think of anything or any one but himself. All he asked of Fate was to remove him from Bury St. Edwards on any terms.
It may be that some inkling of his state of mind was wafted telepathically to Frank and Percy, for it can not be denied that their behavior at this juncture was more than a little reminiscent of the police force. Perhaps it was simply their natural anxiety to keep an eye on what they already considered their own private gold-mine that made them so adhesive. Certainly there was no hour of the day when one or the other was not in Roland’s immediate neighborhood. Their vigilance even extended to the night hours, and once, when Roland, having tossed sleeplessly on his bed, got up at two in the morning, with the wild idea of stealing out of the house and walking to London, a door opened as he reached the top of the stairs, and a voice asked him what he thought he was doing. The statement that he was walking in his sleep was accepted, but coldly.
It was shortly after this that, having by dint of extraordinary strategy eluded the brothers and reached the railway-station, Roland, with his ticket to London in his pocket and the express already entering the station, was engaged in conversation by old Mr. Coppin, who appeared from nowhere to denounce the high cost of living in a speech that lasted until the tail-lights of the train had vanished and Brothers Frank and Percy arrived, panting.
