The little inn at Tillington, to which Horace betook himself for his
night's lodging, had suffered little change from the day when he
conducted his uncle there. Sam, it is true, was fighting the Caffres in
Africa, far enough distant; but his mother had recovered her bustling
good spirits, and his father his philosophy, and even Sergeant Kennedy,
great and pompous as of old, dominated over the little sanded parlour,
and fired the village lads with martial tales, unabashed, under Mrs.
Gilsland's very eye. It was not to the sanded parlour, however, that
Horace now betook himself. He was no longer the sullen country lad,
whole idler and half gentleman, whose deportment had distressed Colonel
Sutherland; and his old gamekeeper acquaintances and alehouse gossips
scarcely knew him, in his changed dress and altered manner. He was the
nephew of "the Cornel," a name which Mrs. Gilsland and Sergeant Kennedy
had made important in the village, and he was flourishing in the world
and likely to come to higher fortune, circumstances which mightily
changed the tide of public opinion towards him. Mrs. Gilsland received
the young man with her best curtsey, and with profuse salutations. She
opened the door of "the best room" for him, and suggested a fire as the
evenings were still cold, and offered a duck for his supper, "or dinner,
I was meaning," added the landlady, as Horace shrugged his shoulders at
the chilly aspect of the room, and tossed his great-coat on a chair with
lordly pretension and incivility. The good woman was daunted in spite of
her indignation. "The Cornel," it is true, had shown no such scorn of
her humble parlour, and she was not disposed to overestimate the
comforts of Marchmain. Still, there is something imposing to the vulgar
imagination in this manner of insolence. The room had never before
looked so mean to its mistress. She stopped herself in her unencouraged
talk, and began to displace the faded paper ornaments in the fireplace,
which concealed a fire laid ready for lighting, and kindled the wood
herself with a somewhat unsteady hand. "It's just as it was when the
Cornel was here, and he was very well pleased with everything," she
said, half to herself. Horace took no notice of the implied apology and
defence.
"Send me candles, please, and I'll see about dinner later," he said,
loftily; "lights in the meanwhile, and immediately; never mind the
fire--I want lights, and at once!"
Mrs. Gilsland withdrew, awed, but deeply wrathful. "I would like to know
how many servants he had to wait upon him at Marchmain!" she exclaimed
to herself as she left the room--"with his candles, and lights, and his
immediantely! Immediantely, quotha! Eh me, the difference of men! Would
the Cornel, or young Mr. Roger, order a person that gate? I would just
say no!--but the like of an upstart like him!"
However, the candles did come immediately, in Mrs. Gilsland's best
candlesticks, and in elaborate frills of white paper; and the duck was
killed, as a great gabble in the yard gave immediate notice, and all the
preparations which she could make set on foot instantly for her
fastidious guest. Clean linen, snowy and well-aired, was spread upon the
bed which "the Cornel" had once occupied; and greater commotion than
even the advent of the Cornel himself would have caused diffused itself
through the house. Meanwhile Horace addressed himself at his leisure to
his immediate business. He had come thus far without being able to
perceive that he had gained nothing by his inroad into his father's
privacy. He was still possessed by the excitement of the act. All the
way, while he walked as if for a race, he had been going over these
unfatherly words, and they moved him to an unreasoning and unusual
amount of emotion, rather more than a personal encounter would have
done--confirming all his own sentiments, and adding to them a certain
bitterness; but in the haste and fervor of his thoughts he still
imagined himself to have acquired something, and now took out the letter
which he had seized and crumpled into his pocket, only in the idea that
it might supplement and confirm his visionary information. It was, as he
supposed, from Colonel Sutherland, and chiefly occupied with that
earnest invitation to Susan which her father had declined. What
concerned himself was brief enough, and was to the following effect:--
"You will probably say that I have very little right to address you on
subjects so intimate and personal. I merely throw myself upon your
indulgence, pleading our old acquaintance and connection. I have no
right whatever to say a word, and I trust you will pardon all the more
kindly what I do say on this account. Your son Horace is a very peculiar
and remarkable young man. That miserable circumstance that happened when
he was a child seems to have had an effect upon the boy unawares, little
as he knows of it. And you, my dear Scarsdale, have you forgotten that
this boy is your own child, and not a rival unjustly preferred to you? I
acknowledge the wicked and desperate injustice of the whole proceeding,
but Horace was not to blame. Would it not have been better, I appeal to
you, to make an open effort to overthrow this iniquitous will, than to
suffer it to produce results so deplorable? Hear me, I beseech you:
receive the boy into your confidence before it is too late. It is your
only means of really defeating and forestalling the evil objects of that
posthumous punishment and vengeance. Suffer me to speak. I have no
interest in it, save that of natural affection; let your own heart plead
with me, as I am sure it will, if you permit it. Let him know his
singular and unhappy fortune, and I am grievously mistaken in human
nature if the attempt does not prove to you how little you need to
apprehend from the temper and disposition of your son."
Horace read this over with an interest only more intense than the
contempt which it produced in him. "The old twaddler!" he exclaimed to
himself, in the first impulse of his disdain. That feeling moved him,
even before curiosity. He could not take time to think what it was
which his father was urged to reveal to him, in his scorn of the
anticipated result, the natural affection, the generous response, which
his innocent old uncle believed in. Then he put the letter back into his
pocket, and set his mind to consider what information he had really
gained. What was it? Some vague intimation about a will, which Mr.
Scarsdale had better have tried to set aside: some mysterious hint at
posthumous punishment and vengeance, and his own singular and unhappy
fortune; and on his father's side a declaration of dislike and enmity,
but nothing more. That was what he had discovered--this was the
information which had sent him in nervous haste out of Marchmain, and
quickened his solitary walk over the moor--and this was all. He ground
his teeth together when he perceived it, with savage disappointment and
rage. He had been deceived--he, so boldly confident in his own powers,
had allowed himself to be blinded and circumvented by his own excitement
and childish commotion of feeling. For a moment he had enjoyed such
command of his father's house as a midnight thief might have gained,
and had sacrificed all the results of that precious instant by a piece
of involuntary self-deceit and ridiculous weakness, an indulgence absurd
and contemptible. His feelings were not enviable as he sat in Mrs.
Gilsland's dark little parlour, with the two faint candles burning, and
the damp wood hissing in the grate. He might have borne to be deceived,
but it was hard to consent to the humiliating idea of having deceived
himself. However, he could make nothing better of it, and grinding his
teeth did no harm to anybody, and certainly could do little service to
himself. So he swallowed his mortification as he best could, put Colonel
Sutherland's letter in his pocket-book, and addressed himself with what
content he might to Mrs. Gilsland's duck. He was not without appetite,
in spite of his disappointment. Then he sauntered into the public room,
and opened his heart so far as to bestow a pint or two of ale upon his
old acquaintances. Even this _divertissement_, however, did not withdraw
his thoughts from his own affairs--he lounged at the door of the sanded
parlour, doing a little grandeur and superiority as he loved to do, but
turning over his secret strain of thought without intermission,
notwithstanding. A will!--then there was a will which concerned himself,
and lay at the bottom of all these hints and mysteries. Wills are
accessible to curious eyes in this country, in spite of all the
safeguards which the most jealous care can take. The young man started
when that idea interposed the flicker of its taper into the darkness. He
raised his head again and renewed his courage: after all, his invasion
of his father's private sanctuary had not been entirely in vain. There
was comfort to his self-esteem, as well as a definite direction to his
efforts, in the thought.