His old friend Mr. Jopling, like himself an ardent numismatist and collector, had died a few weeks before, much to the baronet’s regret. To-day there had reached him a tiny packet, forwarded by Mr. Jopling’s executors, containing a couple of rare coins bequeathed him by his dead friend. One of them was a gold stater of Argos, with the head of Hera, the reverse being Diomedes carrying the palladium; while the other was a scarce fifty-shilling piece of Cromwell. Sir Gilbert had long envied his friend the possession of them, and now they were his own; therefore was the feeling with which he regarded them one of mingled pleasure and pain.
He had devoted the evening to a rearrangement of the contents of some of his cases and cabinets and to deciding upon a resting-place for his newly-acquired treasures.
It had been a labour of love. But, for all that, his thoughts every now and again would keep reverting from the pleasant task he had set himself to his eldest son; for this was the latter’s birthday, a fact which the father could not forget, although he would fain have kept it in the background of his memory. On just such a wild night twenty-four years before, had John Alexander Clare been born. With what bright hopes, with what glowing expectations he had been welcomed on the stage of life, Sir Gilbert alone could have told. A groan broke involuntarily from his lips when he pictured in thought the difference between then and now. His heart was very bitter against his son.
The night was creeping on apace.
In the great house everybody was in bed save the baronet, who was addicted to solitude and late hours. Outside, at recurring intervals, the wind blew in great stormy gusts, which anon died down to an inarticulate sobbing and wailing, as it might be of some lost spirit wandering round the old mansion, seeking ingress but finding none. There were voices in the wide-mouthed chimney; the rain lashed the windows furiously; by daybreak the trees would be nearly bare and all the woodways be covered by a sodden carpet of fallen leaves. Summer was dead indeed.
Suddenly, in a lull of the gale, Sir Gilbert was startled into the most vivid wakefulness by an unmistakable tapping at one of the two long windows which lighted the room. He listened in rigid silence till the tapping came again. Then he crossed to the window whence the sound had proceeded, and after having drawn back the curtains and unbarred and opened the shutters, he demanded in his sternest tones:
“Who is there?”
“It is I—Alec, your son,” came the reply in a well-remembered voice.
Sir Gilbert drew a long breath and paused for a space of half-a-dozen seconds. Then he unhasped and flung wide the window, and John Alexander Clare, the scapegrace heir, rain-soaked and mud-bedraggled, stepped into the room.
His father closed the window after him, while Alec proceeded to relieve himself of his soft broad-brimmed hat and the long cloak which had enveloped him from head to foot.