"I must go by my conscience, sir."

"Oh, damn your conscience! Will you promise, or will you not? You're to have nothing to say to those young persons."

"I will not promise."

"Not if I promise to look after them?"

"No, sir." His father was silent for a moment, regarding him—not all in anger.

"Well, you're a good-plucked one, I allow? But you're the greatest fool, the dullest young ass out, notwithstanding. You won't suit me—though you are web-footed!—Why, damn it, boy! don't you understand yet that I'm your father?"

"Mrs. Manson told me so, sir."

"Oh, rot Mrs. Manson! she told you a damned lie! She told you I wronged your mother! I tell you I married her! What a blockhead you are! Look there, with your miserable tradesman's-eyes: all those books will be yours one day!—to put in the fire if you like, or mend at from morning to night, just as you choose! You fool! Ain't you my son, heir to Mortgrange, and whatever I may choose to give you besides!"

Richard's heart gave a bound as if it would leap to heaven. It was not the land; it was not the money; it was not the books; it was not even Barbara; it was Arthur and Alice that made it bound. But the voice of his father went on.

"You know now, you idiot," it said, "why you can have nothing more to do with that cursed litter of Mansons!"

Richard's heart rose to meet the heartlessness of his father.

"They are my brother and sister, sir!" he said.

"And what the devil does it matter to you if they are! It's my business that, not yours! You had nothing to do with it! You didn't make the Mansons!"

"No, sir; but God made us all, and says we're to love our brethren."

"Now don't you come the pious over me! It won't pay here! Mind you, nobody heard me acknowledge you! By the mighty heavens, I will deny knowing anything about you! You'll have to prove to the court of chancery that you're my son, born in wedlock, and kidnapped in infancy: by Jove, you'll find it stiff! Who'll advance you the money to carry it there?—you can't do it without money. Nobody; the property's not entailed, and who cares whether it be sir Richard or sir Arthur? What's the title without the property! But don't imagine I should mind telling a lie to keep the two together. I'm not a nice man; I don't mind lying! I'm a bad man!—that I know better than you or any one else, and you'll find it uncomfortable to differ and deal with me both at once!"

"I will not deny my own flesh and blood," said Richard.

"Then I will deny mine, and you may go rot with them."

"I will work for them and myself," said Richard.

Sir Wilton glared at him. Richard made a stride to the table. The baronet caught up the cheque. Richard darted forward to seize it. Was his truth to his friends to be the death of them? He would have the money! It was his! He had told him to take it!

What might have followed I dare not think. Richard's hands were out to lay hold on his father, when happily he remembered that he had not given him back the former cheque, and Barset was quite within reach of his grandfather's pony! He turned and made for the door. Sir Wilton read his thought.

"Give me that cheque," he cried, and hobbled to the bell.

Richard glanced at the lock of the door: there was no key in it! Besides there were two more doors to the room! He darted out: there was the man, far off down the passage, coming to answer the bell! He hastened to meet him.

"Jacob," he said, "sir Wilton rang for you: just run down with me to the gate, and give the woman there a message for me."

He hurried to the door, and the man, nothing doubting, followed him.

"Tell her," said Richard as they went, "if she should see Mr. Wingfold pass, to ask him to call at old Armour's smithy. She does not seem to remember me! Good day! I'm in a hurry!" He leaped into the pony-cart.

"Barset!" he cried, and the same moment they were off at speed, for Simon saw something fresh was up.

"Drive like Jehu," panted Richard. "Let's see what the blessed pony can do! Every instant is precious."

Never asking the cause of his haste, old Simon did drive like Jehu, and never had the pony gone with a better will: evidently he believed speed was wanted, and knew he had it to give.

No hoofs came clamping on the road behind them. They reached the town in safety, and Richard cashed his cheque—the more easily that Simon, a well-known man in Barset, was seen waiting for him in his trap outside. The eager, anxious look of Richard, and the way he clutched at the notes, might otherwise have waked suspicion. As it was, it only waked curiosity.

When the man whom Richard had decoyed, appeared at length before his master, whose repeated ringing had brought the butler first; and when sir Wilton, after much swearing on his, and bewilderment on the man's part, made out the trick played on him, his wrath began to evaporate in amusement: he was outwitted and outmanoeuvred—but by his own son! and even in the face of such an early outbreak of hostilities, he could not help being proud of him. He burst into a half cynical laugh, and dismissed the men—to vain speculation on the meaning of the affair.

