“I do, and I am the more angry at those who compel you to seek the relief of tears. But I’ll be as patient as I can with Neil, for your sake, and for his father’s and mother’s sake.”
So Christine returned and Neil was difficult to awaken, but he heard her finally, and opened the door, in a half-asleep condition. “So the Domine refused you?” he said – “I thought he would.”
“He did not refuse me. He will send, or bring, what you need, later.”
“You should hae brought them with you, Christine. I dislike to be seen in these disreputable rags. You should hae thought o’ that.”
“I should, but I didna.”
Then she cooked dinner, and he sat beside her, and told, and retold the wrongs and sufferings he had innocently endured. It was all Reginald Rath he blamed, and he would not admit that his behavior had been in any way provocative of it. “He was furious because I married his sister, and naturally took the management of her money into my own hands.”
“Where are the Raths now?”
“I do not know. Somewhere in California, I suspect.”
“Why?”
“My wife has a good deal of real estate there. It was of little value when deeded to her. Its worth has increased enormously. Rath hated the idea of it belonging to me.”
“Neil, how does Roberta feel toward you?”
“She was angry as he was at first – but she loved me.”
“Why do you not go to her?”
“I do not know where she is.”
“Why not go to California?”
“I have not money enough. Whatever set you to writing books, Christine?”
“How do you know I have been writing books?”
“I saw a review of a book by Christine Ruleson. It praised the bit novel a good deal – Did you get much for it?”
“They paid me vera weel.”
“How much?”
She hesitated a moment, and then said, “Three hundred and fifty pounds.”
“That is a deal of money for a book – I mean a storybook, like a novel. I did not know writing novels paid so well, or I would have chosen it, in place of the law.”
“The Domine thinks writing as a profession must choose you, that you cannot choose it.”
“The Domine does not know everything. Have the men who bought it paid you yet?”
“The publishers? Yes, they paid upon acceptance.”
“How did you learn to write?”
“I never learned. I just wanted to write, and I wrote – something in me wrote. My writing is neither here nor there. Go to your old room, and lie down and sleep. The Domine may think it best for you to go somewhere at once.”
So Neil went to his room but he could not sleep, and about four o’clock the Domine called for him. They met very coldly. The Domine had long ago lost all interest in him as a scholar, and he resented the way in which Neil had quietly shuffled off his family, as soon as he supposed he had socially outgrown them. The young man was terribly humiliated by the necessity of appearing in his dirty, beggarly raiment, and the Domine looked at him with a pitying dislike. The physical uncleanliness of Neil was repellent to the spotless purity which was a strong note in the minister’s personality. However, he thought of the father and mother of Neil, and the look of aching entreaty in poor Christine’s face quite conquered his revulsion, and he said, not unkindly, “I am sorry to see you in such a sad case, Neil. You will find all you need in that parcel; go and dress yourself, and then I shall be waiting for you.” He then turned quickly to Christine, and Neil found himself unable to offer any excuse for his appearance.
“Poor Neil!” sighed Christine.
“Yes, indeed, poor Neil,” answered the Domine. “What can man do for a fellow creature, who is incapable of being true, and hardly capable of being false?”
“I advised him to go to his wife. He says she loved him once, but turned against him at her brother’s request.”
“She did, and a wife who cries out has everyone’s sympathy.”
“She will forgive him – if she loved him.”
“She may, I have known women to go on loving and trusting a man found out in fraud – only a woman could do that.”
“A man – ”
“No!”
“Oh, Domine, for father’s sake – you loved father – for his sake, be kind to poor, dispairing Neil.”
“Yes, child, ‘despairing’ – that is, because he knows he is wrong, and is not sorry for his fault. A good man in the presence of any misfortune stands up, feels exalted, and stretches out his arms to the Great Friendship – he never drifts like a dismasted ship.”
Here Neil entered the room again, looking very respectable in the new tweed suit which the Domine had brought him. “Does it fit you, Neil?” he asked.
“As if made for me, Sir. I thank you for it.”
“It was altered for you. Finlay knew your measure to a quarter of an inch, he said. I told him you were not fit to come.”
“Was that prudent, Sir?”
“Yes, for we are going away at once.”
“I would like to rest with Christine for a few days.”
