There & Back

“I can’t, sir; it wouldn’t be right.”

“Fiddlesticks!—Wouldn’t be right! What’s that to you? It’s my business. You’ve got to do what I tell you.”

“I must go by my conscience, sir.”

“Oh, damn your conscience! Will you promise, or will you not? You’re to have nothing to say to those young persons.”

“I will not promise.”

“Not if I promise to look after them?”

“No, sir.” His father was silent for a moment, regarding him—not all in anger.

“Well, you’re a good-plucked one, I allow? But you’re the greatest fool, the dullest young ass out, notwithstanding. You won’t suit me—though you are web-footed!—Why, damn it, boy! don’t you understand yet that I’m your father?”

“Mrs. Manson told me so, sir.”

“Oh, rot Mrs. Manson! she told you a damned lie! She told you I wronged your mother! I tell you I married her! What a blockhead you are! Look there, with your miserable tradesman’s-eyes: all those books will be yours one day!—to put in the fire if you like, or mend at from morning to night, just as you choose! You fool! Ain’t you my son, heir to Mortgrange, and whatever I may choose to give you besides!”

Richard’s heart gave a bound as if it would leap to heaven. It was not the land; it was not the money; it was not the books; it was not even Barbara; it was Arthur and Alice that made it bound. But the voice of his father went on.

“You know now, you idiot,” it said, “why you can have nothing more to do with that cursed litter of Mansons!”

Richard’s heart rose to meet the heartlessness of his father.

“They are my brother and sister, sir!” he said.

“And what the devil does it matter to you if they are! It’s my business that, not yours! You had nothing to do with it! You didn’t make the Mansons!”

“No, sir; but God made us all, and says we’re to love our brethren.”

“Now don’t you come the pious over me! It won’t pay here! Mind you, nobody heard me acknowledge you! By the mighty heavens, I will deny knowing anything about you! You’ll have to prove to the court of chancery that you’re my son, born in wedlock, and kidnapped in infancy: by Jove, you’ll find it stiff! Who’ll advance you the money to carry it there?—you can’t do it without money. Nobody; the property’s not entailed, and who cares whether it be sir Richard or sir Arthur? What’s the title without the property! But don’t imagine I should mind telling a lie to keep the two together. I’m not a nice man; I don’t mind lying! I’m a bad man!—that I know better than you or any one else, and you’ll find it uncomfortable to differ and deal with me both at once!”

“I will not deny my own flesh and blood,” said Richard.

“Then I will deny mine, and you may go rot with them.”

“I will work for them and myself,” said Richard.

Sir Wilton glared at him. Richard made a stride to the table. The baronet caught up the cheque. Richard darted forward to seize it. Was his truth to his friends to be the death of them? He would have the money! It was his! He had told him to take it!

What might have followed I dare not think. Richard’s hands were out to lay hold on his father, when happily he remembered that he had not given him back the former cheque, and Barset was quite within reach of his grandfather’s pony! He turned and made for the door. Sir Wilton read his thought.

“Give me that cheque,” he cried, and hobbled to the bell.

Richard glanced at the lock of the door: there was no key in it! Besides there were two more doors to the room! He darted out: there was the man, far off down the passage, coming to answer the bell! He hastened to meet him.

“Jacob,” he said, “sir Wilton rang for you: just run down with me to the gate, and give the woman there a message for me.”

He hurried to the door, and the man, nothing doubting, followed him.

“Tell her,” said Richard as they went, “if she should see Mr. Wingfold pass, to ask him to call at old Armour’s smithy. She does not seem to remember me! Good day! I’m in a hurry!” He leaped into the pony-cart.

“Barset!” he cried, and the same moment they were off at speed, for Simon saw something fresh was up.

“Drive like Jehu,” panted Richard. “Let’s see what the blessed pony can do! Every instant is precious.”

Never asking the cause of his haste, old Simon did drive like Jehu, and never had the pony gone with a better will: evidently he believed speed was wanted, and knew he had it to give.

No hoofs came clamping on the road behind them. They reached the town in safety, and Richard cashed his cheque—the more easily that Simon, a well-known man in Barset, was seen waiting for him in his trap outside. The eager, anxious look of Richard, and the way he clutched at the notes, might otherwise have waked suspicion. As it was, it only waked curiosity.

When the man whom Richard had decoyed, appeared at length before his master, whose repeated ringing had brought the butler first; and when sir Wilton, after much swearing on his, and bewilderment on the man’s part, made out the trick played on him, his wrath began to evaporate in amusement: he was outwitted and outmanoeuvred—but by his own son! and even in the face of such an early outbreak of hostilities, he could not help being proud of him. He burst into a half cynical laugh, and dismissed the men—to vain speculation on the meaning of the affair.

