"Pip" Part 28

She looked up at him with s.h.i.+ning eyes. Pip saw them, and permitted himself one brief gaze. This was no time for tender pa.s.sages. He put his hand in his pocket and produced a rather crumpled envelope.

"Would you mind giving that to the Squire for me?" he said. "I have to go away."

"Go away? Oh, Pip! Now?"

"Yes, you see, I have just--"

"But are you going to leave me in the house with that man?" cried Elsie, with a sudden access of her old terror.

"If I am any judge of human nature," said Pip, "he is out of the house by this time. I don't think he will even wait for his luggage. He--he's not very presentable. I see the trap has come round for him. It can take me instead, and I'll cart his luggage up to town and leave it at his club. I owe him some consideration," he added, surveying his knuckles thoughtfully.

Elsie acquiesced.

"Yes, that will be best," she said. "The Ch.e.l.ls will think he went off in the ordinary way, and n.o.body will ever know--Pip, it was awful."

She broke off, and shuddered again and again.

"I should go and lie down till dinner if I were you," said Pip gently.

"All over now: forget it. Good-bye."

They shook hands and walked to the door together.

"Why are you going away like this?" said Elsie, as the groom piled the luggage into the trap.

Pip's face clouded.

"I'm ashamed to say that what has happened made me forget for a bit," he said. "I have just had a wire from Pipette--I say, here is the whole cricket-party coming across the lawn! I simply can't face them now. I could have told you about it, but not them. Good-bye, and--good-bye. I shall see you again soon, I hope."

He jumped into the cart, and was rattling down the drive by the time that the cricketers and their attendant throng, hot, noisy, and jubilant, burst like a wave into the hall. Elsie turned hastily from a window as they entered.

"Hallo, Elsie," cried Raven Innes, "what are you doing here?"

"Rather a headache, Raven. I have stayed in since tea," said Elsie.

"You certainly don't look very well, dear," said Mrs. Ch.e.l.l.

"You missed a great finish," said c.o.c.kles.

"Only two wickets," shrieked the flapper.

"Yes," added the Squire, "and if one of them had gone down we should have been dished. Pip deserted. Where was the ruffian? Have you seen anything of him, my dear?"

"Yes," said Elsie; "he was here just now."

One or two knowing smiles illuminated the honest faces of the cricketers.

"He came up," she continued composedly, "about four, and hurried away to catch the five-thirty train. He has just gone. He gave me this note for you, Mr. Ch.e.l.l."

The Squire took the note and read it, and his jolly face grew grave.

"Poor fellow!" he said soberly.

"What is it?" said everybody.

"Pip has had a wire from his sister to say that his father died suddenly this morning--heart failure. Pip has slipped away by the afternoon train: he did not want to spoil our fun. He asks me to say good-bye to all of you from him."

CHAPTER VIII

LIFE AT FIRST-HAND

I

PIP reached London that evening to find the great gloomy house in Westock Square shuttered and silent. His father's brougham had driven up as usual at lunch-time, after the morning round, and its owner had been discovered lying in a dead faint inside it. He had been carried into the house, to die--not even in his bed. Death, with whom he had waged a vicarious and more than commonly successful warfare for thirty-one years, had conquered at last, and that, too, with grim irony, in the very arena of the dead man's triumphs--his own consulting-room. The great physician lay peacefully on an operating-couch near the darkened window, surrounded by life-saving appliances and books that tell how death may be averted.

His affairs were in a hopeless tangle. He had risked almost every penny he possessed in an ill-judged effort to "get rich quick," and so provide for himself, or at any rate for his family, however sudden and direct the course that his malady might take. Half his capital had been sunk in unremunerative investments, which might or might not pay fifty per cent some day; and the other half was gone beyond recall on an unrealised antic.i.p.ation of a fall in copper shares.

A week later Pip, Pipette, and Mr. Hanbury--the latter ten years older than when we last heard of him, but not much changed except for a little reasonable adiposity--sat at dinner. It was almost the last meal they were to take in the old house, for now _res angustae_ were to be the order of the day.

The meal ended, and coffee having been served, Pipette, looking pale and pretty in her black evening frock, gave each of the men a cigar, snipping the ends herself, as she had been accustomed to do for her father; and the trio composed themselves to conversation.

"I saw Crampton to-day," said Pip. (Crampton was the family lawyer.) "He gave me the facts and figures about things. I couldn't follow all the stuff on blue paper, but I asked him questions and jotted down what I wanted."

"How does it work out?" inquired Hanbury.

"By putting what money there is in the bank into Consols, and adding the interest on the few investments that are paying anything at all, the total income of the estate comes to exactly one hundred and fifty a year," said Pip.

"So long as the capital sunk in the other investments produces nothing, that is?"

"Yes. There is a matter of fifteen thousand pounds buried in some Australian mining group: it might as well be sunk in the sea for all the good it is doing us. Of course it may turn up trumps some day, but not at present, Crampton says. So Pipette and I are worth just a hundred and fifty a year between us."

There was a silence, and the ash on Pip's cigar was perceptibly longer when he spoke again.

"A hundred and fifty," he said, "is not much use for two, but it's a comfortable little sum for one; so Pipette is going to take it all."

Pipette came round and sat on the arm of Pip's chair with the air of one who wishes to argue the point, and Pip continued hurriedly,--

"We talked it over with her this afternoon, Ham, and she agreed with me that for the present it will be best for her to accept the Rossiters'

invitation to join them on their visit to Spain and Algiers, which is to last about a year. Pipette will be able to pay her full share of the expenses, so she won't be dependent on anybody. At the same time she will be having a good time with really nice people instead of--instead of--"

"Instead of sitting all day in a two-pair-back in London?" said Hanbury.

"That's it, exactly," said Pip, grateful for this moral support. "Of course it would be ripping".--Pipette was beginning to shake, and he put his arm clumsily round her--"it would be ripping to have remained together, but it can't be done at present. In a year, perhaps. The old lady has been very sensible about it."

Apparently being "sensible" did not include abstinence from tears, for Pipette was now weeping softly. She had lost her father only a week, and now she was to lose her beloved brother.