“Adam will be glad to take you, I am main sure of that, Mr Harry,” said the dame. “But as the Nancy will be ready to put off before I get back, I would ask you to wait till to-morrow afternoon, when she will go out for the night’s fishing.”
Harry, well pleased at the arrangement, having wished the dame good-bye, accompanied Mr Groocock on his morning’s ride.
Chapter Six.
Lord Howe’s Victory.
Harry got back at luncheon time to Texford, where the family were assembled in the dining-hall. Sir Reginald—a fine-looking old man, the whiteness of whose silvery locks, secured behind a well-tied pig-tail, was increased by the hair-powder which besprinkled them—sat at the foot of the table in the wheel-chair used by him to move from room to room. His once tall and strongly-built figure was slightly bent, though, unwilling to show his weakness, he endeavoured to sit as upright as possible while he did the honours of his hospitable board. Still it was evident that age and sickness were making rapid inroads on his strength.
He had deputed his niece, Mrs Castleton, to take the head of his table. She had been singularly handsome, and still retained much of the beauty of her younger days; with a soft and feminine expression of countenance which truly portrayed her gentle, and perhaps somewhat too yielding, character—yielding, at least, as far as her husband, Ralph Castleton, was concerned, to whose stern and imperious temper she had ever been accustomed to give way.
“My dear Harry, we were afraid that you must have lost your way,” she said, when the young midshipman entered the room.
“I rode over to the post-office at Morbury for letters, and had to wait while the bag was made up. I slung it over my back, and I fancy was taken for a government courier as I rode along. I have brought despatches for every one in the house, I believe; a prodigious big one for you, Uncle Fancourt, from the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, I suspect, for I saw the seal when it was put into the bag,” he said, addressing a sunburnt, fine-looking man, with the unmistakable air of a naval officer, seated by his mother’s side. “Mr Groocock, to whom I gave the bag, will send them up as soon as he has opened it. There is something in the wind, I suspect, for I heard shouting and trumpeting just as I rode out of the town. Knowing that I had got whatever news there is at my back, I came on with it rather than return to learn more about the matter.”