Simon would have had Richard send the bank-notes by post, and stay with him a week or two; but Richard must take them himself; no other way seemed safe. Nor could he possibly rest until he had seen his mother, and told her all. He said nothing to his grandfather of his recognition by sir Wilton, and what followed: he feared he might take the thing in his own hands, and go to sir Wilton.

Questioning his grandfather, he learned that Barbara was at home, but that he had seen her only once. She had one day appeared suddenly at the smithy door, with Miss Brown all in a foam. She asked about Richard, wheeled her mare, and was off homeward, straight as an arrow—for he went to the corner, and looked after her.

They were near a station at Barset, and a train was almost due. Simon drove him there straight from the bank, and before he was home, Richard was half-way to London.

Short as was his visit, he had got from it not merely all he had hoped, but almost all he needed. His weakness had left him; he had twenty pounds for his brother and sister; and his mother was cleared, though he could not yet tell how: was he not also a little step nearer to Barbara? True, he was disowned, but he had lived without his father hitherto, and could very well go on to live without such a father! As long as he did what was right, the right was on his side! As long as he gave others their rights, he could waive his own! A fellow was not bound, he said, to insist on his rights—at least he had not met with any he was bound to insist upon. Borne swiftly back to London, his heart seemed rushing in the might of its gladness to console the heaven-laden hearts of Alice and Arthur. Twenty pounds was a great sum to carry them! He could indeed himself earn such a sum in a little while, but how long would it not take him to save as much! Here it was, whole and free, present and potent, ready to be turned at once into food and warmth and hope!



CHAPTER LI

BARONET AND BLACKSMITH.

The more sir Wilton's anger subsided, the more his heart turned to Richard, and the more he regretted that he had begun by quarrelling with him. Sir Wilton loved his ease, and was not a quarrelsome man. He could dislike intensely, he could hate heartily, but he seldom quarrelled; and if he could have foreseen how his son would take the demand he made upon him, he would not at the outset have risked it. He liked Richard's looks and carriage. He liked also his spirit and determination, though his first experience of them he could have wished different. He felt also that very little would make of him a man fit to show to the world and be proud of as his son. To his satisfaction on these grounds was added besides a peculiar pleasure in the discovery of him which he could ask no one to share—that it was to him as a lump of dynamite under his wife's lounge, of which no one knew but himself, and which he could at any instant explode. It was sweet to know what he could do! to be aware, and alone aware, of the fool's paradise in which my lady and her brood lived! And already, through his own precipitation, his precious secret was in peril!

The fact gave him not a little uneasiness. His thought was, at the ripest moment of her frosty indifference, to make her palace of ice fly in flinders about her. Then the delight of her perturbation! And he had opened his hand and let his bird fly!

His father did not know Richard's prudence. Like the fool every man of the world is, he judged from Richard's greatness of heart, and his refusal to forsake his friends, that he was a careless, happy-go-lucky sort of fellow, who would bluster and protest. As to the march he had stolen upon him on behalf of the Mansons, he nowise resented that. When pressed by no selfish necessity, he did not care much about money; and his son's promptitude greatly pleased him.

"The fellow shall go to college," he said to himself; "and I won't give my lady even a hint before I have him the finest gentleman and the best scholar in the county! He shall be both! I will teach him billiards myself! By Jove! it is more of a pleasure than at my years I had a right to expect! To think of an old sinner like me being blessed with such a victory over his worst enemy! It is more than I could deserve if I lived to the age of Mephistopheles! I shouldn't like to live so long—there's so little worth remembering! I wish forgetting things wiped them out! There are things I hardly know whether I did or only wanted to do!—Damn it, it may be all over Barset by this time, that the heir to sir Wilton's property has turned up!"

He rang the bell, and ordered his carriage.

"I must see the old fellow, the rascal's grandfather!" he kept on to himself. "I haven't exchanged a word with him for years! And now I think of it, I take poor Robina's father for a very decent sort of fellow! If he had but once hinted what he was, every soul in the parish would have known it! I must find out whether he's in my secret! I can't prove it yet, but perhaps he can!"

Simon Armour was not astonished to see the Lestrange carriage stop at the smithy: he thought sir Wilton had come about the cheque. He went out, and stood in hairy arms and leather apron at the carriage door.

"Well, Armour, how are you?" said the baronet.

"Well and hearty, sir, I thank you," answered Simon.

