"Then you must believe it has to do with unusual dangers, and you must believe I am now threatened by some unusual dangers?" said he with a start. He had been threatened by a very uncommon danger that day, the danger of being made a laughing stock for the whole town, but such a misfortune could never have been contemplated by his father. Compared with the importance of a message from his dead father, how poor and insignificant seemed his fears of the early part Of this day.
"I do not know. I am not sure. Something out of the common must be in your case, my dear child." What a luxury of pride and delight to think the tall, powerful, stalwart, clever man, was her child, had been a little helpless baby lying in her lap, pressed close to her heart! "When your father died you were in his opinion too young, I dare say, to be taken into his confidence. He often told me he would leave a paper for you, and that I was not to give it you until you were between twenty one and thirty (if I lived), and that I was only to give it to you in case you showed any very strong leaning towards politics or a public life."
The son smiled, and threw himself back in his chair. He felt greatly relieved. He knew his father had always shown a morbid horror of politics, and had always tried to impress upon him the emptiness of public honours and distinctions. Why, his father never said. The son distinctly remembered how tremulously excited the old and ailing man had been at every rumour of ambitious scheming abroad, particularly how he garrulously condemned the ceaseless scheming for the throne of France then perplexing the political world. He had often pointed out to his young son the folly of the Legitimists and the Orleanists and the Napoleons, until once John had said, "Why, sir, you are as emphatic to me in this matter as if I myself were a pretender!" Upon which his father had said, "Hush! Hush! my boy. You must not jest about such matters. Idle, the idlest, pretensions of the kind have often caused oceans of bloodshed." Upon which John had smiled in secret to note how his father's cherished horror had carried him so far as to caution him, John Hanbury, member of a simple English household, against aspiring to the kingly or imperial throne of the Tuileries!
"You do not think, mother," he said gaily, "that I am going to buy a tame eagle, and hire a fishing boat and take France?"
She smiled sadly, remembering her husband's dread of lofty aspirants. "No," she said, "I think, if your father were alive now, he would see as little need of cautioning you against becoming a pretender to the throne of France as of keeping out of dissipation. But he told me if ever you showed signs of plunging into politics I was to give you the paper. I left it in my room, thinking we might both sit there, not fancying we should have our chat here. I shall give it to you as you go to your room."
"And you have no clue to what the paper contains?" he asked pleasantly.
"No," she answered with hesitancy and a thoughtful lowering of her eyes. "You remember, at that time--I mean as a boy and lad--you were a fierce Radical."
"Oh, more than that! I was a Republican, a Socialist, a Nihilist, I think. A regular out-and-out Fire-eater, Iconoclast, Destructionist, I think," the young man laughed, throwing himself back in his chair and enjoying the memory of his youthful thoroughness.
"And your father took no part whatever in politics, seemed to dread the mention of them. He was at heart, I think, an aristocrat."
"And married the daughter of Sir Ralph Preston, whose family goes back centuries before the Plantagenets, and to whom a baronetcy is like a mere Brummagem medal on the breast of a Pharoah."