The Man of Gold (7 page)

She expected some sharp denial of the possibility of any
such deliberating. And indeed she recognised that she was once again promising something hardly in human nature to perform. But the response she got was very different.

‘I must have it,’ the old man said. ‘I must have safety. You would not deny me that? Add to add, add to add, it is the only way. Add to add and add to add, and it adds to safety at the last.’

Miss Unwin thought at one time that this pronouncing of his creed was to be the last words the old miser ever spoke. Because, no sooner had he uttered them, leaning yet more forward towards her, than he gave a single high-pitched scream of pain, wrapped both arms round his stomach in an uncontrollable gesture and fell forward on the desk in front of her, unconscious.

Miss Unwin, after a moment of shocked inability to move, rose from her chair, felt at the old man’s forehead, gathered from the damp heat there that he was not dead, for all that the extreme agony of this bout might have meant it had been fatal, and hurried at once to summon assistance.

The clerk, whom she had spoken to at the top of the stairs, proved to be a person not easily flustered. He summoned two hulking fellows from the machines below and between them they carried the old man across to the house and laid him on his bed.

Little of those minutes remained clear in Miss Unwin’s head afterwards. But she recalled with a sort of pity seeing how bare and chill the old man’s bedroom was, no more comfortable than her own small chamber on the floor above. And, later still, she realised that the bed on to which the two operatives had lowered that little body was plainly still the marriage bed where, some thirty years before, a young wife had died after childbirth and that old man had, looking down at her lifeless corpse, resolved on his course of ever-gathering penny-pinching.

But even while she was wondering, as the two burly operatives dipping and ducking left the room, whether
she should send for medical assistance and indeed whom she should send for the old man’s eyelids fluttered open.

Miss Unwin approached more closely to the bed.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘you are gravely ill. You collapsed while we were talking at the works and have been carried back here. Please tell me who is your physician. I am certain he ought to be summoned.’

‘Oh, yes,’ came the feeble croaking reply. ‘Summoned to hold out his hand for his seven shillings and sixpence. No, I want no doctor.’

‘But, sir –’

‘No, I tell you. No. Leave me to rest and in an hour I shall be as right as ever I was.’

‘Very well, sir, I will send for no one,’ Miss Unwin answered, wary of provoking perhaps yet another attack. ‘But let me at least stay with you until your son returns.’

She received no answer to that, and took it for agreement.

So for an hour more she sat in the old miser’s bare room and watched over him as he lay, eyes closed, occasionally giving a quiet groan but otherwise silent. At the end of the hour Richard Partington came in, having gone back to the pin works and heard what had happened. His open round face wore a look of sharp worry. Miss Unwin felt at once more sorry for him than she was for his father.

But she knew, too, that in telling him what had happened she must take the greatest care not to let slip the reason for this latest attack, to give no hint of what it was she herself had had to go to see the old man about.

Luckily Richard was so concerned that he failed to ask why she had been at the works when the attack had occurred.

‘Your father is insistent that no doctor should be called,’ she said in the quiet whisper of the sick room as they stood together at its door.

Richard frowned.

‘He ought to have medical attention,’ he said. ‘I know
that he ought. These attacks are becoming increasingly frequent. But–D’

He broke off. Yet Miss Unwin had no difficulty in completing his sentence in her head.
But he is as obstinate as the devil, and I do not dare cross him
.

Instead she asked an almost meaningless, soothing question. The answer she got was to give her, later, much food for thought. But at the time it did not at all occur to her that it was more than a reply equally soothing to both of them.

‘How long is it that these attacks have been occurring?’ she asked.

‘Oh, not for very long,’ Richard answered. ‘He was as healthy as could be until a year or so ago. Otherwise I should never have left him to go and stay with Miss Fulcher down at Stavely.’

‘No, I am sure that you would not,’ Miss Unwin replied, thinking at that moment no more of it.

They stood for a while in silence. The heavy breathing of the sick man was all too easy to hear.

At last Richard spoke again.

