“Oh! I am, sir.”
“That is commendable,” said the baronet dryly. “Only—you understand?”
“I understand fully, sir. She shall not annoy you again. I have made away with—with the things, as you ordered.”
“And the skull is gone?”
“It is—yes, it is gone.”
Was there a shifting devil in the fellow’s eyes? His master looked at him keenly. Everything about the man—his humility, his gentle voice, his poor physique, and more beggarly resignation to a life of long inaction—told against him with the robuster individuality. And, after all, were these qualities in a measure assumed? So much of doubt and mystery had entered into the baronet’s days of late, as to give birth in him to a gloom and suspicion that were hitherto foreign to his nature. He foresaw himself, with dark apprehension, the lord of a bugbear estate—beset with a thousand trials and difficulties—cut off from the world of his custom, and ever sinking into deeper sloughs of melancholy and despondence.
He roused himself with an effort. That very afternoon, he inwardly determined, he would ride into Winchester—where was to be found his agent, to whom Creel had entrusted the moneys standing to his credit—and satisfy himself as to his prospective position as a man of more or less substance. Then, if all figured out well, he could arrange for the purchase of furniture and hire of servants proportionate to his means.
At any rate he would rub shoulders with his fellow-creatures once more. That, perhaps, was not the least that induced him to the purpose. He most piously longed to shake off, if only for an hour, that sense of sombre isolation that had lain on him from his first coming, like a dark fatality.
“You can go,” he said sharply; and fell to musing again.
His meal was served by Darda. If, in her half-crazed consciousness, she resented, with a swollen, passionate heart, the cruel order that had deprived her at a blow of the chief fantastic interest of her broken life, she had disciplined herself already to give no sign of it. No doubt her brother, forced to be the instrument of a harsh despotism, had appealed to her by love of himself to control the emotion that, expressed, could only read their ruin. No doubt, also, the sense of bitter wrong driven down, would by and by stimulate certain nerves of action that had hitherto slumbered unrecognized.