"'Your father's son? Impossible!' he mocked. 'Impossible save for that big nose of yours and the set of your shoulders. Ha, ha! So you would not run away in face of an enemy? Morbleu! A game cockerel, I protest.'
"So, making me a very mocking bow, he went away. And my mother wept again very sorely and very often, till the day she died."
"Saying nought of him?"
"As I knelt beside her, at the last, she put her arms around me closely.
"'Pray God you may not meet him!' she moaned, 'or, if you do, pray God you may save him from——' But she died before she finished her words."
Sir Henry's chin was sunk on his breast. The reopening of an unhealable wound is sore enough work.
Let it be closed henceforth.
Yet, being open, he would tell the lad all now, before forbidding mention of such subject again. "Come," he said, rising, clutching at his ebony stick with the sudden weakness of age. "You shall see his likeness, and then—well, it is good that the dead past buries its dead."
Sir Henry Berrington did not believe in ghosts. Yet they haunted the picture-gallery up there. Ah yes! Curse he might and did, yet the ghosts laughed and sang with merry, boyish voices, shouting in glee as they romped with Chieftain and Bride, the great deerhounds, crying aloud to tell father or mother of some youthful sport, carolling out some brave, rollicking ditty of gallant deeds.
Ah, yes! It was not the old mother alone who had wept on the neck of these ghosts, holding out wide, empty arms to embrace shadows, and turning away—alone.