CHAPTER LI. BARONET AND BLACKSMITH.
The more sir Wilton's anger subsided, the more his heart turned to Richard, and the more he regretted that he had begun by quarrelling with him. Sir Wilton loved his ease, and was not a quarrelsome man. He could dislike intensely, he could hate heartily, but he seldom quarrelled; and if he could have foreseen how his son would take the demand he made upon him, he would not at the outset have risked it. He liked Richard's looks and carriage. He liked also his spirit and determination, though his first experience of them he could have wished different. He felt also that very little would make of him a man fit to show to the world and be proud of as his son. To his satisfaction on these grounds was added besides a peculiar pleasure in the discovery of him which he could ask no one to share—that it was to him as a lump of dynamite under his wife's lounge, of which no one knew but himself, and which he could at any instant explode. It was sweet to know what he could do! to be aware, and alone aware, of the fool's paradise in which my lady and her brood lived! And already, through his own precipitation, his precious secret was in peril!
The fact gave him not a little uneasiness. His thought was, at the ripest moment of her frosty indifference, to make her palace of ice fly in flinders about her. Then the delight of her perturbation! And he had opened his hand and let his bird fly!
His father did not know Richard's prudence. Like the fool every man of the world is, he judged from Richard's greatness of heart, and his refusal to forsake his friends, that he was a careless, happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, who would bluster and protest. As to the march he had stolen upon him on behalf of the Mansons, he nowise resented that. When pressed by no selfish necessity, he did not care much about money; and his son's promptitude greatly pleased him.
“The fellow shall go to college,” he said to himself; “and I won't give my lady even a hint before I have him the finest gentleman and the best scholar in the county! He shall be both! I will teach him billiards myself! By Jove! it is more of a pleasure than at my years I had a right to expect! To think of an old sinner like me being blessed with such a victory over his worst enemy! It is more than I could deserve if I lived to the age of Mephistopheles! I shouldn't like to live so long—there's so little worth remembering! I wish forgetting things wiped them out! There are things I hardly know whether I did or only wanted to do!—Damn it, it may be all over Barset by this time, that the heir to sir Wilton's property has turned up!”
He rang the bell, and ordered his carriage.
“I must see the old fellow, the rascal's grandfather!” he kept on to himself. “I haven't exchanged a word with him for years! And now I think of it, I take poor Robina's father for a very decent sort of fellow! If he had but once hinted what he was, every soul in the parish would have known it! I must find out whether he's in my secret! I can't prove it yet, but perhaps he can!”
Simon Armour was not astonished to see the Lestrange carriage stop at the smithy: he thought sir Wilton had come about the cheque. He went out, and stood in hairy arms and leather apron at the carriage door.
“Well, Armour, how are you?” said the baronet.