At last the lifting of the veil to the eastward revealed the bold promontory of Land's End, and soon, beyond, the fair green slopes of his own beautiful Old England. For all of the captious criticism he had fallen in the way of bestowing upon her, how he loved her! He felt as if he must throw up his arms and shout for joy. Suddenly she had become his, with a sense of possession new to him, and sweet to feel. The orderliness and stereotyped lines of her social system against which he had rebelled, and the iron bars of her customs which his soul had abhorred in the past,—against which his spirit had bruised and beaten itself,—now lured him on as a security for things stable and fine. In subtile ways as yet unrealized, he was being drawn back into the cage from which he had fled for freedom and life.
How quickly he had become accustomed to the air of deference in Mr. Stretton's continual use of his newly acquired title—"my lord." Why not? It was his right. The same laws which had held him subservient before, now gave him this, and he who a few months earlier had been proudly ploughing his first furrows in his little leased farm on a mountain meadow, now walked with lifted head, "to the manor born," along the platform, and entered the first-class compartment with Mr. Stretton, where a few rich Americans had already installed themselves.
David noticed, with inward amusement, their surreptitious glances, when the lawyer addressed him; how they plumed themselves, yet tried to appear nonchalant and indifferent to the fact that they were riding in the same compartment with a lord. In time he would cease to notice even such incongruities as this tacit homage from a professedly title-scorning people.
David's mother had moved into the town house, whither his uncle had sent for her, when, stricken with grief, he had lain down for his last brief illness. The old servants had all been retained, and David was ushered to his mother's own sitting-room by the same household dignitary who was wont to preside there when, as a lad, he had been allowed rare visits to his cousins in the city.
How well he remembered his fine, punctilious old uncle, and the feeling of awe tempered by anticipation with which he used to enter those halls. He was overwhelmed with a sense of loss and disaster as he glanced up the great stairway where his cousins were wont to come bounding down to him, handsome, hearty, romping lads.
It had been a man's household, for his aunt had been dead many years—a man's household characterized by a man's sense of heavy order without the many touches of feminine occupation and arrangement which tend to soften a man's half military reign. As he was being led through the halls, he noticed a subtile change which warmed his quick senses. Was it the presence of his mother and Laura? His entrance interrupted an animated conversation which was being held between the two as the manservant announced his name, and, in another instant, his mother was in his arms.
"Dear little mother! Dear little mother!" But she was not small. She was tall and dignified, and David had to stoop but little to bring his eyes level with hers.
"David, I'm here, too." A hand was laid on his arm, and he released his mother to turn and look into two warm brown eyes.
"And so the little sister is grown up," he said, embracing her, then holding her off at arm's-length. "Five years! When I look at you, mother, they don't seem so long—but Laura here!"