‘Ay—right joyously!’ cried the porter; ‘and eke return him some of his own. Shall I take a cudgel, master?’
‘Thy little finger will serve,’ said Brion dryly.
Joan parted with him a little anxiously, urging diplomacy rather than violence; but he reassured her, answering for himself as a model of discretion.
And, indeed, Master Harnett, when found, discovered himself in too abjectly disarming a mood to invite retaliation. Terrified by events, and fawningly eager to propitiate, he was only too ready to curry favour with the old heir by damning the pretensions of the new. The man was burnt to ashes, he said, and with him the Will which had made him master of the estate. His covetousness would never part with it, and, with its destruction, there was an end of his title. If Captain Middleton—as the rogue was pleased to call him—knew of another Will assigning him heir to the estate, that Will would now hold good. At the same time he would not have Captain Middleton assume an injustice of his Uncle. The deceased, as he knew for a fact, had made him in the later Will his residuary legatee—implying his succession to a sum which, if inconsiderable, owing to the testator’s reckless habits, was yet some earnest of his thoughtfulness—and would no doubt have left him all, had not his mind been somewhat basely practised on. He hoped Captain Middleton would remember that, and perhaps his own share in venturing to suggest such a course to the testator.
He lied as to that, as Brion very well understood; but the information was as balm to an aching wound. It had not been the thought of poverty which had caused it, but of the estranged affection which could have condemned him to it. And now he knew. He thought nothing of the smallness of the bequest: the fact that it had been made at all was solace enough.
He left the attorney, with an expression of formal obligation to him so stiff and chill as almost to sound like an affront, and, being obsequiously bowed into the street, turned his steps for St Lawrence’s graveyard, before going home to life and love. For home was wherever Joan was—that was a new and lovely thought.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A LAST DISCOVERY
‘After the storm, calm,’ said Brion in a subdued level voice, his eyes brooding on the melancholy scene about him.
They had ridden over early from Ashburton, and had wandered through the desolate grounds, and seen the hopeless ruin of it all; and at the end, going into the trampled garden, had sat themselves down on a bench in a leafy corner, and turned to quiet discussion of the ways and means of the life before them. The place was quite deserted. Remote always, its loneliness, broken and death-smitten, had never seemed so stark a thing as now. An acrid smell of burning still lingered in the heavy Autumn air; no sound broke the stillness but the periodic rustle and crash of débris pitching from the crumbling walls.
‘O, love, dear love!’ sighed the girl: ‘if only you could feel it so!’