Night was falling apace. Father and son sat together over the supper table. The meal, such as it was, was over; each had made a pretence at eating, lest he add to the other’s burden. In silence Harry’s eyes ever sought his father, striving to reconcile the man he had known and reverenced above all manhood with the man who had harmed him to the shattering of his life. Yet he could now find nothing in his heart but a deeper tenderness. Nay, as he gazed at the noble silvered head, the countenance, beautiful, diaphanous, it was with no jot of reverence abated, rather a kind of awe added to a climbing apprehension. His own words of that terrible moment of revelation rang in his ears as a tolling bell: “Father! You are all I have left!”
At last he rose and went restlessly to the open window. When he looked up, there was the pure sky overhead with a star or two, very peaceful; and when he looked forth between the towers, there raged the flames, yonder hung the murk the blacker for the fire lurid below. It seemed an image of his own life.’
“At least there can be peace,” he told himself.
The door opened behind him; he heard Chitterley’s shuffling feet, and next the quavering voice; but, lost in his contemplation, he never turned his head.
“Harry!” came Lord Rockhurst’s voice of a sudden.
The young man leaped at his tone. Rockhurst thrust a crumpled sheet into his hand.
“Read it, Harry! A messenger has brought it, hotfoot, and is gone as he came.”
As he spoke, the Lord Constable strode to the door.
“Ho there!” he called to the sentinel in the passage. “Call out the guard! Have the assembly sounded!”
His voice rang out, clarion clear. Harry, holding the paper, stared, astounded; the old fire had come back to his father’s eye, the old life to his step; under the very whiteness of his locks his face looked young again.