This anxiety lest Lord Killcrichtoun should marry and have an heir before death should claim him, so preyed upon the poor gentleman’s spirits that he watched over his lordship more carefully, and inquired about him more anxiously than ever.
In the places where they chanced to meet, he could neither see nor hear any sign of the misfortunes he dreaded. No one knew whether his lordship was meditating matrimony or not; no rumor of his contemplating conjugal life was afloat.
Of course the impoverished gentleman in his threadbare coat, limp linen and broken gloves, could not go into those circles from which Lord Killcrichtoun would be likely to select a bride; and so, though Everage in their mutual resorts learned nothing to alarm him, he was tormented with uneasiness as to what might be going on out of his sight in places from which his poverty excluded him.
He went into coffee-rooms, not to partake of the refreshments for which he could not pay, but to look at the fashionable news, longing to see at what dinners, dances, or conversaziones, he, who was keeping him out of his estate, had been seen, and fearing to find, under the head of “Approaching Marriages in High Life,” some announcement of the calamity he so much dreaded—the impending marriage of the baron. But of course he never found anything of the sort.
“I hope the fellow has too much sense—yes, and too much conscience, to think of taking a wife. Men in his wretched state of health should never marry; for when they do, they always entail their infirmities upon any children they may happen to have,” said Everage, with virtuous emphasis; for his wish being father to his thought, he had fully persuaded himself that Alexander was in a very bad way—a doomed man, rushing with railroad rapidity to the grave.
“If he will only refrain from marriage for a year or two all will be well,” said Everage to himself, as visions, not of wealth, rank and grandeur, but simply of independence, respectability and comfort floated before his eyes.
Sitting in his small, stifling room, surrounded by his little pale girls and his invalid wife, breathing the heavy city air, he thought of Killcrichtoun that might yet soon be his own. He saw the forests of fragrant pine and feathery firs; the fields of oats and barley; the streams full of trout and salmon; the mountains with their game; the old tower with its cool rooms. He saw his wife and daughters blooming with health and smiling with happiness; he felt the bracing breezes of the Highlands fan his brow. Sitting in his stuffy little room, he saw and felt all this in a vision, and he longed and prayed, oh how earnestly, that this vision might yet be realized.
But a very great shock was at hand for him.
One day, while Lord Killcrichtoun and himself were walking on Trafalgar square, they met a nurse and child, with whom his lordship immediately stopped to speak.
At the very first sight of the child, Everage was struck with its unmistakable likeness to Lord Killcrichtoun. And when the baron took the boy in his arms, and hugged and kissed him with effusion, Everage looked on in surprise and disapprobation, for he thought that he knew his lordship was unmarried, even while he detected the relationship between the two.