Sir Sykes Denzil was one of those men who, as husband and father, never carry their confidences beyond a certain convenient limit. He was no tyrant, and his daughters, who fondly loved him and who believed in his love for them, looked with regret on the cloud that so often rested on his yet handsome features. But he had known how to preserve his jealously guarded individuality from the encroachments of affectionate interference, so that it was but very rarely that his actions were the theme of open comment. Blanche and Lucy, therefore, though with feminine nicety of observation they noted that their father could not eat, but that he emptied his glass again and again, said nothing; while Jasper, as he watched Sir Sykes with a stealthy inquisitiveness, made the mental reflection that ‘the governor must be hard hit, very hard indeed;’ and secretly determined to turn the occasion to his own peculiar profit.
‘Jasper!’ said Lucy anxiously, some time after the dinner had come to an end; ‘what is the matter with papa? Do you know if he is really unwell, or if anything has gone wrong? I waited here for you, in case you might know what is amiss.’
Jasper, who had been intercepted as he was leaving the house for his customary twilight stroll, with a cigar between his lips, turned lazily round. ‘How can I tell, Lucy?’ he returned indifferently. ‘I’m not the keeper of my father’s conscience, as the Lord Chancellor, by a polite fiction, is supposed to be of the king’s.’
‘I only meant, has anything occurred, to your knowledge,’ pleaded Miss Denzil, ‘calculated to annoy or distress him? Anything, for instance, about you?’
‘How about me!’ demanded Jasper with a slight start and a slight frown.
‘Don’t be angry, brother; I only meant, dear, about your—debts,’ answered the girl, laying her hand on Jasper’s arm.
‘Has he been talking to you on that delightful subject?’ retorted the brother, almost roughly. ‘No; I see that he has not; at least not very lately. One would think, to hear that eternal refrain of debts, debts, debts for ever jangling in my ears, that I was the first fellow who ever overran the constable. Surely I’m punished enough, if I did owe a trifle, by being caged up in this wearisome old Bastille of a house, and—— There, there; Lucy, don’t cry. I’ll not say a word more against Carbery, and you may set your mind at rest. If the governor has anything to vex him, be assured that it is not in the least connected with so insignificant a person as myself.’ And, as though weary of the subject, he sauntered off.
It was Sir Sykes’s habit on most evenings to spend a short time, half an hour or so, in the drawing-room. He liked music; and Blanche, his younger daughter, who had been gifted with the sweet voice and delicate sense of harmony which are often found in conjunction with frail health, knew the airs and the songs that best suited him. He never, under any circumstances, remained long in company with his daughters, being one of those men to whom the society of women is in itself uncongenial; but on this particular evening he went straight from the dining-room to the library, and sipped his coffee there, while the twilight deepened into the gloom of night.
The day had been fine enough, but the sun had sunk in a cloud-bank of black and orange, and there were not wanting signs that a change of weather was at hand. The wind had risen, and the clouds gathered as the sun went down, and it seemed as though the proverbial fickleness of our climate would soon be illustrated. But Sir Sykes, as he went forth shortly after the clock on the turret had struck nine, paid no heed to the weather, save that once or twice he glanced upwards with a sort of half-conscious satisfaction at the darkling sky. The night, with its friendly shadows and its threats of a coming storm, suited far better with his purpose than cloudless azure and bright moonlight would have done. The moon, not as yet long risen, was young and wan, and her feeble lustre fell but at rare intervals through the wrack of hurrying clouds. The larches in the plantations quivered and the aspens by the trout-stream trembled as the gusts of wailing wind went by; while the giant trees in the park, each one a citadel of refuge to squirrel and song-bird, sent down a rustling sound, as though every one out of their million leaves had found a tiny voice of its own to give warning of the approaching gale. Sir Sykes skirted the lawn, passed through the shrubbery, and struck into a path seldom trodden except by the feet of his keepers, which led northwards through the park.
There is something ignominious in the very fact that the master of any dwelling, howsoever humble, should steal away from it with as earnest a desire to elude observation as though he had been a robber of hen-roosts or a purloiner of spoons. And perhaps such a proceeding appeared still more so in the case of the owner of so stately a place as Carbery. Sir Sykes felt as he glided, unseen as he hoped, past paling and thicket, at once angry and ashamed. So repugnant to him was the errand on which his mind was bent, that on reaching a private door in the northern wall of the park he came to a halt, and held as it were parley with himself before proceeding on the quest of the writer of the letter.