"I will telegraph for you," he replied, with provoking good-humour. "Karl will be the very fellow: he has ten times the head for business that I have. Let him act for me in all things, exactly as though it were he who had succeeded: I give him carte blanche. It will save all trouble to you."
Sir Adam Andinnian declined to be shaken out of his resolve and his inertness. In what might be called a temper, Mrs. Andinnian departed straight from the breakfast-table for the railway-station, to take the train. Her son duly accompanied her to see her safely away: she had refused to take Hewitt: and then he despatched a telegram to Karl, telling him to join his mother at Foxwood. Meantime, while these, the lady and the message, went speeding on their respective ways, the new baronet beguiled away the day's passing hours amidst his flowers, and shot a few small birds that were interfering with some choice seedlings just springing up.
Lieutenant Andinnian received the message promptly. But, following the fashion much in vogue amidst telegraphic messages, it was not quite as clear as daylight. Karl read that Sir Joseph was dead, that his mother was either going or gone to Foxwood; that she was waiting for him, and he was to join her without delay. But whether he was to join her at her own home and accompany her to Foxwood, or whether he was to proceed direct to Foxwood, lay in profound obscurity. The fault was not in Sir Adam's wording; but in the telegraph people's carelessness.
"Now which is it that I am to do?" debated Karl, puzzling over the sprawling words from divers points of view. They did not help him: and he decided to proceed home; he thought his mother must be waiting for him there. "It must be that," he said: "Adam has gone hastening on to Foxwood, and the mother is staying for me to accompany her. Poor Uncle Joseph! And to think that I never once saw him in life!"
Mr. Andinnian had no difficulty in obtaining leave of absence: and he started on his journey. He was somewhat changed. Though only a month had gone by since the severance from Lucy Cleeve, the anguish had told upon him. His brother officers, noting the sad abstraction he was often plunged in, the ultra-strict fulfilment of his duties, as if life were made up of parades and drill and all the rest of it, told him in joke that he was getting into a bad way. They knew naught of what had happened; of the fresh spring love that had made his heart and this earth alike a paradise, or of its abrupt ending. "My poor horse has had to be shot, you know"--which was a fact; "and I can't forget him," Mr. Andinnian one day replied, reciprocating the joke.
The shades of the midsummer night were gathering as Karl neared the house of his mother. He walked up from the terminus, choosing the field-path, and leaving his portmanteau to be sent after him. The glowing fires of the departed sun had left the west, but streaks of gold where he had set illumined the heavens. The air was still and soft, the night balmy; a few stars flickered in the calm blue firmament: the moon was well above the horizon. This pathway over the fields ran parallel with the high road. As Mr. Andinnian paced it, his umbrella in his hand, there suddenly broke upon his ears a kind of uproar, marring strangely the peaceful stillness of the night. Some stirring commotion, as of a mass of people, seemed to be approaching.
"What is it, I wonder?" he said to himself: and for a moment or two he halted and stared over the border of the field and through the intervening hedge beyond. By what his sight could make out, he thought some policemen were in front, walking with measured tread; behind came a confused mob, following close on their heels: but the view was too uncertain to show this distinctly.
"Some poor prisoner they are bringing in from the county," thought Mr. Andinnian, as the commotion passed on towards the town, and he continued his way.
"This is a true Midsummer Eve night," he said to himself, when the hum of the noise and the tramping had died away, and he glanced at the weird shadows that stood out from hedges and trees. "Just the night for ghosts to come abroad, and---- Stay, though: it is not on Midsummer Eve that ghosts come, I think. What is the popular superstition for the night? Young girls go out and see the shadowy forms of their future husbands? Is that it? I don't remember. What matter if I did? Such romance has died out for me."
He drew near his home. On the left lay the cottage of Mr. Turner. Its inmates seemed to be unusually astir within it, for lights shone from nearly every window. A few yards further Karl turned into his mother's grounds by a private gate.