“Jill.”
“Yes?”
Uncle Chris paused again, searching for the best means of saying what had to be said.
“Jill, I don’t know if you understand about these things, but there was what is called a slump on the Stock Exchange this morning. In other words —”
Jill laughed.
“Of course I know all about that,” she said. “Poor Freddie wouldn’t talk about anything else till I made him. He was terribly blue when he got here this afternoon. He said he had got ‘nipped’ in Amalgamated Dyes. He had lost about two hundred pounds, and was furious with a friend of his who had told him to buy margins.”
Uncle Chris cleared his throat.
“Jill, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you. I bought Amalgamated Dyes, too.” He worried his mustache. “I lost heavily, very heavily.”
“How naughty of you! You know you oughtn’t to gamble.”
“Jill, you must be brave. I—I—well, the fact is—it’s no good beating about the bush—I lost everything! Everything!”
“Everything?”
“Everything! It’s all gone! All fooled away. It’s a terrible business. This house will have to go.”
“But—but doesn’t the house belong to me?”
“I was your trustee, dear.” Uncle Chris smoked furiously. “Thank heaven you’re going to marry a rich man!”
Jill stood looking at him, perplexed. Money, as money, had never entered into her life. There were things one wanted, which had to be paid for with money, but Uncle Chris had always looked after that. She had taken them for granted.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
And then suddenly she realized that she did, and a great wave of pity for Uncle Chris flooded over her. He was such an old dear. It must be horrible for him to have to stand there, telling her all this. She felt no sense of injury, only the discomfort of having to witness the humiliation of her oldest friend. Uncle Chris was bound up inextricably with everything in her life that was pleasant. She could remember him, looking exactly the same, only with a thicker and wavier crop of hair, playing with her patiently and unwearied for hours in the hot sun, a cheerful martyr. She could remember sitting up with him when she came home from her first grown-up dance, drinking cocoa and talking and talking and talking till the birds outside sang the sun high up into the sky and it was breakfast-time. She could remember theatres with him, and jolly little suppers afterwards; expeditions into the country, with lunches at queer old inns; days on the river, days at Hurlingham, days at Lords’, days at the Academy. He had always been the same, always cheerful, always kind. He was Uncle Chris, and he would always be Uncle Chris, whatever he had done or whatever he might do. She slipped her arm in his and gave it a squeeze.
“Poor old thing!” she said.
Uncle Chris had been looking straight out before him with those fine blue eyes of his. There had been just a touch of sternness in his attitude. A stranger, coming into the room at that moment, would have said that here was a girl trying to coax her blunt, straightforward, military father into some course of action of which his honest nature disapproved. He might have been posing for a statue of Rectitude. As Jill spoke, he seemed to cave in.
“Poor old thing?” he repeated limply.
“Of course you are! And stop trying to look dignified and tragic! Because it doesn’t suit you. You’re much too well dressed.”
“But, my dear, you don’t understand! You haven’t realized!”
“Yes, I do. Yes, I have!”
“I’ve spent all your money—your money!”
“I know! What does it matter?”
“What does it matter! Jill, don’t you hate me?”
“As if anyone could hate an old darling like you!”
Uncle Chris threw away his cigar, and put his arms round Jill. For a moment a dreadful fear came to her that he was going to cry. She prayed that he wouldn’t cry. It would be too awful. It would be a memory of which she could never rid herself. She felt as though he were someone extraordinarily young and unable to look after himself, someone she must soothe and protect.