The Lion's Share. Arnold Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ it. The chairman has a typewriter, and father means to be the next chairman. You’ll see. … Oh! What’s that? Listen!”

      “What’s what?”

      A faint distant throbbing could be heard.

      “It’s the motor! He’s coming back for something. Fly out of here, Winnie, fly!”

      Audrey felt sick at the thought that if her father had returned only a few minutes earlier he might have trapped her at the safe itself. She still kept one hand behind her.

      Miss Ingate, who with all her qualities was rather easily flustered, ran out of the dangerous room in Audrey’s wake. They met Mr. Mathew Moze at the half-landing of the stairs.

      He was a man of average size, somewhat past sixty years. He had plump cheeks, tinged with red; his hair, moustache and short, full beard, were quite grey. He wore a thick wide-spreading ulster, and between his coat and waistcoat a leather vest, and on his head a grey cap. Put him in the Strand in town clothes, and he might have been taken for a clerk, a civil servant, a club secretary, a retired military officer, a poet, an undertaker—for anything except the last of a long line of immovable squires who could not possibly conceive what it was not to be the owner of land. His face was preoccupied and overcast, but as soon as he realised that Miss Ingate was on the stairs it instantly brightened into a warm and rather wistful smile.

      “Good morning, Miss Ingate,” he greeted her with deferential cordiality. “I’m so glad to see you back.”

      “Good morning, good morning, Mr. Moze,” responded Miss Ingate. “Vehy nice of you. Vehy nice of you.”

      Nobody would have guessed from their demeanour that they differed on every subject except their loyalty to that particular corner of Essex, that he regarded her and her political associates as deadly microbes in the national organism, and that she regarded him as a nincompoop crossed with a tyrant. Each of them had a magic glass to see in the other nothing but a local Effendi and familiar guardian angel of Moze. Moreover, Mr. Moze’s public smile and public manner were irresistible—until he lost his temper. He might have had friends by the score, had it not been for his deep constitutional reserve—due partly to diffidence and partly to an immense hidden conceit. Mr. Moze’s existence was actuated, though he knew it not, by the conviction that the historic traditions of England were committed to his keeping. Hence the conceit, which was that of a soul secretly self-dedicated.

      Audrey, outraged by the hateful hypocrisy of persons over fifty, and terribly constrained and alarmed, turned vaguely back up the stairs. Miss Ingate, not quite knowing what she did, with an equal vagueness followed her.

      “Come in. Do come in,” urged Mr. Moze at the door of the study.

      Audrey, who remained on the landing, heard her elders talk smoothly of grave Mozian things, while Mr. Moze unlocked the new tin box above the safe.

      “I’d forgotten a most important paper,” said he, as he relocked the box. “I have an appointment with the Bishop of Colchester at ten-forty-five, and I fear I may be late. Will you excuse me, Miss Ingate?”

      She excused him.

      Departing, he put the paper into his pocket with a careful and loving gesture that well symbolised his passionate affection for the Society of which he was already the vice-chairman. He had been a member of the National Reformation Society for eleven years. Despite the promise of its name, this wealthy association of idealists had no care for reforms in a sadly imperfect England. Its aim was anti-Romanist. The Reformation which it had in mind was Luther’s, and it wished, by fighting an alleged insidious revival of Roman Catholicism, to make sure that so far as England was concerned Luther had not preached in vain.

      Mr. Moze’s connection with the Society had originated in a quarrel between himself and a Catholic priest from Ipswich who had instituted a boys’ summer camp on the banks of Mozewater near the village of Moze. Until that quarrel, the exceeding noxiousness of the Papal doctrine had not clearly presented itself to Mr. Moze. In such strange ways may an ideal come to birth. As Mr. Moze, preoccupied and gloomy once more, steered himself rapidly out of Moze towards the episcopal presence, the image of the imperturbable and Jesuitical priest took shape in his mind, refreshing his determination to be even with Rome at any cost.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

THE THIEF’S PLAN WRECKED

       Table of Contents

      “The fact is,” said Audrey, “father has another woman in the house now.”

      Mr. Moze had left Miss Ingate in the study and Audrey had cautiously rejoined her there.

      “Another woman in the house!” repeated Miss Ingate, sitting down in happy expectation. “What on earth do you mean? Who on earth do you mean?”

      “I mean me.”

      “You aren’t a woman, Audrey.”

      “I’m just as much of a woman as you are. All father’s behaviour proves it.”

      “But your father treats you as a child.”

      “No, he doesn’t. He treats me as a woman. If he thought I was a child he wouldn’t have anything to worry about. I’m over nineteen.”

      “You don’t look it.”

      “Of course I don’t. But I could if I liked. I simply won’t look it because I don’t care to be made ridiculous. I should start to look my age at once if father stopped treating me like a child.”

      “But you’ve just said he treats you as a woman!”

      “You don’t understand, Winnie,” said the girl sharply. “Unless you’re pretending. Now you’ve never told me anything about yourself, and I’ve always told you lots about myself. You belong to an old-fashioned family. How were you treated when you were my age?”

      “In what way?”

      “You know what way,” said Audrey, gazing at her.

      “Well, my dear. Things seemed to come very naturally, somehow.”

      “Were you ever engaged?”

      “Me? Oh, no!” answered Miss Ingate with tranquillity. “I’m vehy interested in them. Oh, vehy! Oh, vehy! And I like talking to them. But anything more than that gets on my nerves. My eldest sister was the one. Oh! She was the one. She refused eleven men, and when she was going to be married she made me embroider the monograms of all of them on the skirt of her wedding-dress. She made me, and I had to do it. I sat up all night the night before the wedding to finish them.”

      “And what did the bridegroom say about it?”

      “The bridegroom didn’t say anything about it because he didn’t know. Nobody knew except Arabella and me. She just wanted to feel that the monograms were on her dress, that was all.”

      “How СКАЧАТЬ