“How can you think of such a thing? Do you want to ruin your sister as well as yourself? Do you not know that Rath is going to sue you as soon as your first sentence is served, for shortage in his money account? He will keep up this prosecution, if you stay in this country.”
“What can I do? What can I do?”
“You must go to the United States, or Argentine, or India, or – ”
“I have no money to spend in travel.”
“How much have you?”
“Thirty pounds – and a little over.”
“H-m-m! I will lend you twenty pounds, if you will repay it.”
“Certainly, I will repay it. I will go to New York. I shall have a little left, when I get there, I suppose. I shall have to travel decently.”
“You can get a comfortable passage for twelve pounds. With the balance you can make a spoon, or spoil a horn. Many a good man has built a fine fortune on less than forty pounds.”
“I can spare fifty pounds, Sir. I will gladly give it.”
“You cannot spare it. You need every shilling of it, and as I have said – fifty pounds will make a man, or waste a man. Any Scotchman with youth, education, and fifty pounds, feels sure of his share of the world, or he is not worth his porridge.”
“You forget, Sir, that I have the bonds of a false charge to fight.”
“The charge was not false. Do what is right, in the future, and I promise you that it shall never more come up against you. But if you go on buying money with life and honor, you will have a second charge to meet. I know whereof I speak. I have had several interviews with Mr. Rath. He is my half-sister’s nephew. He will do anything reasonable I ask of him.”
“My God! And you let me go to prison, and blasted my good name, and made a beggar and a wreck of me. I won’t have your help,” and he turned to Christine, and cried out passionately, “Christine! Christine! Save me from a friend like this! Help me yoursel’, dear lassie! Help Neil yoursel’! For Mither’s sake help Neil yoursel’.”
She went quickly to his side. She put her arms round him – her white, strong, motherly arms. She kissed his face, and wept with him, and she said with a loving passion, all those soft, cruddling, little sentences with which a mother soothes a hurt child. “I’ll gie you a’ the siller you want, dearie. I’ll gie it to you as a free gift. I’ll stand by ye through thick and thin. Guilty or not guilty, ye are my ain dear brither! I don’t believe you’re guilty! You are feyther’s son, ye couldna be guilty. It’s a’ spite, and envy, and ill will. Mither bid me be kind to you, and I will be kind, though all the warld’s against me!”
The Domine watched this scene with eyes full of tears, and a tender fatherly look. He finally put his elbow on the table, and rested his face in his hand, and no doubt he was praying for counsel. For he presently stood up, and said in a kind, familiar voice, “Neil, we must hurry, we have a little journey before us, if you get the next Atlantic steamer. We will talk this matter fairly out, when we are alone. It is cruel to force it on your sister. She knows, and you know also, that you may safely put your trust in me.”
Then Christine left the room, and when she returned the two men were ready to leave the house. “Where are you taking Neil, Domine?” she asked, in that lowered voice Fear always uses. “Where are you taking my brother?”
“Only to Moville, Christine. There may be spies watching the outgoing steamers – especially the American Liners – so he had better go to Moville, and take his passage from there.”
She did not answer. She bent her tearful, loving face to Neil’s, and kissed him again, and again, and whispered hurriedly – “Write to me often, and soon,” and when her hand unclasped from his, she left with him the money she had promised. The Domine pretended not to see the loving transaction, and the next moment the two men were wrapped up in the thick darkness, which seemed to swallow up even the sound of their footsteps.
That night Christine mingled her lonely cup of tea with tears, but they were tears that had healing in them. Those to whom love has caused no suffering, have never loved. All who have loved, have wept. Christine had given away her heart, it had been bruised and wounded – but ought she to love her brother less, because he had proved himself unworthy? If anything could bring him back to her trust, would it not be the prayers and tears born from her desolation? To regret, and to desire, between these two emotions the horizons recede; they are two spiritual levers, by which the soul can work miracles of grace.
So the days went on in alternating sunshine and storm. The Domine or Jamie came every day to see if all was well with her. Sometimes Norman stopped long enough on an evening visit, to talk about Neil and to wonder over his past and future. For though he had reached New York safely, they knew little of his life. He said he had found a clerkship in the general store of a merchant in a small town on the Hudson River, about sixty miles from New York; but he intimated it was only a resting place, till he felt ready to go to California. His great anxiety was to obtain the knowledge of his wife’s hiding-place, for he was sure her brother was determined to keep them apart. And this conviction was gradually making a reconciliation with her the chief aim and desire of his unhappy life. He was sure the Domine knew where she was, and his letters to Christine urged on her constantly a determined effort to induce him to reveal her residence. Christine had made three efforts to win the Domine’s confidence, and had then abandoned the attempt as utterly useless.
