And with these orders to Jorrocks, he marched back under the ancestral trees to the old hall of Wyvern. Who was to keep the hearth of the Fairfields aglow? The light of the old Squire’s life was flaring low in the socket, a tiny taper was just lighted in darksome Carwell, and Harry Fairfield—was he ever to take his turn and illuminate the Wyvern world?
CHAPTER LII.
A TALK WITH THE SQUIRE.
Harry proved how hungry he was by eating a huge dinner. He had the old dining-room to himself, and sipped his brandy and water there by a pleasant fire of coal and spluttering wood. With a button or two undone, he gazed drowsily into the fire, with his head thrown back and his eyes nearly closed; and the warmth of the fire and the glow of the alcohol flushed his cheeks and his nose and his forehead to a brilliant crimson.
Harry had had a hard day’s riding. Some agitations, great variety of air, and now, as we have seen, a hearty dinner and many glasses of brandy and water, and a hot fire before him. Naturally he fell asleep.
He dreamed that the old Squire was dead and buried. He forgot all about the little boy at Carwell, and fancied that he, Harry Fairfield, draped in the black mantle with which the demure undertaker hangs the mourners in chief, had returned from the funeral, and was seated in the old “oak parlour,” just in all other respects as he actually was. As he sat there, Master of Wyvern at last, and listening, he thought, to the rough tick of the old clock in the hall, old Tom Ward seemed to him to bounce in, his mulberry-coloured face turned the colour of custard, his mouth agape, and his eyes starting out of their sockets. “Get up, Master Harry,” the old servant seemed to say, in a woundy tremor, “for may the devil fetch me if here baint the old master back again, and he’s in the blue room callin’ for ye.”
“Ye lie!” gasped Harry, waking up in a horror.
“Come, ye, quick, Master Harry, for when the Squire calls it’s ill tarrying,” said now the real voice of Tom Ward.
“Where?”
“In the blue chamber.”
“Where—where am I?” said Harry, now on his feet and looking at Tom Ward. “By jingo, Tom, I believe I was dreaming. You gave me a hell of a fright, and is he there really? Very well.”