“What is the matter?” he said, as the man approached. “What has happened? You were going to me? Tell me at once what it is.”
“I beg your pardon, Sir,” said Rixon, with the perpetual apology of a well-bred servant. “Yes, Sir, I was going to St. Michael’s. My lord sent me to tell you——”
“Thank heaven, that it is not my father! You mean that my father sent you? That is a relief,” said Rollo, drawing a long breath.
“Yes, my—Sir!” said Rixon, with confusion, “My lord is in the enjoyment of perfect health—at least as good as is compatible with the great misfortune, the catastrophe that has—snatched——”
“What do you mean?” said Rollo. Rixon was fond of long words. He laughed, “You are always mysterious. But if my father is all right——”
“Oh, don’t! my—don’t, Sir!” said the man, “laughing is not what ought to be on your lips at such a moment. Your brother has had an accident——”
“My brother—Ridsdale? Good heavens! Can’t you speak out? What has happened?” said Rollo, with blanched cheeks. Horror, fear, hope, all sprung up within him, indistinguishable the one from the other. The moment seemed a year during which he stood waiting for Rixon’s next words.
“It is too true, my lord,” said the man, and the address threw around Rollo a sudden gleam of growing light. “Your brother had a terrible accident on the hunting-field. His horse stumbled on King’s Mead, at that bad fence by Willowbrook. He was taken up insensible, and died before he could be got home. Things are in a terrible state at Courtlands. I was sent to let your lordship know. My lord would be glad if you would come home at once.”
Rollo staggered back, and put himself against the wall. A cold moisture burst out over him. He grew so pale that Rixon thought he was going to faint. The man said afterwards that he could not have believed that Mr. Ridsdale had so much feeling. And partly it was feeling as Rixon thought. For the first moment the thought that his brother, upon whom fate had always smiled—Ridsdale! Ridsdale!—the very impersonation of prosperity and good fortune, should be lying dead, actually dead, at his age, with all his prospects, appalled him. It seemed too much, unnatural, beyond all possibility of belief. Then the blood rushed back through all his veins with a flush and suffusion of sudden heat. The change alarmed the messenger of so much evil and so much good. He put out his hand to support his young master. “My lord, my lord!” he said (they were words which Rixon loved to repeat, and which added to his own dignity as a gentleman’s gentleman), “remember your father; now that your lamented brother is gone, all his lordship’s trust is in you.”
Rollo waved his hand, not caring for the moment to speak. “Let me alone!” he said. “Let me alone! leave me to myself.” And it did not take him long to recover and shake off the horrible impression, and realise the astounding change that had occurred. Perhaps it is not possible that the death of a brother, which produces so extraordinary and beneficial a change in the situation and prospects of the next in succession, can be regarded with the natural feeling which such an event uncomplicated by loss or gain of a pecuniary kind calls forth. There was a sudden shock, then a consciousness that something was expected from him, some show of grief and profound distress; and then a bewildering, overwhelming, stupefying, yet exciting realisation of the change thus suddenly accomplished in himself. He was no longer merely Rollo, a fashionable adventurer, dealing in every kind of doubtful speculation, and legitimatised gambling, a man of no importance to anyone, and free to carry out whatever schemes might come into his head; but now—an altogether different person—Lord Ridsdale, his father’s heir; the future head of a great family; a future peer; and already endowed with all the importance of an heir-apparent. The world seemed to go round and round with Rollo, and when it settled again out of the whirling and pale confusion as of an earthquake, it was not any longer the same world. The proportion of things had changed in the twinkling of an eye. The distant and the near had changed places. What was close to him before receded; what was far away became near. In the hurry of his thoughts he could not even think. Pain mingled with everything, with the giddiness of a strange elation, with the bewilderment of a surprise more startling than any that had ever come to him before in all his life. Ridsdale!—he who had always been so smiling and prosperous; he to whom everything was forgiven; whose sins were only peccadilloes; whose lightest schoolboy successes were trumpeted abroad, whose movements were recorded where-ever he went; it was inconceivable that he should be lying—dead; inconceivable that Rollo, the detrimental, the one in the family whom all disapproved of, should be put in his place, and succeed to all his privileges and exemptions. It did not seem possible. It needed Rixon saying my lord to him at every moment, to make the curious fiction seem true. Rixon got a cab to drive his young master to the other station, by which he must go to Courtlands; and Rollo—leaving all his former life behind him, leaving his license, his marriage, his bride, in the opposite direction, fading into misty spectres—turned his back upon all that had been most important to him half an hour ago, and drove away.