His mind is so nimble and his thoughts so extravagant, that your own break away from their usual grooves, and surprise you by their activity. You feel pleased at your own inventiveness and originality, when you are really like the wren when it took a lift on the eagle's shoulder. Old Peterson, you remember, used to have a similar effect upon you in the Linlithgow days.
In the middle of dinner he plunged off, and came back with a round bag about the size of a pomegranate in his hand.
"What d'ye think this is, Munro? Eh?"
"I have no idea."
"Our day's take. Eh, Hetty?" He undid a string, and in an instant a pile of gold and silver rattled down upon the cloth, the coins whirling and clinking among the dishes. One rolled off the table and was retrieved by the maid from some distant corner.
"What is it, Mary? A half sovereign? Put it in your pocket. What did the lot come to, Hetty?"
"Thirty-one pound eight."
"You see, Munro! One day's work." He plunged his hand into his trouser pocket and brought out a pile of sovereigns, which he balanced in his palm. "Look at that, laddie. Rather different from my Avonmouth form, eh? What?"
"It will be good news for them," I suggested.
He was scowling at me in an instant with all his old ferocity. You cannot imagine a more savage-looking creature than Cullingworth is when his temper goes wrong. He gets a perfectly fiendish expression in his light blue eyes, and all his hair bristles up like a striking cobra. He isn't a beauty at his best, but at his worst he's really phenomenal. At the first danger signal his wife had ordered the maid from the room.
"What rot you do talk, Munro!" he cried. "Do you suppose I am going to cripple myself for years by letting those debts hang on to me?"
"I understood that you had promised," said I. "Still, of course, it is no business of mine."
"I should hope not," he cried. "A tradesman stands to win or to lose. He allows a margin for bad debts. I would have paid it if I could. I couldn't, and so I wiped the slate clean. No one in his senses would dream of spending all the money that I make in Bradfield upon the tradesmen of Avonmouth."
"Suppose they come down upon you?"
"Well, we'll see about that when they do. Meanwhile I am paying ready money for every mortal thing that comes up the door steps. They think so well of me here that I could have had the whole place furnished like a palace from the drain pipes to the flagstaff, only I determined to take each room in turn when I was ready for it. There's nearly four hundred pounds under this one ceiling."
There came a tap at the door, and in walked a boy in buttons.
"If you please, sir, Mr. Duncan wishes to see you."
"Give my compliments to Mr. Duncan, and tell him he may go to the devil!"
"My dear Jimmy!" cried Mrs. Cullingworth.
"Tell him I am at dinner; and if all the kings in Europe were waiting in the hall with their crowns in their hands I wouldn't cross that door mat to see them."
The boy vanished, but was back in an instant.
"Please, sir, he won't go."
"Won't go! What d'you mean?" Cullingworth sat with his mouth open and his knife and fork sticking up. "What d'you mean, you brat? What are you boggling about?"
"It's his bill, sir," said the frightened boy.
Cullingworth's face grew dusky, and the veins began to swell on his forehead.
"His bill, eh! Look here!" He took his watch out and laid it on the table. "It's two minutes to eight. At eight I'm coming out, and if I find him there I'll strew the street with him. Tell him I'll shred him over the parish. He has two minutes to save his life in, and one of them is nearly gone."
The boy bolted from the room, and in an instant afterwards we heard the bang of the front door, with a clatter of steps down the stairs. Cullingworth lay back in his chair and roared until the tears shone on his eyelashes, while his wife quivered all over with sympathetic merriment.
"I'll drive him mad," Cullingworth sobbed at last. "He's a nervous, chicken-livered kind of man; and when I look at him he turns the colour of putty.