“You’re very ready with your ‘heaven’s sake,’ Mr. Horry,” said Peggy, severely; “do ye no think another word might stand better? Heaven has but little to do with it all. The Lord help us! Who is he? ’Deed and he’s a man, none so vartuous as he ought to be. And what does he here? Live as it pleases him, the Lord forgive him! without heeding God nor man—that’s all about it. And as for hating of you, how much love is there lost, Mr. Horry? Do you think I could kep it on the point o’ my finger? You never were wan to waste your kindness. How much of it, think you, gos to him?”
“It is well I can equal him in something,” said Horace, with a careless but bitter tone. “However, Peggy, you’ll tell nothing, as I might have known. I suppose I may wait to see Susan; there’s nothing against that, is there? So, with your permission, I’ll go and wait for her. Don’t be afraid—only to the dining-room.”
“The Lord preserve me!—and if he comes in!” cried Peggy, half addressing herself, and half appealing to her unwelcome visitor.
“Let him come in. I am in my father’s house,” cried Horace, with that cold, hopeless smile. Peggy knew it of old, and had seen it on other faces. She put out her hand with a fierce impatience, shaking it in his face.
“Oh, man! go away, and make me rid of ye! Go where ye please; if ever mortal man has a devil incarnate in him, it’s when ye see that smile!”
Smiling still, Horace went coolly away to the dining-room, as he said; and Peggy, at her wit’s end, as she was, found no better way of averting the evil she dreaded than by fastening the doors, so that they could not be opened from without, and clambering upstairs to watch at the elevated window of the storeroom, from whence she could see her master’s approach. Horace had never felt himself so entirely in command of the house. He paused at the door of the dull apartment in which he had spent so many hours and years, and where Susan’s needlework, more ornamental now than of old, made a little unaccustomed brightness on the dark mirror of the uncovered table; but no sympathy for his young sister, shut up here hopelessly during her early bloom of life, warmed his heart, or even entered his thoughts. He thought of himself—how he used to waste and curse the days in this miserable solitude, and what a change had passed upon his life since then. Listening, in the extreme silence, he heard Peggy go upstairs to her watch. He smiled at that, too, but accepted the safeguard; and, without any more hesitation, turned round, and went across the hall to his father’s room.
The study; that dreaded, dismal, apartment;—with its dull bookcases set at right-angles, the hard elbow-chair standing stiffly before the table, the big volume laid open upon the desk, the stifling red curtains drooping over the window; his heart beat, in spite of himself, as he entered; he could scarcely believe his father was not there, somehow watching him, reading his very thoughts. With a sudden “Pshaw!” of self-contempt and temerity, he hastened forward to the table. There was no lock upon the little sloping desk which sustained the volume Mr. Scarsdale had been reading. Without hoping to find anything, but with a vague thrill of curiosity and eagerness, Horace lifted the book, and opened the desk. It was full of miscellaneous papers—Peggy’s household bills, and other things entirely unimportant; but among these lay some folds of blotting-paper. He opened them with a trembling hand; the first thing he saw there was a letter, which fell out, and which Horace grasped at, half-consciously, and thrust into his pocket; another fold concealed, apparently, the answer to it, half written, and hurriedly concluded. The young man ran his eyes over it with burning curiosity. It was addressed to Colonel Sutherland, and chiefly concerned an invitation from her uncle to Susan, which Mr. Scarsdale peremptorily declined. Then his own name caught his eye; the last paragraph abruptly broken off, as if the writer had thrown down his pen in impatience, and could continue no longer. These words, which conveyed so little information to him, burned themselves, notwithstanding, upon Horace’s memory with all the vehement interest of unnatural hate:—
“As for my son, I do not choose to answer to any man for my sentiments and actions in respect to him. I held all natural ties as abrogated between us from the period you mention, when, as you say, he seems to have ceased to appear to me as my child, and I have only viewed him as a rival, unjustly preferred to me. I do not object to adopt your words; they are sufficiently correct; but I will suffer no question on the subject; let the blame be upon the head of the true culprit. As to the will——”
Here the letter ended, with a dash and blot, as if the pen had fallen from the writer’s fingers; it was this, evidently, which had driven him forth in wild impatience, stung by his subject. Horace read, and re-read the sentence, devouring it with his eyes of enmity. Then he restored it rudely to its place, put back the book, and left the room. He thought he had discovered something in the first flush of his excitement. It did not seem possible that he could have looked thus directly into his father’s thoughts without discovering something. He no longer cared to risk a meeting with him. In the tumult of his imaginary enlightenment he called to Peggy, hastily, that he was going away, and went out, as he entered, by the back door. Nobody was visible on the moor; the whole waste lay barren before him, under the slanting light of the setting sun. He put up the collar of his coat, set his hat over his eyes, and plunged along the narrow path among the gorse and heather, to Tillington, thinking still in his excited mind, and feeling in his tingling frame, that he had found out something; and knew more of the secret of his life than he had ever known before; deluded by his eagerness and enmity, and the excitement caused in him by the first stealthy investigation it had ever been in his power to make.