So early as next morning the messenger of vengeance had gone like a fiery cross all over Eskside—up the water and down the water, placarded in the hamlets, sent flying by the post over all the county. It came by the morning’s post to Rosscraig itself. The man who went for the letters got a copy from somebody, which was given with much solemnity and secrecy to Harding the butler for his private information. The upper servants laid their heads together over it in the housekeeper’s room with fright, and yet with that almost agreeable excitement which moves a little community when any great event happens to the heads of it. Excitement is sweet, howsoever it comes; and the grim pleasure which servants often seem to enjoy even in “a death in the family,” is curious to behold. This was much more piquant than a death, and nobody could tell to what it might lead; and then there was the thrilling suspense as to who should venture to tell it to my lord and my lady, and how they would take it when they found it out.
As was to be expected, it was through Harding’s elaborate care to keep it from his master that it was found out. Lord Eskside was in his library before breakfast, very busy with his lists of voters, and the calculations of each district and polling-place, all of which agreed so delightfully in the certain majority which must carry Val triumphantly to his place in Parliament—a triumph which, all the more perfect that it was late, filled the old lord’s heart. His wrinkled forehead was smoothed out as if he had swallowed an elixir of life; his shaggy eyebrows, almost white now, were still, or nearly so; his under lip had subsided peacefully. How many disappointments had passed over that rugged old head! His son Richard had been nothing but one disappointment from beginning to end, sometimes giving acute pain—always a dormant dissatisfaction to his parents. For years and years he had been lost to them altogether: he had sinned like a prodigal, bringing in a wild and miserable romance into the family records, without making up for his sin by the prodigal’s compensating qualities,—the readiness to confess, the humility of asking pardon. Richard had done badly by his family, yet was as proud, and took up as superior a position, as if he had done well. He had not only disappointed but scorned his father’s hopes. Neither father nor mother had any comfort in him, any good of him, any more than if they had no son.
But there was recompense for all their suffering in Val; he was altogether their own, their creation: and the pleasure with which the old lord found all his hopes realising themselves in this boy, who was still young enough to be under his own influence, to take his opinions as a kind of credo and symbol of faith, to carry out his wishes, and take up the inheritance of the Rosses, as he had perfected and filled it up during his long life—was, I think, far greater, more perfect and delightful, than the success of any middle-aged man like Richard, who, as old Jean Moffatt said, was quite as old if not older than himself, could have given him. There were a hundred things in Richard’s character that jarred upon his father, which his good sense made him accept and submit to, knowing how hopeless it would be to attempt to shape a man of the world, who half despised even while he respected his rustic father, into anything like his own image. But there was nothing yet which was grieving or contradictory in Val. The boy was passionate, but then every boy had some defect; and a little wayward and wilful if roused, but always submissive as a child to the arguments of affection, and candid to understand when he was wrong. Lord Eskside saw with fond eyes of affection, and heard from every one—scholastic Grinders, and persons in society, and men of the world—that no more promising lad could be than this hero of his, who had accepted all his schemes and fallen in with all his views. To attain this rare pleasure in your old age is not a common blessing, and it was all the more exquisite because he knew how rare it was.
In this state of mind he rose from his library table and his lists of voters, and stalked out with his hands clasped under his coat tails, to look at the great registering thermometer which hung outside on the shady corner at the west wing. When he came into the hall, Lord Eskside saw Harding in the distance, poring over a paper which he held in his hand,—a large white broadsheet, very much like Val’s address, of which there were some copies about the house. Harding’s obtusity was a joke with the old lord. “Has he not got the sense of it into his old noddle yet?” he said to himself, half laughing, and watched with quiet amusement the butler’s absorption. Lord Eskside’s patience, however, was none of the longest, and he called Harding before many seconds had passed. The man was too much occupied to hear him, and did not stir. Then the old lord, half irritated, half laughing, called again. “If that’s Mr Ross’s address you are reading, bring it here, you haverel, and I’ll explain it to you,” he said. Harding turned round with a scared look, and, crushing up the paper in his hand, he thrust it into his pocket with hurried and almost ostentatious panic.
“It’s not Mr Ross’s address, my lord,” he said.
“Hey! what is it then?—let me see. Lord bless us, man!” said his irascible master, “why do you put on that look? What is it? Let me see!”
“I assure you, my lord, it’s nothing—nothing of the least consequence,” said Harding. “Your lordship would not look twice at it; it’s nothing, my lord.” And he put his hand upon his pocket, as if to defend that receptacle of treason, and stood with the air of the hero in the poem—
“Come one, come all, this rock shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I.”
Harding, for the first time in his life, was melodramatic in his determination to give his blood sooner than the objectionable paper. While the old lord stood looking at him half alarmed, and becoming more and more impatient, Mrs Harding strayed from her room, which was within reach of the voices, as it was her habit to do when her husband was audible in too prolonged colloquy with my lord.
“Marg’ret,” said Lord Eskside, “what has that haverel of a man of yours got in his pocket? I never can get a word of sense out of him, as you well know.”