In due course, Roland availed himself of the invitation to which we heard his father make reference, and transferred himself and his luggage to the ancestral home of the Nevilles.
There the cordiality of his reception surprised and pleased him. The Colonel was, as we have seen, very well disposed towards the son of his old friend and comrade-in-arms, and, moreover, was delighted to have a companion for the smoking-room and the morning lounge; one, too, who was such a capital listener; for to Roland the old man’s stories were all new, and being good in themselves when not heard too often, the normal quiet of Ardleigh was apt to be disturbed by much uproarious mirth when the two got together. As for Clara, she seemed to have quite forgotten any little unpleasantness which had taken place when they last met, and had put on her most gracious and agreeable manner for their guest’s benefit; and as she knew how to show to advantage when she chose, and was exceedingly clever and well informed, Roland found himself beginning to feel rather ashamed of his former bad opinion of her. Mrs Neville, who was somewhat of an invalid and of an argumentative—not to say contradictious—turn, forbore to snub him as she was wont to snub everything male under the age of fifty. “Young men want continually putting down, even when they are right”—was her creed, and, truth to say, she acted up to it most religiously. But in Roland’s favour exception was made; whether it was that he was known to possess “a queer temper”—his father’s own son, in fact—or that there was some ulterior reason for making his stay a particularly attractive one, his conversational remarks were allowed to pass unchallenged by his hostess to an extent which caused the girls to exchange frequent glances of surprise. Even Roy’s presence was not only tolerated, but welcomed, and the woolly rascal, before he had been twenty-four hours at Ardleigh, ran in and out as he pleased, according to his usual way of making himself perfectly at home wherever he went.
“By the way, how does our reformed black sheep, Steve Devine, get on in the capacity of a thief set to catch a thief?” asked Roland, as he and his host were smoking their after-breakfast cigars on the terrace one morning.
“All right as yet,” replied the latter, who being in want of an under-keeper, had, on Roland’s representations partly, appointed the ex-poacher to that office a few days after his release from gaol—“in order to give him a fair chance of starting afresh,” as the kind-hearted old soldier put it. The latter’s friends, indeed, shook their heads over the arrangement, and prophesied that it would lead to no good—but the Colonel was not to be upset in his benevolent scheme once he had made up his mind. So Devine found himself installed in a snug berth with good wages, and if, being in such a fair way to doing well, he did not do it, why, he would have himself only to thank for it as an ungrateful rascal.
Now the ex-poacher knew perfectly well that he owed this piece of luck largely to Roland’s good word for him, for his employer had told him as much; and this being so, of course, by all the rules of that maudlin and slobbery optimism which usually characterises human nature in fiction—especially cad human nature—he should have become eternally grateful, and his former hostility straightway have been metamorphosed to lifelong devotion. But was this the case?
Not even a little bit. No idea of gratitude ever entered his head. It was only for his own purposes that the young Squire of Cranston had helped him, argued this ruffian, with the low suspicious cunning of his class, but he, Devine, would keep a weather eye open, never fear.
He was right in a way. Roland had acted to serve his own purposes, but in a directly opposite sense to that suspected by Gipsy Steve.
“By the way, Roland,” went on the Colonel, “that daughter of his is a monstrously pretty girl, eh! By Jove, sir, but I don’t believe you’d have bothered your head about them if she’d had a snub nose and a squint, eh?”
“No, I shouldn’t. Beauty in distress appeals to the susceptibilities of man, whereas hideosity in similar case does not—unchivalric, even brutal as the confession may sound. But as the girl is only on a visit to her father—doesn’t live with him—my character may be regarded as clear.”
“Ha-ha! You dog!” laughed the jolly Colonel. “That reminds me of—”