“My poor darling, it will break her heart! Poor old fellow! Cut off like that.”
Resentment, bitterness, died out in this great sorrow; and Chris could only see now the fine-looking, masterful, elderly man, who had always been his friend, till ambition had led him astray, and he had discarded the suitor who had grown up to love his child.
It seems too horrible! One of these terrible fits.
He was on his way up to ask to see Claude, and try to administer some consolation, but he paused. It would be an outrage to go now. It would be indecent to force his way there in disobedience to the wishes of the man who was lying blank and cold—blank and cold as the edifice he had so proudly reared with the money he had fought for so long.
“No,” thought Chris. “I must go back and write.”
In the manly frankness of his disposition, up to that moment, no thought of obstacle removed, or the future that lay before him, had come across his brain, till just then he caught sight of the gardener coming quickly along the town street, when, like a flash, came back to him the scene of the past night, and his discovery. Then, with the incongruity of human nature, there came a feeling of satisfaction in the thought that Gartram could never now sting him with contemptuous allusions to his wretched escapade, and that now he need not fear this man.
Momentary thoughts, which he chased away with a feeling of indignation against himself as he stopped the gardener.
“Is it—true?”
“Yes, sir. It’s true enough. He was a hard master, one as come down upon you awful if he see a weed; but I’d give that there right hand to have him alive and well before me now.”
Chris bowed his head and walked slowly back, to start aside and gaze fiercely in the eyes of the man whom he encountered a few yards farther on, for, as he was approaching the post-office, Glyddyr came out suddenly with a telegraph form in his hand.