The herring-fishery with all its preparatory and after duties and settlements was now quite past, and the school was in full swing again, and the quiet days of St. Martin’s summer were over the land. All the magnificent flowers of early autumn were dead, but the little purple daisy of St. Michael filled the hedges, and the crannies of the moor. In the garden, among the stones of its wall, the mint and the thyme and the wall flowers still swung in sunny hours, faint ethereal perfume; but it was like the prayers of the dying, broken and intermittent, the last offering of the passing autumn. There were gray and ghostly vapors in the early morning, and the ships went through them like spirits. The rains sobbed at the windows, and the wind was weary of the rain. Sometimes the wind got the best of both fog and rain, then it filled the sails of the ships, and with swelling canvas they strutted out with the gale.
In the mornings, if the sea was willing, she saw the fishermen hastening to the boats, with their oilskins over their arms, and water bottle swinging at their sides. And it was the sea after all, that was her true companion. The everlasting hills were not far away, but they were young compared with the old, old, gray sea. Its murmur, its loud beat of noisy waves, its still, small voice of mighty tides, circling majestically around the world, all spoke to her. Her blood ran with its tide, she wrote best when they were inflowing. When it was high water with the sea, it was high water with Christine’s highest nature, spiritual and mental. Their sympathy was perfect, and if taken away from the sea, she would have been as miserable as a stormy petrel in a cage. So then, with the sea spread out before her, and her paper and pencils in hand, she hardly missed human companionship.
Still there were days when she wanted to talk, when singing did not satisfy her, and one morning when she had watched a boat come ashore, broadside on the rocks, she felt this need almost like a pain in her heart. No lives had been lost, and she had watched her brother Norman playing a godlike act of salvation with the life-boat, yet she had what she called “a sair heartache!”
“It isna for the men,” she said softly, “they are a’ safe, through God’s mercy, and Norman’s pluck and courage. I think it is for the poor, poor boat, beaten and lashed to pieces, on thae black, cruel rocks! Poor Boatie! left alane in her misery and death! And she did her best! Nae doubt o’ that! She did her best, and she had to die!”
Just then there was a knock at the door, and though she had a moment’s wonder at anyone’s coming up the hill, so early in such rough weather, she cried out, “Come in. Lift the hasp, and come in.” Then she turned round to see who would enter. It was Roberta Ruleson.
CHAPTER XIII
THE RIGHT MATE AND THE RIGHT TIME
For the destiny whereof they were worthy drew them unto this end. – Wisdom of Solomon, xix, 4.
Mercifully ordain that we may become aged together. – Tobit, viii, 7.
The Bride of Love and Happiness!
Roberta Ruleson was the last person in the world Christine expected to see. She came in smiling, and with outstretched hand said, “Dear Christine, tell me that you are glad to see me.”
“There’s nane living, Roberta, saving your ain husband, I would be gladder to see.”
“I have sent the carriage away, can I stop with you this night?”
“You can stay as long as you want to stay. I will be gey glad o’ your company.”
“I have long looked for an opportunity to come to you. At last I pretended to be very sick with rheumatism, and had a famous physician to see me. Of course I had looked up the symptoms I had to complain of, and I succeeded in deceiving him. He was puzzled about my freedom from fever, but I told him ‘it came bad enough every third day,’ and he said he would see me on the third day. My brother and his saucy wife left for Edinburgh yesterday, and they think I am safe in bed. I am safe here. I left Glasgow an hour after they did.”
“Will you hae a cup of tea and a mouthful o’ bread and broiled ham?”
“I am hungry and cold, and shall be very glad of it.”
“Then go and tak’ off your bonnet and cloak, and come to the fireside. I’ll hae the food ready for you, in ten minutes.”
Christine wanted a few minutes to consider. Was it right for her to tell Roberta all she knew, or must she follow the Domine’s plan and be non-committal. She had not satisfied herself on this subject when Roberta returned to her, and she then hastily decided to do right and tell the truth whatever turned up. The tea and ham and bread were ready and Roberta sat down to them with the pleasant eagerness of a hungry child. She was, however, much changed. Her face showed plainly the wear and tear of a troubled, anxious mind, and as soon as she had taken a long drink of tea, she asked abruptly, “Christine, where is Neil?”
