"Can you send somebody down to the office with that?" he said. "It can't go until to-morrow. I want to keep my other man ready."
"Yes," agreed Maxwell. "There are regulations, Chatterton, which will bar out your opening sentence, Damn your private code. The rest is, I think, plain enough. Get news whatever it costs. Wire your agent in English if he has sense enough to understand it. Believe I am quite able to meet the bill."
"That man," explained Chatterton, "is, I blush to say, a relative of my own, and given to complaining that times are bad. It surprises me that he does not find them ruinous, if this is a sample of his enterprise. I'm almost as much cut up as you are about this affair; and I'm sorry for you, Maxwell."
"Thanks," returned the master of Culmeny, quietly. "He was the only son left me, and I have a presentiment of what the end will be. It is, however, in the hands of the Almighty; but, if the worst comes, I know that neither of them will forget what is due to the land that bred him."
Chatterton coughed huskily.
"You are morbid, Culmeny. If they can only steer clear of treachery, by the Lord, those two lads will cut their way out in spite of all the savages in Africa. I know the one whose father was my partner, and I know your son. If my own brother told me he had seen them beaten, I would not believe him."
Maxwell left, and in a few minutes Mrs. Chatterton came in to say that Lilian was growing delirious. As they spoke together the iron-master heard a voice in the hall.
"It is that confounded Rae," he observed. "It was he who encouraged Lily to go poking into the houses of poor folks who didn't want her, all winter. I consider him responsible for her illness, and feel quite capable of telling him so."
The clergyman was ushered in, and he had barely stated the purport of his visit when the elder man cut him short.
"No. Miss Chatterton will neither sing at your concert, nor distribute any more coal tickets to encourage professional loafers!" he said. "In fact she is seriously ill. If you had not been enjoying yourself in Edinburgh you would have known it. You are sorry! Well, I really cannot help saying that I think you ought to be. Miss Chatterton has not been strong all winter, and was warned against damp and exposure; but you managed to convince her it was her duty to wander up and down the village, pestering the sick folk, in spite of the rain and snow. Women have not the sense to discriminate between what is necessary and sentimental foolishness, you know."