"I want a word with you," said sir Wilton.

"Shall I tell the coachman to drive round to the cottage, sir?"

"No; I'll get out and walk there with you."

Simon opened the carriage-door, and the baronet got out.

"That grandson of yours—" he began, the moment they were in Simon's little parlour.

Simon started. "The old wretch knows!" he said to himself.

"—has been too much for me!" continued sir Wilton. "He got a cheque out of me whether I would or not!"

"And got the money for it, sir!" answered the smith. "He seemed to think the money better than the cheque!"

"I don't blame him, by Jove! There's decision in the fellow!—They say his father's a bookbinder in London!"

"Yes, sir."

"You know better! I don't want humbug, Armour! I'm not fond of it!"

"You told me people said his father was a bookbinder, and I said 'Yes, sir'!"

"You know as well as I do it's a damned lie! The boy is mine. He belongs neither to bookbinder nor blacksmith!"

"You'll allow me a small share in him, I hope! I've done more for him than you, sir."

"That's not my fault!"

"Perhaps not; but I've done more for him than you ever will, sir!"

"How do you make that out?"

"I've made him as good a shoesmith as ever drove nail! I don't say he's up to his grandfather at the anvil yet, but—"

"An accomplishment no doubt, but not exactly necessary to a gentleman!"

"It's better than dicing or card-playing!" said the blacksmith.

"You're right there! I hope he has learned neither. I want to teach him those things myself.—He's not an ill-looking fellow!"

"There's not a better lad in England, sir! If you had brought him up as he is, you might ha' been proud o' your work!"

"He seems proud of somebody's work!—prouder of himself than his prospects, by Jove!" said sir Wilton, feeling his way. "You should have taught him not to quarrel with his bread and butter!"

"I never saw any call to teach him that. He never quarrelled with anything at my table, sir. A man who has earned his own bread and butter ever since he left school, is not likely to quarrel with it."

"You don't say he has done so?"

"I do—and can prove it!—Did you tell him, sir, you were his father?"

"Of course I did!—and before I said another word, there we were quarrelling—just as it was with me and my father!"

"He never told me!" said Simon, half to himself, and ready to feel hurt.

"He didn't tell you?"

"No, sir."

"Where is he?"

"Gone to London with your bounty."

"Now, Simon Armour," began the baronet with some truculence.

"Now, sir Wilton Lestrange!" interrupted Simon.

"What's the matter?"

"Please to remember you are in my house!"

"Tut, tut! All I want to say is that you will spoil everything if you encourage the rascal to keep low company!"

"You mean?"

"Those Mansons."

"Are your children low company, sir?"

"Yes; I am sorry, but I must admit it. Their mother was low company."

"She was in it at least, when she was in yours!" had all but escaped Simon's lips, but he caught the bird by the tail.—

"The children are not the mother!" he said. "I know the girl, and she is anything but low company. She lay ill in my house here for six weeks or more. Ask Miss Wylder.—If you want to be on good terms with your son, don't say a word, sir, against your daughter or her brother."

"I like that! On good terms with my son! Ha, ha!"

"Remember, sir, he is independent of his father."

"Independent! A beggarly bookbinder!"

"Excuse me, sir, but an honest trade is the only independence! You are dependent on your money and your land. Where would you be without them? And you made neither! They're yours only in a way! We, my grandson and I, have means of our own," said the blacksmith, and held out his two brawny hands. "—The thing that is beggarly," he resumed, "is to take all and give nothing. If your ancestors got the land by any good they did, you did not get it by any good you did; and having got it, what have you done in return?"

"By Jove! I didn't know you were such a radical!" returned the baronet, laughing.

"It is such as you, sir, that make what you call radicals. If the landlords had used what was given them to good ends, there would be no radicals—or not many—in the country! The landlords that look to their land and those that are on it, earn their bread as hardly as the man that ploughs it. But when you call it yours, and do nothing for it, I am radical enough to think no wrong would be done if you were deprived of it!"

"What! are you taking to the highway at your age?"

"No, sir; I have a trade I like better, and have no call to lighten you of anything, however ill you may use it. But there are those that think they have a right and a call to take the land from landlords like you, and I would no more leave my work to prevent them than I would to help them."

"Well, well! I didn't come to talk politics; I came to ask a favour of you."

"What I can do for you, sir, I shall be glad to do."

"It is merely this—that you will, for the present, say nothing about the heir having turned up."

