'Horton is a clever fellow enough, as country doctors go; but at Hastings I could have had the best physicians in London to see me,' grumbled his lordship.
The rustic maid-servant came in to lay the table, assisted by her ladyship's footman, who looked a good deal too tall for the room.
'I shan't dine,' said the Earl. 'I am a great deal too ill and cold. Light a fire in my room, girl, and send Steadman to me'—this to the footman, who hastened to obey. 'You can send me up a basin of soup presently. I shall go to bed at once.'
He left the room without another word to his wife, who sat by the hearth staring thoughtfully at the cheery wood fire. Presently she looked up, and saw that the man and maid were going on with their preparations for dinner.
'I do not care about dining alone,' said her ladyship. 'We lunched at Windermere, and I have no appetite. You can clear away those things, and bring me some tea.'
When the table furniture had been cleared, and a neat little tea-tray set upon the white cloth, Lady Maulevrier drew her chair to the table, and took out her pocket-book, from which she produced a letter. This she read more than once, meditating profoundly upon its contents.
'I am very sorry he has come home,' wrote her correspondent, 'and yet if he had stayed in India there must have been an investigation on the spot. A public inquiry is inevitable, and the knowledge of his arrival in the country will precipitate matters. From all I hear I much fear that there is no chance of the result being favourable to him. You have asked me to write the unvarnished truth, to be brutal even, remember. His delinquencies are painfully notorious, and I apprehend that the last sixpence he owns will be answerable. His landed estate I am told can also be confiscated, in the event of an impeachment at the bar of the House of Lords, as in the Warren Hastings case. But as yet nobody seems clear as to the form which the investigation will take. In reply to your inquiry as to what would have happened if his lordship had died on the passage home, I believe I am justified in saying the scandal would have been allowed to die with him. He has contrived to provoke powerful animosities both in the Cabinet and at the India House, and there is, I fear, an intention to pursue the inquiry to the bitter end.'
Assurances of the writer's sympathy followed these harsh truths. But to this polite commonplace her ladyship paid no attention. Her mind was intent on hard facts, the dismal probabilities of the near future.
'If he had died upon the passage home!' she repeated. 'Would to God that he had so died, and that my son's name and fortune could be saved.'
The innocent child who had never given her an hour's care; the one creature she loved with all the strength of her proud nature—his future was to be blighted by his father's misdoings—overshadowed by shame and dishonour in the very dawn of life. It was a wicked wish—an unnatural wish to find room in a woman's breast; but the wish was there. Would to God he had died before the ship touched an English port.