‘Glad to see you all,’ shouted Mr. Rich; ‘delighted we’ve got such a fine day; almost good enough for croquet, it appears to me. Good morning, my lord. Oh, any friend of yours! Ah-ha, Mr. Frank Renton,’ stretching forth his hand with a cordiality which took Frank by surprise, ‘now I call this kind. Had everything been as it ought to be, of course we’d have met before now,—country neighbours, you know. Your brother has just come by the last train with a friend of his, a wonderful clever fellow from town. He’s too much of a swell himself ever to paint much, eh? but he’s hand and glove with all of them. Come along up-stairs, and I’ll take you to him. Lord Edgbaston, you know your way to the drawing-room. Mrs. Rich will be delighted to see you; and I trust to you not to let my Nelly leave the room till I send for her. I mean to give the child a little surprise,’ added the millionnaire, rubbing his fat hands. ‘Come along, Mr. Renton.’ Frank followed in a state of partial stupefaction. What reason there could be for this old fellow’s cordiality; why he should leave a live lord to find his own way up-stairs and conduct him, Frank Renton, instead; why Laurie should be here; what he had to do with the surprise Mr. Rich was going to give his child;—all these were mysteries to Frank. He seemed to have gone into an enchanted house. Had Mr. Rich taken him aside and offered him his daughter’s hand and fortune on the spot, his surprise would scarcely have been increased. Was this what it meant? Or if it was not this, what did it mean?
The Rentons and the Beauchamps had been friends in the old days, and Frank knew the house through which he was being guided almost as well, perhaps, as the owner of it did, who walked before him, looking not half so imposing as his own butler. Frank, who had a good deal of prudence for so young a man, thought it would be better on the whole to say nothing about this; but when his host preceded him through passage after passage, and up one short flight of stairs after another, surprise got the better of him.
‘We must be going to the music-room, I suppose,’ he said; ‘this is the way;’ for the new master paused uncertain between two turns.
‘That’s about it,’ said Mr. Rich; ‘droll though, to see a stranger know one’s house better than one does oneself. I suppose you were a deal here in the time of the old people? Very nice people according to all I hear. But, you know, I didn’t turn them out. Bought the place at a fair price, as anybody else might have done. It was their doing, not mine. Ah! it’s a sad thing to outrun the constable, Mr. Frank. It should be a lesson to you as a young man.’
‘I am just going off to India,’ said Frank, determined, at least, to let his new acquaintance know that little was to be made of him in the way of society, ‘and I shall not have much chance.’
‘To India, eh?’ said Mr. Rich, with an unchanged tone. Clearly after all, he did not mean to offer the young Guardsman on the spot his daughter and her fortune. ‘India’s a fine thing at your age. My eldest boy went off a dozen years ago, when we were not quite so well off as we are now; and he’s coming home this summer, please God. If you had been at home we might have had no end of jolly meetings; but your mother goes out nowhere, I hear.’
‘Not now,’ said Frank; ‘my mother is a great invalid.’ And there was something in his tone which betrayed a certain offence,—What right had this man to speak of his mother? And this tone conveyed itself at once to the other’s lively ear.
‘Ah, well! she has a right to please herself,’ said Mr. Rich. ‘Here we are at last. Halloo, gentlemen, I hope it fits. I wouldn’t have it too large or too small for a hundred pounds.’
‘Never fear, it will fit beautifully,—I knew it would,’ cried Laurie’s voice from behind a great picture, which was being hoisted into its place. After having been rather splendid and haughty about his mother to this commonplace individual, who had no right to hope for her acquaintance, it must be admitted that it gave Frank a pang to find his brother as busy as a workman, and quite at his ease in his occupation, putting up Mr. Rich’s pictures. Here was something worse even than Laurie’s slovenly ways and contented relapse into lower life. When a man has a brother in the Guards he owes it, if not to himself, at least to his relations, to remember that he is a gentleman. And to play the fool in such a house as this was worse than anything, with all those fellows below to tell each other how sadly Frank Renton’s brother, ‘the artist fellow,’ had fallen back in the world.
‘I did not know my brother was in the habit of carrying home his work,’ he said, with a certain savage irony. But Laurie did not hear this speech, and Mr. Rich, who did hear it, took no notice. There was nothing for it but to stand and stare at the daub as it was raised to its place. In the middle of the floor, in front of it, stood a bearded stranger, whom Frank did not know, nor care to know. He was watching the progress of the picture with anxious interest. Was it Laurie’s picture? Whether it were or not, Laurie condescending to make a carpenter of himself for the moment was a sight which shocked his brother much. He strode away to the end window, and gazed out to show his indifference, with a soft whistle of impatience, which would have made itself into words anything but soft had circumstances permitted. But nobody remarked either his impatience or his anger. The room was long and not very broad, and the panel in which the picture was being placed was immediately opposite the gilded pipes of a chamber organ, which was let into the wall. To be sure, if it had been a picture of chorister boys instead of little barbarians it would have been more harmonious with the place; but Suffolk’s Angles shone out of the dark wall like positive sunshine. There were three broad mullioned windows in one end of the room, and at the other a great east window full of heraldic designs in painted glass,—the arms of the Beauchamps and their connexions. Under this blaze of colour, on either side, the panels were carved, running into little pinnacles and canopy work of a semi-ecclesiastical kind. It had been, indeed, a chapel in the early ages, when the Beauchamps were Catholic. A few high-backed, heavy, oak chairs were all the furniture in it now, except quite at the west end of the room, near where the picture was being placed, where a grand piano stood under one window, and a small easel in the other. This picturesque place, in which priests in glittering vestments, and knights in steel, and ladies in flowing robes, would have been the natural actors, was now the music-room in Richmont, occupied chiefly by the ex-cheesemonger’s daughter,—an out-of-the-way place in which she could pursue her occupations as she pleased. Reflections, not exactly to this effect, but of a somewhat similar meaning, were in Frank’s mind as he turned with disgust from his unconscious brother. The poor Beauchamps!—who had the best blood in England in their veins, and were now vegetating at all sorts of wretched Continental baths and watering-places. To be sure, old Beauchamp was a blackleg, and his wife no better than she should be,—and the music-room, when Frank knew it, had been a lumber-room and play-room, dear to the children, though nobody thought anything about its picturesqueness. Still, those were the Beauchamps, and these Riches,—and what a falling off was there! Frank was full of these thoughts, and in a very discontented mind generally, not condescending to look at the picture with which all the rest were absorbed, when Laurie emerged from behind the frame, and, to his amazement, saw that it was his brother who interrupted the light in the middle window. It was a kind of bay window, projecting just a little out beyond the line of the others, and in it there stood a low chair covered with old brocade, and a small table with a vase of fresh spring flowers. Frank had not noticed these little accessories, but Laurie, having the eye of an artist, took them in at a glance. Somehow Frank’s attitude, standing between the low chair and the little table, suggested ideas to Laurie’s mind of a different kind from those which moved his brother. This was the favourite haunt of the millionnaire’s daughter. The chair was hers, and the flowers, and the book which lay on the ledge of the window; and Royalborough was close at hand, not too far for a young soldier to ride over any day. Could Frank be Nelly Rich’s property too?