The servant turned to Dick. Doubtless there had been a great deal of excited conversation in the servants' quarters, and he awaited confirmation of what he had heard.
"Do as he tells you," assented Dick, and then he left the room.
But he could not help hearing what took place between Riggleton and the servant.
"What do you mean by looking to him?" asked Riggleton angrily. "Any of your nonsense and it'll be right about face with you. I'm master here and no error. It was all a mistake about Faversham. Everything belongs to me. See? And look here, there's going to be a change here. I ain't no milksop, I can tell you, and the whole lot of you'll have to get a move on, or out you go. It isn't much time that I shall spend in this gloomy hole, but when I am here there'll be something doing. I shall get the place full of a jolly lot of girls, and Wendover Park won't be no mouldy church, nor no bloomin' nunnery. You can bet your life on that. There'll be plenty of booze, and plenty of fun. Now then, get that fizz, and be quick about it."
The man's raucous, throaty voice reached him plainly, and every word seemed to scrape his bare nerves. He left the hall, and went out on the lawn where the sun shone, and where the pure spring air came to him like some healing balm.
This, then, was his cousin! This was the man who was the heir of old Charles Faversham's great wealth!
The whole situation mocked him. He believed he had done the thing that was right, and this was the result of it.
Like lightning his mind swept over his experiences, and again he wondered at all that had taken place. He tried to understand his strange experiences, but he could not. His thoughts were too confused; his brain refused to grasp and to co-ordinate what he could not help feeling were wonderful events.
He looked towards the great doorway, where, on the day of his coming to Wendover Park, he had seen that luminous figure which had so startled him. But there was nothing to be seen now. He wondered, as he had wondered a hundred times since, whether it was an objective reality, or only the result of a disordered imagination. There, in the bright sunlight, with Anthony Riggleton's raucous voice still grating on his ears, he could not believe it was the former. But if it were pure imagination, why—why——And again his mind fastened on the things which in spite of everything were beginning to revolutionise his life.
Then a thought startled him. He realised that a change had come over him. If he had met Tony Riggleton a few months before, neither the man's presence nor his language would have so disgusted him. He had writhed with anger when Riggleton had unfolded his plans to him, and yet a little while before he himself had contemplated a future which was not, in essence, so far removed from what his cousin had so coarsely expressed. Yes; he could not blind himself to the fact that since—since——But no, nothing was clear to him.