And Archie came in so unconscious, almost self-satisfied, expecting a little approbation, and to find that his exertions had been appreciated! There was a half smile on his mouth which changed the expression of a face so often lowering and heavy with anticipation of evil. He feared no evil this night. His eyes were limpid and blue, without a cloud, though with a faint mist of boyish drowsiness in them just coming over the brightness of excitement. He was excited still, but a little sleepy, the call upon him being almost over: and it was nearly four o’clock in the morning, a sufficient reason for fatigue. “Did you want me, father?” he said, in his fresh, boyish voice. Evelyn stood by her husband’s side, holding his arm with a firm significant pressure. She gave one look at the lad who stood there, with his half smile, fearing no one, and then, with a sick heart, turned her face away.
“Yes, sir, I wanted you. I have been waiting for you here for hours,” Rowland said.
Archie was startled by this unexpected tone. The smile went away from his mouth. His eyes woke up from that mist of coming slumber and looked a little anxious, a little wondering, ready to be defiant, in his father’s face.
Rowland took up the piece of paper that lay on the table in the fierce white light of the lamp. Archie had clearly perceived it was a cheque, but what it could be for he did not imagine. His father took it up, and once more flung it at him as he had done so often. “Look at that,” in a voice of thunder, “and tell me what it means!” he cried.
CHAPTER XXXV.
“What is the meaning of it?” said Archie. He was so tired and pleased and sleepy, that he did not even now feel sure that anything was wrong. A faint idea struck his mind that his father, though he did not look amiable, might yet be making him another present, as he had done before. He caught it this time as it whirled towards him, and looked at it puzzled, but without any alarm. “It is a cheque,” he said, looking up from it, with again that vague, slumbrous smile creeping about the corners of his mouth.
“Is that all you have to say?”
“What should I say?” asked the young man. “Is it—another present you are making me?—but it’s a great sum,” he added, waking up more and more; “it can’t be that.”
He was so simple as he stood, almost so childish, taking the awful missive, of the nature of which he had no understanding, which meant ruin, shame, everything that was dreadful, into his hand so innocently, that there came from the breast of the spectator standing by—the only being whom the boy feared—a suppressed but irrestrainable groan of emotion. Yet Evelyn felt that to her husband his son’s ignorance meant nothing but acting, a consummate deceit, got up beforehand, the result of guilty expectation, not of innocent ignorance.
“Mind, how you drive me wild!” Rowland said hoarsely. “I give you yet a place of repentance. For your mother’s sake, and for my wife’s sake, who is not your mother—own to it like a man even now—and I’ll forgive you yet.”