Then all Christine’s hesitation vanished, and she answered frankly, “Neil is in a little town on the Hudson River, about a two hours’ journey from New York.”
“What is he doing?”
“He is bookkeeper in a shop there.”
“What is the name of the town? Tell me truly, Christine.”
“I will let you read his last letter. It came two days ago.”
“Thank you! It would be a great comfort to me.”
There was a John Knox teapot on the chimney-piece, and Christine lifted it down, removed the lid, and took Neil’s letter out, and handed it to Roberta.
The woman’s invincible sense of whatever was ridiculous or inconsistent, with a person or event, was instantly roused by the appearance of John Knox. She laughed with girlish merriment. “To think of John Knox interfering in my matrimonial difficulties!” she cried, “it is too funny! The old scold! How grim and gruff he looks! If he could speak, how he would rave about the outrageous authority of women. It is refreshing to know that he had a wife that snubbed him, and didn’t believe in him, and did not honor and obey him, and – ”
She had unfolded the letter as she was speaking, and now her eyes were so busy, that her tongue got no message to deliver, and this was what she read: —
My dear sister Christine,
I am still here, waiting for the information I asked you to get me, namely the address of my dear wife. I am unhappy, I may say I am miserable; and I can never settle anywhere, till I see her. If she then refuses to hear and believe me, life will be over to me. But she will believe me, for I will tell her the truth, and she will see that though I was foolish, I was not criminal. The law separating these two conditions is far from being clear enough. I want to know where my wife is! She will believe me! She will trust me! You do. Mother did. Roberta has been very near and dear to me. She has been forced to abandon me. It is the injustice of my treatment that is killing me. If I could only clear myself in her sight, I could lift life again, and make the best of it. I am not half content in this place. I cannot believe the people here are representative Americans, and I dislike small towns. Traders and dwellers in small towns are generally covetous – they have a sinister arithmetic – they have no clear notions of right and wrong, and I think they are capable of every kind of malice known to man. I want to go to a big city, where big motives move men, and if you do not send me Roberta’s hiding place, I will put out for California, if I foot it every step of the way. I am stunned, but not broken.
Your loving brother,Neil.
When she had finished this letter, she was crying. “Give it to me!” she sobbed, “it is all about me, Christine. Give it to me! Poor Neil! He has been badly used! Oh Christine, what must I do?”
“You ought to go to his side, and help him to mak’ a better life. What prevents ye?”
“Oh the shame of it! The atmosphere of the prison!”
“You promised God to tak’ him for better or worse, richer or poorer. You are breaking your promise every day, and every hour, that you stay away from him.”
“You must not blame me ignorantly, Christine. My brother and I were left alone in the world, when he was ten years old, and I was eight. He at once assumed a tender and careful charge of my lonely life. I cannot tell you how good and thoughtful he was. When I left school he traveled all over Europe with me, and he guarded my financial interests as carefully as if they were his own. And I gave him a great affection, and a very sincere obedience to all his wishes and advice. At first he seemed to favor my liking for Neil, but he soon grew furiously jealous, and then all was very unpleasant. Neil complained to me. He said he did not want me to take my brother’s opinion without saying a few words in his own behalf, and so I soon began to take Neil’s side. Then day by day things grew worse and worse, and partly because I liked Neil, and partly because I was angry at Reginald, and weary of his exacting authority, I became Neil’s wife.”
“That was an engagement for a’ the days of your life. You hae broken it.”
“The law excused and encouraged me to do so.”
“Were you happy in that course?”
“About as unhappy as I could be. I was sure Neil had been hardly dealt with, that advantage had been taken of his terror and grief, when he found himself in prison. I am sure the lawyer he employed was really seeking Reginald’s favor, and practically gave Neil’s case away, but I was angry at Neil’s want of spirit and pluck, in his own defense. Reginald told me that he cried in the dock, and I shed a few passionate tears over his want of courage and manliness.”
“Poor Neil! If you had stood by him, he would have stood by himself. Remember, Roberta, that he was only just out of his college classes, and had had neither time nor opportunity to make friends; that his mither was dying, and that we had no money to defend him; that his wife had deserted him, and that he is naturally a man of little courage, and you will judge him very leniently.”
