‘Do you mean to say that if Anne sets her heart upon her own way, and goes against you--all our children do it more or less; one gets accustomed to it. St. John--do you mean to say----that you will change your will, and put her out of the succession?----’ Mrs. Mountford faltered over the end of her sentence, not knowing what to say.
‘There is no succession. What I have is my own to do what I like with it,’ he said sharply: and then he opened a big book which lay on the table, and began to write. It was a well-known, if tacit, signal between them, that his need of social intercourse was over, and that his wife might go; but she did not move for some time. She went on with her work, with every appearance of calm; but her mind was full of commotion. As her needle went through and through the canvas, she cast many a furtive glance at her husband turning over the pages of his big book, writing here and there a note. They had been as one for twenty years; two people who were, all the world said, most ‘united’--a couple devoted to each other. But neither did she understand what her husband meant, nor could he have believed the kind of feeling with which, across her worsted work, she kept regarding him. She had no wish but that he should live and thrive. Her position, her personal interests, her importance were all bound up in him; nevertheless, she contemplated the contingency of his death with a composure that would have horrified him, and thought with much more keen and earnest feeling of what would follow than any alarm of love as to the possibility of the speedy ending of his life produced in her. Thus the two sat within a few feet of each other, life-long companions, knowing still so little of each other--the man playing with the fears and hopes of his dependents, while smiling in his sleeve at the notion of any real occasion for those fears and hopes; the woman much more intent upon the problematical good fortune of her child than on the existence of her own other half, her closest and nearest connection, with whom her life had been so long identified. Perhaps the revelation of this feeling in her would have been the most cruel disclosure had both states of mind been made apparent to the eye of day. There was not much that was unnatural in his thoughts, for many men like to tantalise their successors, and few men realise with any warmth of imagination their own complete withdrawal from the pains and pleasures of life; but to know that his wife could look his death in the face without flinching, and think more of his will than of the event which must precede any effect it could have, would have penetrated through all his armour and opened his eyes in the most dolorous way. But he never suspected this; he thought, with true human fatuity, with a little gratified importance and vanity, of the commotion he had produced--that Anne would be ‘pulled up’ in her career by so serious a threat; that Rose would be kept ‘up to the mark’ by a flutter of hope as to the reward which might fall to her. All this it pleased him to think of. He was complacent as to the effect of his menaces and promises, but at bottom he felt them to be of no great consequence to himself--amusing rather than otherwise; for he did not in the least intend to die.