The Sleeping Sword by Brenda Jagger Page B

sugar, and handed him his cup quite steadily, feeling that if I had managed to contend with Mrs Agbrigg all these years I should not be intimidated by him.
    He smiled, drank deep as men do after an hour or so in the weaving-sheds, and without really looking at Gervase, said, ‘You’re back, I see. It occurred to me as I was shaving this morning that I hadn’t seen you for a day or two—five or six, I reckon. But then on my way out I noticed a certain amount of destruction that told me you might have come home to roost again.’
    â€˜Well yes, sir—bad penny and all that.’
    â€˜Quite so. It’s the end of the month, isn’t it? And you’ll be overspent.’
    â€˜That’s about it, sir.’
    And what surprised me was not the hostility of their relationship but the lack of it, the absence, almost, of any relationship at all, which was not often seen in an area like ours, where mill masters thought nothing of chasing their sons to the factory yard with a horse-whip if necessary and of keeping them permanently short of money to make sure they stayed there. It had been the boast of Sir Joel Barforth that he could usually make his first thousand pounds of the morning while his competitors were still cooling their porridge. Mr. Nicholas Barforth, his son, whose business was even larger, could probably do better than that. Gervase Barforth had never by his own ingenuity made a single penny, and would not be asked to try, it seemed to me, because Mr. Barforth quite simply, quite coldly, did not think this difficult, almost alien son of his to be worth the trouble. He had written him off, I thought, as he would have done a bad debt, dealing with the consequences, resigning himself to the loss, and it did not escape me that Gervase—who from the moment of his father’s arrival had become more languid, more dissipated and trivial than ever—was fully aware of it.
    â€˜Badly overspent, Gervase?’ Mr. Barforth asked, naming in an astoundingly casual manner an offence any other Cullingford father would have dealt with as a major crime. To which his son, still lounging at ease—although he seemed to have turned rather pale—replied in like manner, presenting so complete a picture of an expensive, useless young gentleman that I glanced at him keenly, finding his portrayal too perfect and wondering if he was attempting, as I often did with Mrs. Agbrigg, to see just how far he could go.
    â€˜Much the same as usual.’
    â€˜And is there a chance this month, do you think, of my getting a return on my money?’
    â€˜It rather depends what sort of return you had in mind, sir.’
    â€˜Oh, nothing much—I wouldn’t ask much.’
    â€˜That’s good of you, sir.’
    And now the atmosphere between them, although I could still not have called it anger, chilled me, warning me that, whatever name they gave to it, it was tortuous and hurtful and unpleasant.
    â€˜I want somebody to go down to London and take a man out to dinner. You could manage that, I reckon?’
    â€˜Well, yes, I could,’ agreed Gervase, his drawling accent belonging so accurately to the public school he had never attended that once again I glanced at him, recognizing his intention to provoke, to enrage, to demonstrate that his father’s opinion of him was if anything not bad enough. And what hurt him and strained him—as I had so often been hurt and strained in my combat with Mrs. Agbrigg—was that his father would not be provoked, had no need to be enraged, being possessed absolutely of the power and the authority that would ensure him, every time, an easy victory.
    â€˜I know where London is, sir—there’d be no trouble about that. But this man you want me to meet—does he understand the wool trade?’
    â€˜No,’ Mr. Barforth said, smiling grimly, ‘he does not. He understands horses and guns—the American variety of