Sir Roderick and Lady Ilchester did not conceal their elation at their daughter"s vast inheritance, though the lady appealed to my feelings in stating that her son Charles was not mentioned in the Will. Sir Roderick talked of the squire with personal pride:--"Now, as to his management of those unwieldy men, his miners they sent him up the items of their complaints. He took them one by one, yielding here, discussing there, and holding to his point. So the men gave way; he sent them a month"s pay to reward them for their good sense. He had the art of moulding the men who served him in his own likeness. His capacity for business was extraordinary; you never expected it of a country gentleman. He more than quadrupled his inheritance--much more!" I state it to the worthy Baronet"s honour, that although it would have been immensely to his satisfaction to see his daughter attracting the suitor proper to an heiress of such magnitude, he did not attempt to impose restriction upon my interviews with Janet: Riversley was mentioned as my home. I tried to feel at home; the heir of the place seemed foreign, and so did Janet.
I attributed it partly to her deep mourning dress that robed her in so sedate a womanliness, partly, in spite of myself, to her wealth.
"Speak to her kindly of your grandfather," said my aunt Dorothy. To do so, however, as she desired it, would be to be guilty of a form of hypocrisy, and I belied my better sentiments by keeping silent. Thus, having ruined myself through anger, I allowed silly sensitiveness to prevent the repair.
It became known that my father was at Bulsted.
I saw trouble one morning on Janet"s forehead.
We had a conversation that came near to tenderness; at last she said: "Will you be able to forgive me if I have ever the misfortune to offend you?"
"You won"t offend me," said I.
She hoped not.
I rallied her: "Tut, tut, you talk like any twelve-years-old, Janet."
"I offended you then!"
"Every day! it"s all that I care much to remember."
She looked pleased, but I was so situated that I required pa.s.sion and abandonment in return for a confession damaging to my pride. Besides, the school I had been graduating in of late unfitted me for a young English gentlewoman"s shades and intervolved descents of emotion. A glance up and a dimple in the cheek, were pretty homely things enough, not the blaze I wanted to unlock me, and absolutely thought I had deserved.
Sir Roderick called her to the library on business, which he was in the habit of doing ten times a day, as well as of discussing matters of business at table, ostentatiously consulting his daughter, with a solemn countenance and a transparently reeling heart of parental exultation.
"Janet is supreme," he would say: "my advice is simple advice; I am her chief agent, that is all." Her chief agent, as director of three Companies and chairman of one, was perhaps competent to advise her, he remarked. Her judgement upon ordinary matters he agreed with my grandfather in thinking consummate.
Janet went to him, and shortly after drove him to the station for London. My aunt Dorothy had warned me that she was preparing some deed in my favour, and as I fancied her father to have gone to London for that purpose, and supposed she would now venture to touch on it, I walked away from the East gates of the park as soon as I heard the trot of her ponies, and was led by an evil fate (the stuff the fates are composed of in my instance I have not kept secret) to walk Westward.
Thither my evil fate propelled me, where accident was ready to espouse it and breed me mortifications innumerable. My father chanced to have heard the particulars of Squire Beltham"s will that morning: I believe Captain William"s coachman brushed the subject despondently in my interests; it did not reach him through Julia.
He stood outside the Western gates, and as I approached, I could perceive a labour of excitement on his frame. He pulled violently at the bars of the obstruction.
"Richie, I am interdicted house and grounds!" he called, and waved his hand toward the lodge: "they decline to open to me."
"Were you denied admission?" I asked him.
"--Your name, if you please, sir?--Mr. Richmond Roy.--We are sorry we have orders not to admit you. And they declined; they would not admit me to see my son."
"Those must be the squire"s old orders," I said, and shouted to the lodge-keeper.
My father, with the forethoughtfulness which never forsook him, stopped me.
"No, Richie, no; the good woman shall not have the responsibility of letting me in against orders; she may be risking her place, poor soul!
Help me, dear lad."
He climbed the bars to the spikes, tottering, and communicating a convulsion to me as I a.s.sisted him in the leap down: no common feat for one of his age and weight.
He leaned on me, quaking.
"Impossible! Richie, impossible!" he cried, and reviewed a series of interjections.
It was some time before I discovered that they related to the Will. He was frenzied, and raved, turning suddenly from red to pale under what I feared were redoubtable symptoms, physical or mental. He came for sight of the Will; he would contest it, overthrow it. Harry ruined? He would see Miss Beltham and fathom the plot;--angel, he called her, and was absurdly exclamatory, but in dire earnest. He must have had the appearance of a drunken man to persons observing him from the Grange windows.
My father was refused admission at the hall-doors.
The butler, the brute Sillabin, withstood me impa.s.sively.
Whose orders had he?
Miss Ilchester"s.
"They are afraid of me!" my father thundered.
I sent a message to Janet.
She was not long in coming, followed by a footman who handed a twist of note-paper from my aunt Dorothy to my father. He opened it and made believe to read it, muttering all the while of the Will.
Janet dismissed the men-servants. She was quite colourless.
"We have been stopped in the doorway," I said.
She answered: "I wish it could have been prevented."
"You take it on yourself, then?"
She was inaudible.
"My dear Janet, you call Riversley my home, don"t you?"
"It is yours."
"Do you intend to keep up this hateful feud now my grandfather is dead?"
"No, Harry, not I."
"Did you give orders to stop my father from entering the house and grounds?"
"I did."
"You won"t have him here?"
"Dear Harry, I hoped he would not come just yet."
"But you gave the orders?"
"Yes."
"You"re rather incomprehensible, my dear Janet."
"I wish you could understand me, Harry."