“No,” answers Barnes. “He knows well enough that there can be no open rupture. We had some words the other day at a dinner he gave at his own house; Colonel Newcome and that young beggar, Clive, and that fool, Mr. Hobson, were there. Lord Highgate was confoundedly insolent. He told me that I did not dare to quarrel with him because of the account he kept at our house. I should like to have massacred him! She has told him that I struck her,—the insolent brute—he says he will tell it at my clubs; and threatens personal violence to me, there, if I do it again. Lady Kew, I’m not safe from that man and that woman,” cries poor Barnes, in an agony of terror.
“Fighting is Jack Belsize’s business, Barnes Newcome; banking is yours, luckily,” said the dowager. “As old Lord Highgate was to die and his eldest son, too, it is a pity certainly they had not died a year or two earlier, and left poor Clara and Charles to come together. You should have married some woman in the serious way; my daughter Walham could have found you one. Frank, I am told, and his wife go on very sweetly together; her mother-in-law governs the whole family. They have turned the theatre back into a chapel again: they have six little ploughboys dressed in surplices to sing the service; and Frank and the Vicar of Kewbury play at cricket with them on holidays. Stay, why should not Clara go to Kewbury?”
“She and her sister have quarrelled about this very affair with Lord Highgate. Some time ago it appears they had words about it and when I told Kew that bygones had best be bygones, that Highgate was very sweet upon Ethel now, and that I did not choose to lose such a good account as his, Kew was very insolent to me; his conduct was blackguardly, ma’am, quite blackguardly, and you may be sure but for our relationship I would have called him to——”
Here the talk between Barnes and his ancestress was interrupted by the appearance of Miss Ethel Newcome, taper in hand, who descended from the upper regions enveloped in a shawl.
“How do you do, Barnes? How is Clara? I long to see my little nephew. Is he like his pretty papa?” cries the young lady, giving her fair cheek to her brother.
“Scotland has agreed with our Newcome rose,” says Barnes, gallantly. “My dear Ethel, I never saw you in greater beauty.”
“By the light of one bedroom candle! what should I be if the whole room were lighted? You would see my face then was covered all over with wrinkles, and quite pale and woebegone, with the dreariness of the Scotch journey. Oh, what a time we have spent! haven’t we, grandmamma? I never wish to go to a great castle again; above all, I never wish to go to a little shooting-box. Scotland may be very well for men; but for women—allow me to go to Paris when next there is talk of a Scotch expedition. I had rather be in a boarding-school in the Champs Elysées than in the finest castle in the Highlands. If it had not been for a blessed quarrel with Fanny Follington, I think I should have died at Glen Shorthorn. Have you seen my dear, dear uncle, the Colonel? When did he arrive?”
“Is he come? Why is he come?” asks Lady Kew.
“Is he come? Look here, grandmamma! did you ever see such a darling shawl! I found it in a packet in my room.”
“Well, it is beautiful,” cries the Dowager, bending her ancient nose over the web. “Your Colonel is a galant homme. That must be said of him; and in this does not quite take after the rest of the family. Hum! hum! is he going away again soon?”