She was down to breakfast on the morning of her birthday. Paul watched her face as she read her letters. He knew the lawyer’s letter. As his mother read it, her face hardened and became more expressionless. Then a cold, determined look came on her mouth. She hid the letter under the pile of others, and said not a word about it.
‘Didn’t you have anything nice in the post for your birthday, mother?’ said Paul.
‘Quite moderately nice,’ she said, her voice cold and absent.
She went away to town without saying more.
But in the afternoon Uncle Oscar appeared. He said Paul’s mother had had a long interview with the lawyer, asking if the whole five thousand could not be advanced at once, as she was in debt.
‘What do you think, uncle?’ said the boy.
‘I leave it to you, son.’
‘Oh, let her have it, then! We can get some more with the other,’ said the boy.
‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, laddie!’ said Uncle Oscar.
‘But I’m sure to know for the Grand National; or the Lincolnshire; or else the Derby.[55] I’m sure to know for one of them,’ said Paul.
So Uncle Oscar signed the agreement, and Paul’s mother touched the whole five thousand. Then something very curious happened. The voices in the house suddenly went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening. There were certain new furnishings, and Paul had a tutor. He was really going to Eton, his father’s school, in the following autumn. There were flowers in the winter, and a blossoming of the luxury Paul’s mother had been used to. And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of mimosa and almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: ‘There must be more money! Oh-h-h! There must be more money! Oh, now, now-w! now-w-w — there must be more money! — more than ever! More than ever!’
It frightened Paul terribly. He studied away at his Latin and Greek with his tutors. But his intense hours were spent with Bassett. The Grand National had gone by: he had not ‘known,’ and had lost a hundred pounds. Summer was at hand. He was in agony for the Lincoln. But even for the Lincoln he didn’t ‘know,’ and he lost fifty pounds. He became wild-eyed and strange, as if something were going to explode in him.
‘Let it alone, son! Don’t you bother about it!’ urged Uncle Oscar. But it was as if the boy couldn’t really hear what his uncle was saying.
‘I’ve got to know for the Derby! I’ve
