Several hours pass, and still Master Percy does not put in an appearance. As Mrs Rimbolt’s uneasiness increases, half a dozen servants are sent out in various directions to seek the prodigal. It is an almost daily ceremony, and the huntsmen set about their task as a matter of course. No one can recollect an occasion on which Master Percy has ever come home at the right time without being looked for. If the appointed hour is four, every one feels well treated if his honour turns up at five. Nor, with the exception of his mother, and now and then Raby, does any one dream of becoming agitated for three or four hours later.
When therefore, just as the family is sitting down to dinner at half-past six, Walker enters radiant to announce that Master Percy has come in, no one thinks any more about his prolonged absence, and one or two of the servants outside say to one another that the young master must be hungry to come home at this virtuous hour.
This surmise is probably correct, for Percy presents himself in a decidedly dishevelled condition, his flannel costume being liberally bespattered with mud, and his hair very much in need of a brush and comb.
You cannot help liking the boy despite the odd, self-willed solemnity of his face. He is between fourteen and fifteen apparently, squarely built, with his mother’s aquiline features and his father’s strong forehead. The year he has spent at Rugby has redeemed him from being a lout, but it is uncertain whether it has done anything more. The master of his house has been heard to predict that the boy would either live to be hanged or to become a great man. Some of his less diplomatic school-fellows had predicted both things, and when at the end of a year he refused point blank to return to school, and solemnly assured his father that if he was sent back he should run away on the earliest opportunity, it was generally allowed that for a youth of his age he had some decided ideas of his own.
The chief fault about him, say some, is that he has too many ideas of his own, and tries to run them all together. But we are digressing, and keeping him from his dinner.
“My dear boy, where have you been?” says the mother; “we have been looking for you everywhere.”
“Oh, out!” replies Percy, hastily taking stock of the bill of fare.
“Well, run and dress yourself, or dinner will be cold.”
“I’m too fagged,” says Percy, coolly taking a seat. “Some soup, please.”
“I can’t have you sit down in that state, Percy,” says Mr Rimbolt; “it is not polite to your mother and Raby.”