Simon would have had Richard send the bank-notes by post, and stay with him a week or two; but Richard must take them himself; no other way seemed safe. Nor could he possibly rest until he had seen his mother, and told her all. He said nothing to his grandfather of his recognition by sir Wilton, and what followed: he feared he might take the thing in his own hands, and go to sir Wilton.

Questioning his grandfather, he learned that Barbara was at home, but that he had seen her only once. She had one day appeared suddenly at the smithy door, with Miss Brown all in a foam. She asked about Richard, wheeled her mare, and was off homeward, straight as an arrow—for he went to the corner, and looked after her.

They were near a station at Barset, and a train was almost due. Simon drove him there straight from the bank, and before he was home, Richard was half-way to London.

Short as was his visit, he had got from it not merely all he had hoped, but almost all he needed. His weakness had left him; he had twenty pounds for his brother and sister; and his mother was cleared, though he could not yet tell how: was he not also a little step nearer to Barbara? True, he was disowned, but he had lived without his father hitherto, and could very well go on to live without such a father! As long as he did what was right, the right was on his side! As long as he gave others their rights, he could waive his own! A fellow was not bound, he said, to insist on his rights—at least he had not met with any he was bound to insist upon. Borne swiftly back to London, his heart seemed rushing in the might of its gladness to console the heaven-laden hearts of Alice and Arthur. Twenty pounds was a great sum to carry them! He could indeed himself earn such a sum in a little while, but how long would it not take him to save as much! Here it was, whole and free, present and potent, ready to be turned at once into food and warmth and hope!

CHAPTER LI. BARONET AND BLACKSMITH

The more sir Wilton’s anger subsided, the more his heart turned to Richard, and the more he regretted that he had begun by quarrelling with him. Sir Wilton loved his ease, and was not a quarrelsome man. He could dislike intensely, he could hate heartily, but he seldom quarrelled; and if he could have foreseen how his son would take the demand he made upon him, he would not at the outset have risked it. He liked Richard’s looks and carriage. He liked also his spirit and determination, though his first experience of them he could have wished different. He felt also that very little would make of him a man fit to show to the world and be proud of as his son. To his satisfaction on these grounds was added besides a peculiar pleasure in the discovery of him which he could ask no one to share—that it was to him as a lump of dynamite under his wife’s lounge, of which no one knew but himself, and which he could at any instant explode. It was sweet to know what he could do! to be aware, and alone aware, of the fool’s paradise in which my lady and her brood lived! And already, through his own precipitation, his precious secret was in peril!

The fact gave him not a little uneasiness. His thought was, at the ripest moment of her frosty indifference, to make her palace of ice fly in flinders about her. Then the delight of her perturbation! And he had opened his hand and let his bird fly!

His father did not know Richard’s prudence. Like the fool every man of the world is, he judged from Richard’s greatness of heart, and his refusal to forsake his friends, that he was a careless, happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, who would bluster and protest. As to the march he had stolen upon him on behalf of the Mansons, he nowise resented that. When pressed by no selfish necessity, he did not care much about money; and his son’s promptitude greatly pleased him.

“The fellow shall go to college,” he said to himself; “and I won’t give my lady even a hint before I have him the finest gentleman and the best scholar in the county! He shall be both! I will teach him billiards myself! By Jove! it is more of a pleasure than at my years I had a right to expect! To think of an old sinner like me being blessed with such a victory over his worst enemy! It is more than I could deserve if I lived to the age of Mephistopheles! I shouldn’t like to live so long—there’s so little worth remembering! I wish forgetting things wiped them out! There are things I hardly know whether I did or only wanted to do!—Damn it, it may be all over Barset by this time, that the heir to sir Wilton’s property has turned up!”

He rang the bell, and ordered his carriage.

“I must see the old fellow, the rascal’s grandfather!” he kept on to himself. “I haven’t exchanged a word with him for years! And now I think of it, I take poor Robina’s father for a very decent sort of fellow! If he had but once hinted what he was, every soul in the parish would have known it! I must find out whether he’s in my secret! I can’t prove it yet, but perhaps he can!”

Simon Armour was not astonished to see the Lestrange carriage stop at the smithy: he thought sir Wilton had come about the cheque. He went out, and stood in hairy arms and leather apron at the carriage door.

“Well, Armour, how are you?” said the baronet.

“Well and hearty, sir, I thank you,” answered Simon.

“I want a word with you,” said sir Wilton.

“Shall I tell the coachman to drive round to the cottage, sir?”

“No; I’ll get out and walk there with you.”

Simon opened the carriage-door, and the baronet got out.