'This vile adventuress, for I am sure she is such, shall not quite gain her ends. I shall break the entail, if I can!' exclaimed Sir Piers, with growing exasperation; 'by the God that hears me, I will!'
'Father, see her once—only once—ere you judge of her so cruelly! And, oh! let us not part thus! One day you may repent it,' urged his son piteously, and yet not without some anger in his heart.
'Repent it? never!' replied his father, with a wild and bitter laugh. 'Now then, Tunley, is that waggonette at the door?'
'Yes, sir,' replied the butler, again appearing, and very much scared.
'Go!' said Sir Piers to his son; 'as God is our judge, here for ever ends all between us!'
He turned and left the room by one door, while his son quitted it by another, and from that moment the father and son met no more. The latter's allowance was cut off; he got into debt, sold his commission, and with his young wife eventually disappeared. Mr. Balderstone was supposed to be cognisant of his movements for a time under a false name; however, the general never inquired, and after a year or so all traces of him were lost.
Proud of his ancient race, incapable personally of a dishonourable thought or guilty plan, his son's rash marriage, without his consent, and with an obscure girl, filled his heart with a species of black fury, and gave his face a look of repellent pride that was long its settled expression.
The fate of Piers became a kind of mystery—hidden; though it is the fate of things in this world that, as a general rule, nothing is hid for ever.
There came a night which the general never forgot! It was the night of an event which he related only to John Balderstone and one or two others, confidential friends, who were now no longer in the land of the living.
On the night referred to, the lonely general, then creeping up the vale of years, was seated in the library, lingering over his last glass of grog, and gazing, as we last left him, into the glowing embers; his thoughts wandered away from present things to the past in spite of himself. He reviewed the things of old—forgotten sayings and doings in camp and quarters, in the field and the Indian jungle; the faces and the voices of the distant and the dead came back to him, and among them, more powerfully than usual, the face and voice of his lost son, Piers.