CHAPTER VII.
HAGGARD COMES INTO HIS OWN.
Old Justice Haggard had died rather suddenly. He had been ailing for several weeks; as his son had remarked, his handwriting had been the first symptom of the breakdown. His articulation, too, had become thickened, and one evening he was found seated in his chair by his study fire speechless, his face painfully drawn on one side; within an hour he had peacefully passed away.
The king was dead, long live the king. Reginald Haggard came into his own. But though Haggard had talked of settling down into a county magnate in the case of his father's death, when that event happened he failed to do so.
"I couldn't stand it, you know. The dreadful dinners and the dreadful people would have finished me, I think," he had said.
So after the funeral, Haggard returned to The Warren, but not before he had given the old steward final and definite instructions, which caused that worthy man's hair to almost stand on end.
"Cunningham," he said, "if you want to remain on the estate as my steward, you'll have to alter the state of things here. My father, you know, muddled along in a happy-go-lucky sort of way. As long as his pigs took the first prize at the county shows he was happy. That was his ambition. Now, Cunningham, you'll have to make the place pay. There are a lot of old servants, old pensioners and old horses, all eating their heads off here, and doing no work. You'll have to make a clean sweep of the lot. Were I to attempt to do it myself they'd worry my life out. Now I want you to act as a buffer. From your decisions there is to be no appeal. They are to look to you, and not to me. As I said, the place must be made to pay, that's the first point; the second is, that I am not to be bothered. It used to amuse my father to sit in his justice-room every morning and to be perpetually receiving and answering letters from all sorts of people about the place. That sort of thing won't suit me. You know as well as I do that my father got nothing out of the place."
"Sir——" began the Scotchman.
"Wait till I have done, Cunningham, and you will see that you have nothing to say. I know what you are going to tell me. That it is my duty to come and live in this place, with these yokels, to have the ague at least twice a year, as my father did before me, and to ask my friends down in September to shoot my partridges. Those were my father's views, they're not mine. As to the house, I shall let it, and I shall do the same with the shooting. With regard to the property, if you can get an income out of it for me, well and good; if you can't, I don't suppose anybody can; and in that case I intend to be shot of the whole bag of tricks."