"Very fair; very fair, indeed," replied William Yorke, some patronage in his tone, meant for the absent young minor canon. Consciously vain of his own excellence in chanting, Mr. Yorke could but accord comparative praise to Tom Channing's. The vanity was not without cause; Mr. Yorke's sweet and sonorous voice was wont to fill the aisles of the old cathedral with its melody.
Just as the tea was over, one of the servants came in with a folded weekly review hot from the press on her silver waiter, and presented it to her master. Hamish opened it with a slight apology, and was glancing at its pages, when he folded it again with a sudden movement and quietly put it in his pocket. His sight, in the moment's happy confusion, partially faded; a bright hectic lighted his cheek; his whole heart leaped up within him, as with a rushing, blissful sense of realized hope. For he had seen that a review of his book was there.
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
AS IRON INTO THE SOUL.
The change in his face was remarkable. It was as though a blight had passed over it and withered the hopeful life out.
He sat with the journal in his hand--the authoritative "Snarler"--and read the cruel lines over and over again. When, in the solitude of his own study, they first met his eager eye, skimming them rapidly, and their purport was gathered in almost at a glance, a kind of sick faintness seized upon his heart, and he hastily put away the paper as though it were some terrible thing he dared not look further upon.
The shock was awful--and the word is not used in its often light sense; the disappointment something not to be described. After the departure of his guests, Roland and Gerald, and William Yorke had gone by his own wish to take home Annabel and to make a late call on Mrs. Bede Greatorex--if haply that fashionable dame might be found at home--Hamish Channing had passed into his study; and, there, alone with himself and his emotions, he once more unfolded the paper. All the while he had sat with it in his pocket, a sweet tumultuous hope had been stirring his bosom; he could hardly forbear, in his eagerness to realize it, telling them to make haste and depart. And when they were really going, it seemed that they were a month over it. He stood up wishing them goodnight.
"By the way, Hamish, I should think your book would soon be getting its reviews," spoke crafty Gerald, who had seen the journal brought in, and knew what was in it. "I hope you'll get good ones, old fellow."
And the wish was spoken with so much apparent genuineness, the tone of the voice had in it so vast an amount of gushing feeling, that Hamish gratefully wrung the offered hand. After that, even had he been of a less ingenuous nature, he would have suspected the whole world of abusing his book, rather than Gerald Yorke.
Shut up in his study, the lamp beside him, he unfolded the paper with trembling expectation, his heart beating with happiness. It was one of those moments, and they come in all our lives, which must stamp itself on the memory for ever. He looked, and looked. And then put the pages away in a kind of terror.