II.
Some five months earlier in the year Lord Veynes had returned from a voyage round the world.
It was to have completed his education, which included, besides some Greek grammar, the use of a cue, a little Cavendish and the racing calendar. He was five-and-twenty, a gentleman; dressed well, looked well and lived well; on the whole, a nice fellow, deeply attached to his father and devotedly to himself.
The former was becoming an old man, having married late in life; was short, had a stoop, a halo of whitened hair, and a face that was a mask of merriment. His kindliness and humor were bywords, and his stories always made a widening silence in a room, to which fresh listeners drifted. He would laugh at them himself, yet his laughter seemed their best part, their sincerest compliment; it was like humor itself holding its sides.
He had filled every county dignity in turn, but they made no mark on him nor he on them; he bore them dutifully, but he was glad to be rid of them; they added something to his tales, to the fullness of his humor, to the softness of his heart; perhaps to public knowledge of his incompetence. Yet he was liked none the less for his failures; his blunt honesty thrust out of them obtrusively, as an elbow through a ragged sleeve.
Veynes was the one relic of his married life, having cost his mother her life; and he was adored as things may be that are made so ruinously unique. He was a good boy, and stood a great deal of spoiling; but he had argued, naturally, his own adorableness from so much adoration, and would have honored his father’s encomiums to any amount.
His home-coming had all the decoration of triumphal entries—flags, festival arches and singing children; afterward a tenant dinner, tenant humor and considerable drowsiness.
When it was all over, and the two men sat together by the log fire in the hall, which burned red splashes on the armored walls, the earl opened the subject nearest his heart—an heir.
“I want to see him here before I’m gone,” he concluded, with a kind of ruefulness which was a part of his pathos and of his humor; “and, by George, my boy, if you don’t marry soon, I will.”