Wanlock sneered. “A book!” said he. “I’m thinking he’d be better at some other business. I find, myself, but the one Book needful; all the others are but vanity, and lead but to confusion. And he was pillaged, was he? Well, there’s this, it might have been a man who could afford it less, for Mellish was the wealthiest in the shire.”
“But now he is the poorest,” said the girl with pity. “I’m told it means his utter ruin.”
“There’s the money of the Glasfurd girl to patch his broken fortune with; they’re long enough engaged if the clash of the countryside be true,” said Wanlock, and his daughter blenched, while the wailing cry rose up again beyond the fir-tops on the moorland edge.
Wanlock stood confused a moment, then seized her by the arm. “Would ye have me vexed for him?” said he. “Now I—with your permission—look upon it as a dispensation. If Mellish is ruined, Dreghorn is the richest man in the countryside and the better match for you—”
“Dreghorn!” cried the girl with scorn. “He danced at my mother’s wedding—a cankered, friendless miser!”
“And now he’ll dance at yours! There have been men more spendthrift, I’ll admit, but you’re not a Wanlock if in that respect ye could not teach him better. He was at me again for ye yesterday—”
Mirren put her fingers in her ears; she was used to these importunities; they had lately made her days and nights unhappy, and sent her fleeing like a wild thing to the hills, or roving with a rebel heart in all the solitary places of the valley. At any other hour this spirit would have made him furious; to-day he was elated at her news, and let her go.
His joy, however, was but transitory. Searching with a candle late that evening through his wine-cellar among dusty bins whose empty niches gloomily announced the ebbing tide of that red sea of pleasure, or its fictitious wave, that had swept so high on ancient jovial nights to the lips of many generations of the guests of Manor, a yellow glint as from a reptile’s eye fastened upon him from a cobwebbed corner. He stared at it in horror and unbelief, closed in upon it with his guttering candle, warily; and found himself once more the owner of the brooch!
In the chill of the vault he felt, for a moment, the convulsion of a mind confronted with some vast mysterious power whose breath was loathsome, deathly, redolent of dust and fraught with retribution, and fearing an actual presence, almost shrieked when the flame of his candle was extinguished in the draught of a slowly opening door. He stood all trembling, with the jewel in his hand: a mocking chuckle rose in the outer night: all the old eerie tales of childhood then were true! He heard approaching cautious footsteps; a light was struck; a taper flared, and he faced the ne’er-do-well, his son!
“At the wine again, Stephen?” he said with unspeakable sadness, for indeed the lad had been the apple of his eye, and he knew too well his failing.