“The young gentleman went away the night you left, Sir,” said Rickards, without being questioned; “but he came over this morning to ask if you had returned.”
“What news of the young lady who was so ill at Dalradern?”
“Out of danger, Sir. The London doctor was the saving of her life, Sir; he has ordered her to the sea-side as soon as she is fit to move, and Sir Within sent off Carter yesterday to Milford Haven, to take the handsomest house he can find there, and never think of the cost.”
“Rich men can do these things, Rickards!”
“Yes, Sir. Sir Within and my master haven’t to ask what’s the price when an article strikes their fancy.”
Grenfell looked to see if the remark was intended to explode a mine, or a mere chance shot. The stolid face of the butler reassured him in an instant, and he said, “I shall want candles in the library, and you will call me to-morrow early—say seven.”
When Grenfell had covered the library table with papers and parchments innumerable, title-deeds of centuries old, and grants from the Crown to Vyner’s ancestors in different reigns, he could not restrain a passionate invective against the man who had, out of mere levity, forfeited a noble fortune.
Contemptible as young Ladarelle was—mean, low-lived, and vulgar—the fellow’s ambition to be rich, the desire to have the power that wealth confers, raised him in Grenfell’s esteem above “that weak-minded enthusiast “—so he called him—who must needs beggar himself, because he had nothing to do.
He emptied drawer after drawer, burning, as Vyner had bade him, rolls of letters, parliamentary papers, and such-like, till, in tossing over heaps of rubbish, he came upon a piece of stout card-board, and on turning it about saw the sketch Vyner had made of the Irish peasant child in Donegal. Who was it so like? Surely he knew that expression, the peculiar look of the eyes, sad and thoughtful, and yet defiant? He went over in his mind one after another of those town-bred beauties he had met in the season, when, suddenly, he exclaimed, “What a fool I have been all this time. It is the girl at Dalradern, the ‘ward,’”—here he laughed in derision—“the ‘ward’ of Sir Within Wardle. Ay, and she knew me, too, I could swear. All her evasive answers about Ireland show it.” He turned hastily to Vyner’s letter, and surmised that it was to this very point he was coming, when the news of young Luttrell’s death was brought him. “What can be her position now, and how came she beneath that old man’s roof? With what craft and what boldness she played her game! The girl who has head enough for that, has cleverness to know that I am not a man to be despised. She should have made me her friend at once. Who could counsel her so well, or tell her the shoals and quicksands before her? She ought to have done this, and she shall, too. I will go over to-morrow to Dalradern; I will take her this sketch; we shall see if it will not be a bond of friendship between us.”
When, true to the pledge he had made with himself, he went oyer to Dalradern the next morning, it was to discover that Sir Within and his ward had taken their departure two hours before. The servants were busily engaged in dismantling the rooms, and preparing to close the Castle against all visitors.