"He hasn't any anxiety on the subject whatsoever, my boy. Miss Lorne and I have seen him, and trumped up a story to cover everything. He doesn't expect you back until morning. But—— Would you like a pleasant surprise? Well, you can come back at once if you like and get it. Take your own time, however; only be sure that you turn up here not later than twelve, and are waiting just outside the lodge gates of the Grange when I go there to meet you. What's that? Yes, quite satisfied, quite. She did come out on the Common to-night, and—— What's that? To look for you? Yes, of course. What other motive could she have, you silly fellow? She came out, and your father came out; and—listen and catch this, Clavering"—sinking his voice—"for it is very important. You said, did you not, that last night when Lady Katharine took you into that house she told you she would show you something that would 'light you back to the land of happiness'?"
"Yes. Those were her words. Why?"
"Well, you be outside the lodge gates at the time I want you, my boy, and I'll show both of you the way to that land to-night." And he hung up the receiver before Geoff could say a word.
"The soul of honour, just as I knew he was, the young beggar!" he said, putting his thoughts into words for once in a way. "A son for any man to be proud of, that!" And chuckling a little, he prepared to leave the room.
But as if the sight of that room, with its swinging French window, its reading desk with an open book upon it and an easy chair beside, brought back to his memory that other son and that other father, the smile faded suddenly from his lips, his jaw squared, and a pucker gathered between his level brows.
What a difference between the two sons of those two men he had left out there in the grounds! The one clean-lived, clean-minded, honour's very self. The other a wastrel, a sot, a liar, the consort of evil women and disreputable men, a poor, paltry worm living in an oak tree's shade.
And to-night the General had wondered why the police should be coming to Wuthering Grange; what trail from last night's tragedy led to the threshold of this house! Yet, while he sat here reading, his own son—— Heigho! "'Tis a mad world, my masters," a mad, mad world indeed. Poor old chap! Poor, blind, unsuspecting old chap, sitting here all alone and reading! What was it he was reading while his unnatural son was slandering him to a stranger?
He walked to the reading desk and bent over the open book that lay upon it, with a pamphlet beside it and a litter of loose papers all round.
"Fruit Culture," by Adolph Bonnaise. And the pamphlet? He took it up to look at the title page, for the half of it was smothered under loose papers, one or two of which his act sent fluttering to the floor. The April number of The Gardener and Fruit Grower. Reading of flowers and of fruits, of Nature's good and beautiful things, and all the while—— Yes, indeed, Shakespeare was right. It is a mad world! Worse than mad: it is wicked! And the sons of men are the wickedest things in it!
Oh, well, he mustn't stand wasting time here in moralizing and mooning. Ailsa was waiting.