In the hall Storms was astonished to find his son waiting, apparently careless, though his eyes gleamed with suppressed wrath. He followed the old man out, and once under the shelter of the park, turned upon him.
"What were you doing in there?"
"Nothing, Dick! Only asking after the young master, and talking a bit with the baronet."
CHAPTER XXXIII.
SHARPER THAN A SERPENT'S TOOTH.
YOUNG STORMS was very restless after his midnight interview with Judith Hart, and became feverishly so when he discovered that the elder Storms had begun to move in his affairs more promptly than he desired. He walked on by the old farmer with a frown on his face, and only spoke when his own footsteps bore him ahead of the stronger and more deliberate stride, which goaded his impatience into anger. There was, indeed, a striking contrast between the two men, which even a difference in age could not well account for. Old Storms was a stoutish man, round in the shoulders, slouching in his walk, and of a downcast countenance, in which a good deal of inert ability lay dormant. There was something of the son's cunning in his eye, and animal craving about the mouth, but if the keen venom which repulsed you in the younger man ever existed in the father, it had become too sluggish for active wickedness, except, perhaps, as the subordinate of some more powerful nature.
That nature the old man had fostered in his own family, of which Richard was the absolute head, before he became of legal age. If the old man had been a tyrant over the boy, as many fathers of his class are supposed to be in the mother land, Richard avenged his youth fully when it merged into manhood. As the two walked together across the park, toward their own farm, it was pitiful to see such gleams of anxiety in that old man's eyes, whenever they were furtively lifted to the stern face of the son.
Once, when Dick got ahead of his father, walking swiftly in his wiry activity, he paused, and cut a sapling up by the roots with his heavy pruning-knife, and stood, with a grim smile on his face, trimming off the small branches, and measuring it into a slender walking-stick.
"Art doing that for me, lad?" said the old man, in a voice that did not sound quite natural. "Nay, nay, I am not old enough for a stick yet a while. My old bones aren't so limber as thine, maybe; but they'll do for me many a year yet, never fear."