“Go down stair, Robert,” said his mistress—“something has happened to fret my father—go down stairs, and let Alick answer the bell.”
When the man left the room, Sir Arthur re-entered, as if he had been watching his departure. “What’s the meaning of this?” he said hastily, as he observed the notes lying still on the table—“Is he not gone? Am I neither to be obeyed as a master or a father?”
“He is gone to give up his charge to the housekeeper, sir,—I thought there was not such instant haste.”
“There is haste, Miss Wardour,” answered her father, interrupting her;—“What I do henceforth in the house of my forefathers, must be done speedily, or never.”
He then sate down, and took up with a trembling hand the basin of tea prepared for him, protracting the swallowing of it, as if to delay the necessity of opening the post-letters which lay on the table, and which he eyed from time to time, as if they had been a nest of adders ready to start into life and spring upon him.
“You will be happy to hear,” said Miss Wardour, willing to withdraw her father’s mind from the gloomy reflections in which he appeared to be plunged, “you will be happy to hear, sir, that Lieutenant Taffril’s gun-brig has got safe into Leith Roads—I observe there had been apprehensions for his safety—I am glad we did not hear them till they were contradicted.”
“And what is Taffril and his gun-brig to me?”
“Sir!” said Miss Wardour in astonishment; for Sir Arthur, in his ordinary state of mind, took a fidgety sort of interest in all the gossip of the day and country.
“I say,” he repeated in a higher and still more impatient key, “what do I care who is saved or lost? It’s nothing to me, I suppose?”
“I did not know you were busy, Sir Arthur; and thought, as Mr. Taffril is a brave man, and from our own country, you would be happy to hear”—