“Reginald told me he was saving money in order to run away from me, and – ”
“If he was saving money to run awa’ with, he intended to take you with him. If he was going awa’ alone, a few pounds would hae been all he needed. And it seems to me you were the runaway from love and duty. But it is little matter now, who was most to blame. Life is all repenting and beginning again, and that is everything that can be done in this case.”
“I will start for New York tomorrow. Can you get Doctor Trenabie here for me?”
“Do you know him?”
“He is a distant relative both of the Raths and the Ballisters.”
“He never said a word about his relationship, to me.”
“It would have been most unlike him had he done so, but I can tell you, he wrote me before my marriage, and advised me to be very cautious with Mr. Neil Ruleson.”
“I will send for him,” said Christine, a little coldly, and then she drew the conversation towards the Raths and Ballisters. “Were they closely connected with Doctor Trenabie?” she asked.
“In a distant way,” said Roberta, “but they are firm friends, for many generations.”
“The Domine does not talk much about himsel’.”
“No. He never did. He vowed himself early in life to chastity and poverty, for Christ’s sake, and he has faithfully kept his vow. Old Ballister gave him the kirk of Culraine at fifty pounds a year, and when the death of his father made him a comparatively rich man, he continued his humble life, and put out all the balance of his money in loans to poor men in a strait, or in permanent gifts, when such are necessary. Reginald used to consider him a saint, and many times he said that if I was married to a good man, he would try and live such a life as Magnus Trenabie.”
“Once I knew Colonel and Angus Ballister.”
“I heard Angus lately boasting about his acquaintance with you – that is since your book has set the whole newspaper world to praising you.”
“He is married. I saw him with his bride.”
“A proud, saucy, beautiful Canadian, educated in a tip-top New York boarding school, in all the pronounced fads of the day. Now, I have seen New York girls of this progressive kind, and the polish being natural to them, they were not only dashing and impertinent, they were fascinating in all their dictatory moods. But this kind of polish is intolerable when laid over a hard, calculating, really puritanical Scotch nature. Such a girl has to kill some of her very best qualities, in order to take it on at all.”
“She would be gey hard to live wi’. I wouldn’t stay wi’ her – not a day.”
“Yet, I can tell you, both English and Scotch men are enslaved easily by this new kind of girl. She is only the girl of the period and the place, but they imagine her to be the very latest improvement in womanly styles. Now, I will astonish you. Reginald married the sister of Angus Ballister’s wife. She is equally beautiful, equally impertinent and selfish, and she holds Reginald in a leash. She makes fun of my dowdy dress and ways, and of my antiquated moralities, even to my brother, in my very presence, and Reggie looks at me critically, and then at Sabrina – that is the creature’s name – and says – ‘Roberta, you ought to get Brina to show you how to dress, and how to behave. You should just see Brina tread our old fogyish social laws under her feet. She makes a sensation in every room she enters.’ And I answer pointedly – ‘I have no doubt of it.’ She understands my laugh, though Reggie is far from it. Of course she hates me, and she has quite changed Reggie. I have no longer any brother. I want to go and see if my husband cares for me.”
“Of course he cares for you, more than for any ither thing. Go to him. Mak’ a man every way of him. Teach him to trust you, and you may trust him. Now go and sleep until the Domine comes, and he will tak’ care of your further movements.”
When the Domine came, he treated Roberta very like a daughter, but he would not hear her tale of woe over again. He said, “There are faults on both sides. You cannot strike fire, without both flint and steel.”
“I have been so lonely and miserable, Doctor, since I saw you last. Reggie has quite deserted me for her.”
“Well, then, Roberta, walk your lonely room with God, and humbly dare to tell Him all your heart.”
“I never had any suspicion of Neil, until – ”
“Roberta, women trust on all points, or are on all points suspicious.”
“I trusted Neil, for as you know, he was under great obligations – ”
“Obligations! Obligations! That is a terrible word. Love should not know it.”
“If I had never met Neil – ”
“You only meet the people in this life, whom you were meant to meet. Our destiny is human, it must come to us by human hearts and hands. Marriage brings out the best and the worst a man or woman has. Let your marriage, Roberta, teach you the height and the depth of a woman’s love. There are faults only a woman can forgive, and go on trusting and loving. Try and reach that height and depth of love. Then you can go boldly to God and say, ‘Forgive me my trespasses, as I have forgiven those who trespassed against me.’ What do you want me to do for you?”
