“Thank’ee, my boy. Don’t forget I’ve always liked you; and if circumstances—deuced aggravating things——” He broke off, humming, and, kicking up his dapper feet, looked at his boot tips.
“I’ll put some fellows in,” he said hurriedly, “and have the place made fit for you.”
“You’ve always been kind to me, sir,” I said gratefully. “I hope I sha’n’t trouble you much longer.”
I was going, but he stopped me again.
“Trouble be cursed!” he said. “You must understand that your happiness and welfare are my aim. You’re welcome to the lodge for ever, or so long as you’re convinced that they centre in that bogeyish hole. Only don’t let your fancy run on bitterness. Evercreech is your home.”
I was conscious of an expression in his face, between joy and mystification, as I left him. It was easy, I thought, to interpret it. Here, after all this interval, was an heir to Evercreech expected, and his lady’s long remissness atoned. The thoroughbred was stretching his neck for home; the encumbrance must clear himself from the course. “Sufferance,” having made the pace for “Welcome,” must withdraw in proper pride of his humble share in the event, and be content to eat his oats in abstraction. Double-distilled nonsense, of course; but a mother’s slight is poison, and that venom was in my blood. Not all the investigations of anatomists can connect the heart with the reason.
CHAPTER III.
THE LODGE IN THE CADDLE
Once, when I was a boy of twelve or so, there had come to stay at Evercreech a little lady whom I hated with all my heart. This was Miss Ira Christmas; but very remote from the charity and goodwill which her name suggested, she had always appeared to me. She was a ward in Chancery, as I understood, and as such committed to the custody of her nearest kinsman, my stepfather. Her mother’s hand, as I came to learn, had once been coveted by him for his son Charlie; but the lady had decided to bestow her fortune elsewhere; and, by the very irony of fate, the residue of her perversity, so to speak, was all that reverted to him from that abortive scheme. Both she and her husband died young, in short, and the orphan Christmas, heiress to an intestate estate, was consigned to his charge for her education and upbringing.
She was with us for only a few months before her transportation to France and elsewhere for her finishing education; but the little interlude of her presence at Evercreech awoke in me such a sense of shame and mutiny as I had never suffered before. I knew nothing of her parents but what might be gathered negatively from their reflection in this detestable child. I call her so with every sense of my responsibility to the present. She had all the instincts of an infantile parvenue, and all the hypocrisy of an embryo Pharisee. Her precocious sharpness was early in discovering the disfavour with which Lady Skene regarded me, and in affecting a sympathy with the reasons for that dislike. I was bad, sullen, one of the unelect on her little tripping red tongue. I had no gratitude for the gifts of Providence in so raising me from the mire to a position which was none of my deserts, and which had come to be mine purely through the instrumentality of an evangelical mother. I should be thankful, on the contrary, for every crumb of condescension vouchsafed me—a feast, if I could only come to realise in it a sense of my own insignificance. She was always poking that in my teeth, viciously and by innuendo. I wondered even that Lady Skene could stand it, since it reflected upon herself; but she had truly no snobbism, and valued her creed above all earthly aggrandisements. The abominable child played up to this weakness, or strength, in her, and so secured her own position as prime favourite with the real head of the establishment.
As to Lord Skene, I think, in his equitable old heart, he disliked his ward as much as I loathed her. But there were other considerations to influence him. She was at least the daughter of her mother, and might have been so different had his plans not miscarried. His dead boy, his shattered hope, for ever figured in the perspective of his past life. That also, perhaps, might have been so different—might have come to record no lapse upon ancient rogueries, had his hope duly taken shape and maturity. But the son had disappeared, and the father was left derelict. How it had all happened was a topic quite taboo in these days. A portrait of the boy hung in his room—a fresh, saucy young face, bright with a wholesome determination to live enjoyably, but wilful and a little imperious. I used to love to look at it, when I dared to steal in unobserved. It conveyed a sort of challenge and help to me in one. And he had been dead—how long? Years piled on years now; and no one knew where his bones lay. He had been climbing in the Italian Alps with his tutor, a travelling comrade, and, it was supposed, had fallen into a crevasse, or down a precipice while exploring the heights alone, and thereafter had never been seen. Mr Delane, the tutor, had given evidence of his parting with him on such and such a day, and there was an end of the matter. Charlie Skene had been wiped out, and with him all the elaborately compiled record of his father’s schemes and ambitions for him.