‘But what if he should die?’ he asked. ‘What if he should die and I have done nothing to bring him medical assistance?’

Miss Unwin hardly knew what response to make. Part of her wanted to say that old Mr Partington would not die, that Richard was right to heed his request not to have a doctor. But another part of her knew that the old man was terribly ill. He could die at any time, and if he did so without having had the benefit of medical advice the burden would lie heavy on his son.

She did not speak immediately in answer to his unspoken plea for comfort. And before she had found in her mind any reply to make he had voiced aloud another more urgent plea.

‘Oh, Miss Unwin, you are the only person I feel I can trust in. Tell me what I should do.’

He reached forward then and grasped her hand.

Gently as she could she freed herself.

‘Mr Partington, I cannot, whether I wish it or not, give you such advice. I am not the person you should ask.’

He made an effort to regain her hand, and this spurred her on to say what she had hesitated to add before.

‘No, sir, if you must have advice, and I can see that you feel you must, there is someone – there is a lady who, surely, has the right to be asked for that assistance.’

‘Miss Fulcher,’ Richard answered dully. ‘Cousin Cornelia. How can –’

‘No, sir,’ Miss Unwin broke in, answering more the dismissive tone of his voice than the words he had yet to utter. ‘No, sir, I must not hear what you were about to say. I must not.’

Richard Partington fell silent then. They stood together in the gloom of the passageway outside the old man’s bedroom.

At last Richard gave a long sigh.

‘I suppose that once again I must go against my better judgment,’ he said, ‘and acquiesce in my father’s decision. We will send for no medical assistance, and we will hope.’

Hope seemed answered in the days that followed. The old miser began gradually to recover from the attack, worse though it had been by far than any he had had before. When, at the end of a week in which he had kept his bed, once again Captain Fulcher and his sister were due to come to dine he announced that he would be present and would go back to the pin works next day.

‘I dare say things will have got into a pretty state there,’ Miss Unwin heard him say to his son as she made her way past his half-open door with her charges. ‘You never had a head for business.’

‘No, father, I suppose I have not. At least I have never disguised from you that it is an occupation I dislike.’

‘But you are happy enough to live in idleness on what that business brings in, such as it is.’

‘Come, father, I do not live in idleness.’

‘I say you do, sir. Oh, I know that you sit at your desk during the hours of business. But you put no willingness into what you do. And you never have.’

‘Well, father, I have not disguised from you either that I believe a manager could look after the works better than myself, and that they provide ample means to pay such a person and for both of us to live in comfort on the profits.’

‘Comfort, comfort. You dare talk to me of comfort. I do not want comfort. And nor should you. There is something a deal more worth having than comfort.’

‘And what is that, sir?’

Miss Unwin tried then to urge the twins onwards so that she might not hear the old miser’s answer. Because she knew too well what it would be. But the girls had been fascinated by the dispute and were lingering unashamedly to hear more.

Miss Unwin gestured them onwards. But in vain. The word she had not wanted to hear was spoken.

‘Safety,’ came the old man’s voice from behind the half-open door. ‘Safety, you poor fool, that is what makes it all worth the doing. Safety. Safety. Safety.’

Miss Unwin put a hand to the small of Maria’s back and another to Louisa and pushed.

Safety, safety, safety
. The old miser’s words rang in her ears as she urged the girls into their room. But she did not know then that they were to be all but the last she would hear him speak.

Miss Unwin had not expected that she would see old Mr Partington downstairs early, though she had been ready to find him in the dining room with the Fulchers when she came down with the twins for dinner. But he was absent. Richard, too, was not in the room. Presumably he was still assisting his father to dress.

So Miss Unwin had the task of making polite conversation to the Fulchers, especially since she thought it important to avoid the twins attacking the Captain once more. It was, after all, possible that he had not yet listened acutely enough to their teasing prattle to have discovered from it Mr Partington’s secret. If that were so, whatever she could do to keep that state of affairs she must.

‘I am afraid, Miss Fulcher, you will find Mr Partington very much less well than at the time of your last visit,’ she said.