“I want you, dear Doctor, to go and take the very earliest passage to New York that you can get. Any steamer and any line will do. Also I want you to go to the bank of Scotland, and tell them to transmit all my cash in their keeping to the bank of New York. Also, there is a trunk at Madame Bonelle’s I want placed on the steamer, as soon as my passage is taken. It has a carefully chosen wardrobe in it. Brina thought it was full of dresses to be altered, according to American styles” – and this explanation of the dress episode she gave to Christine with a smile so comically illuminating, that the Doctor’s smile perforce caught a gleam from it.
But he was in an authoritative mood, and he said, “What is your intention, Mrs. Ruleson? This is a singular order for you to give.”
“Doctor, I am going to my husband. Christine has told me where he is. He loves me yet, and I want to go, and help, and comfort him.”
“That is right. It is converting love into action. If this is not done, love is indolent and unbelieving. It is not enough for Neil to love you, your love must flow out to him in return, or your married life will be barren as sand.”
“I shall forgive him everything. He is longing to explain all to me.”
“Forgive him before he explains. Have no explanations, they turn to arguments, and an argument is a more hopeless barrier than a vigorous quarrel, or an indignant contradiction. You do not want to judge whether he is right or wrong. The more you judge, the less you love. Take him just as he is, and begin your lives over again. Will you do this?”
“I will try.”
“Roberta, you have a great work before you – the saving of a man – the lifting of him up from despair and ruin to confidence and hope, and success. He is well worth your effort. Neil has fine traits, he comes of a religiously royal ancestry, and true nobility is virtue of race. You can save this man. Some women could not, others would not, you can do it.”
“I will do it, Sir, God helping me.”
“Now I will go to Glasgow, and do all you require. You must take some money with you, the bank – ”
“I have a thousand pounds in my purse.”
“You extravagant woman!”
“Money is necessary, in saving souls, Sir.”
“I believe you. Where shall I meet you in Glasgow?”
“At the Victoria Hotel – dinner at six.”
To these words the Doctor disappeared, and Roberta began to amplify and explain and justify her position and her intentions. She talked to Christine, while Christine cooked their meals and did all the necessary housework. She begged her to lock the doors against all intruders, and then making herself comfortable in the large cushioned chair by the fireside, she took off her tight shoes, and divested her hair of all its pads, and combs, and rats, and with a sigh of relief said, “Now we can talk comfortably.” They talked all day long, and they talked of Neil. A little later, she was eager to tell Christine all about her brother’s unaccountable marriage. “I was really ashamed of the affair, Christine,” she said. “No consideration for others, scarcely time to make the wedding-dress, and I think she asked everyone she saw to come to her marriage. She talked the slang of every country she had visited, and the men all thought it ‘so funny’ when she kicked up her dress with her heel, and treated them to a bit of London or New York slang. The perfectly silly and easy way in which men are caught, and tied fast, always amazes me, Christine. It is just like walking up to a horse’s head, with a dish full of corn in one hand and a bridle in the other. This little Sabrina Wales walked up to Reginald Rath with a bit of London slang on her lips, and a wedding ring hid in the palm of her hand, and the poor man is her slave for life.”
“Not necessarily a slave for life, Roberta.”
“Necessarily. No remission. No redemption. The contract reads ‘until death us part.’”
They discussed Sabrina from head to feet – her hair, her eyes, her complexion, her carriage, her way of dressing, her gowns – all short in front and long behind – “can you guess what for, Christine?”
“Perhaps she has pretty feet.”
“She has very small ones. I do not know whether they are pretty or not. But the effect is striking, if you watch her from the front – you can’t help thinking of a turkey gobbler.”
The hours went happily enough, Christine enjoyed them. After her paper heroine, this all-alive, scornful, loving and hating, talking and laughing woman was a great pleasure. Christine baked delicious scones, and scalloped some fine oysters in bread crumbs and chopped parsley, and made one or two pots of Pekoe and Young Hyson tea, and they nibbled and sipped, and talked over the whole sacred druidical family of the Raths, even to Aunt Agatha, who was worth half a million pounds – “which I threw away for a good joke,” said Roberta.