Miss Fulcher’s thin, raw-red nose lifted disparagingly.

The air of London. Little wonder that Mr Partington does not keep good health.’

‘I am afraid that it is worse than that,’ Miss Unwin allowed herself to answer with some sharpness. ‘Mr Partington suffered a grave seizure a week ago. He became unconscious. We had to carry him from the works to his bed, and he is leaving that only now.’

‘All work and no play,’ Captain Fulcher boomed in. ‘Always said toiling away at a damned desk did a fellow no good.’

‘It was not his toil that brought on the attack,’ Miss Unwin answered, yet more sharply.

At once she regretted the remark.

‘Not his toil?’ Cousin Cornelia said. ‘Then, pray, Miss, what was the cause of the onset?’

‘It was – It was –’

Miss Unwin sought inspiration. And found it in the nick of time.

‘It appears to have been something he had eaten,’ she said.

‘Eaten, eh?’ Captain Fulcher brayed. ‘Shouldn’t have thought the fellow ever ate enough to do anybody any harm. Or drank enough.’

He turned abruptly away and began to open the two bottles of sherry which in his customary way he had brought with him.

‘And where is my dear Cousin Richard?’ Miss Fulcher asked with a fearful simper.

Miss Unwin thought of the sharply certain way in which only a week before, when they had been so concerned about old Mr Partington’s refusal of a doctor, Richard had rejected the idea of Cousin Cornelia being the person from whom he ought above all to ask advice.

‘I expect he is assisting his father,’ she answered. ‘I am afraid that Mr Partington

She broke off.

On the stairs outside there had come the sound of urgent pounding steps. A moment later the door was flung open and Richard stood there, white faced.

‘Father, father,’ he said. ‘I – I think that – that he may be dead.’

Cousin Cornelia took a step backwards away from him. From her brother there came a snorted ‘Well, really.’

Miss Unwin decided at once that she must see for herself what the old man’s state really was. Richard had said only that he might be dead.

She brushed past him as he stood, still holding the knob of the door he had thrust open, visibly trembling with
shock. She took the stairs at an unladylike run and without ceremony went straight into the old man’s room.

She found him lying on the floor, and for an instant she thought that a last attack had indeed laid him low. But before she had time even to kneel and examine the little, half-dressed body a faint groan came.

Carefully as she could she rolled the old miser over. The sight of his face made her think that, if he was living still, he could not be far from the end. Even the projecting ears on either side of the enormous white skull were now devoid of colour while the rest of his countenance was an appalling grey.

She began to chafe his hands, not knowing what else there was that could be done.

After a little she became aware that Richard had broken free of the trance that seemed to have struck him after he had made his announcement in the dining room. He was standing looking down at her.

‘What happened?’ she asked, continuing to rub and rub at the old man’s icy hands.

‘I feared he was not well,’ Richard answered. ‘He seemed so lethargic when he tried to dress. But he was adamant that he would come down to dine. He said –’

Richard checked as if some thick scarf had been wrapped suddenly across his mouth.

‘He said,’ he went on at last in a curiously hollow voice, ‘that if I was too weak to win Cousin Cornelia for myself he would see to the business for me.’

Miss Unwin was aware that Richard had said what he ought never to have allowed himself to say. But before she could in her turn say a word to indicate that she had not heard him, or had not fully understood, she felt in the hand she held between her mechanically rubbing fingers a faint twitch.

‘I believe he is recovering,’ she said. ‘Perhaps this may not be what we had feared.’

Certainly the old miser began to show further signs of life. His eyelids fluttered. A faint pinkness began to creep back into his lips. He stirred.

‘Where-Where-’

‘Hush,’ Miss Unwin said. ‘You had another attack, sir. You fell to the floor. But we can get you to bed again in a moment. You will be better there.’

The old man did not answer, and Miss Unwin resumed the vigorous chafing that had seemed to restore him.

After a little two more words came from his still almost bloodless lips.

‘No-doctor.’