"I could have laid my hand on him any moment this twenty years; and I can tell you where to find the parish book with his baptism in it! That I've not spoken proves I can hold my tongue; but I will give no pledge; when the time comes I will speak."

"Are you aware I could have you severely punished for concealing the thing?"

"Fire away. I'll take my chance. But I would advise you not to allow the thing come into court. Words might be spoken that would hurt! I know nothing myself, but there is one that could and would speak. Better let sleeping dogs lie."

"Oh, damn it! I don't want to wake 'em! Most old stories are best forgotten. But what do you think: will the boy—What's his name?"

"My father's, sir,—Richard."

"Will Richard, then, as you have taken upon you to call him"—

"His mother gave him the name."

"What I want to know is, whether you think he will go and spread the thing, or leave it to we to publish when I please."

"Did you tell him to hold his tongue?"

"No; he didn't give me time."

"That's a pity! He would have done whatever you asked him."

"Oh! would he!"

"He would—so long as it was a right thing."

"And who was to judge of that?"

"Why the man who had to do it or leave it, of course!—But if he didn't tell me, he's not likely to go blazing it abroad!"

"You said he would go to his mother first: his mother is nowhere."

"So say some, so say not I!"

"Never mind that. Who is it he calls his mother?"

"The woman that brought him up—and a good mother she's been to him!"

"But who is she? You haven't told me who she is!" cried the baronet, beginning to grow impatient; and impatience and anger were never far apart with him.

"No, sir, I haven't told you; and I don't mean to tell you till I see fit."

"And when, pray, will that be?"

"When I have your promise in writing that you will give her no trouble about what is past and gone."

"I will give you that promise—always provided she can prove that what was past and gone is come again. I shall insist upon that!"

"Most properly, sir I You shall not have to wait for it.—And now, if you will take me to the post-office, I will send a telegram to Richard, warning him to hold his tongue."

"Good! Come."

They walked to the carriage, and Simon, displacing the footman, got up beside the coachman. He was careful, however, to be set down before they got within sight of the post-office.

The message he sent was—

"I know all, and will write. Say nothing but to your mother."



CHAPTER LII.

UNCLE-FATHER AND AUNT-MOTHER.

When Richard reached London, he went straight to Clerkenwell. There he found Arthur, in bed and unattended, but covered up warm. Except one number of The Family Herald, he had nothing to read. The room was tidy, but very dreary. Richard asked him why he did not move into the front room. Arthur did not explain, but Richard understood that the mother had left so many phantasms behind her that he preferred his own dark chamber. When Richard told him what he had done and the success he had had, he thanked him with such a shining face that Richard saw in it the birth of saving hope.

"And now, Arthur," he said, "you must get better as fast as you can; and the first minute you are able to be moved, we'll ship you off to my grandfather's, where Alice was."

"Away from Alice?"

"Yes; but you must remember there will be so much more for her to eat, and so much more money to get things comfortable with by the time you come back. Besides, you will grow well faster, and then perhaps we shall find some fitter work for you than that hideous clerking!"

The flush of joy on Arthur's cheek was a divine reward to Richard for what he had done and suffered and sacrificed for the sake of his brother. He made a fire, and having set on the kettle, went to buy some things, that he might have a nice supper ready for Alice when she came home. Next he found two clean towels, and covered the little table, forgetting all his troubles in the gladness of ministration, and the new life that hope gives. If only we believed in God, how we should hope! And what would not hope do to reveal the new heavens and the new earth—that is, to show us the real, true, and gracious aspect of those heavens and that earth in which we now live so sadly, and are not at home, because we do not see them as they are, do not recognize in them the beginning of the inheritance we long for!

When Alice came in, she heard Arthur cough, and hurried up; but before she reached the top of the second stair, she heard a laugh which, though feeble, was of such merry enjoyment, that it filled her with wonder and gladness. Had the fairy god-mother appeared at last? What could have come to make Arthur laugh like that? She opened the door, and all was explained: there sat the one joy of their life, their brother Richard, looking much like himself again! What a healer, what a strength-giver is joy! Will not holy joy at last drive out every disease in the world? Will it not be the elixir of life, and drive out death? She sprang upon him, and burst out weeping.

"Come and have supper," he said. "I've been out to buy it, and haven't much time to help you eat it. My father and mother don't know where I am."

Then he told her what he had been about. It was with a happy heart he made his way home, for he left happy hearts behind him. He wondered that his mother was not surprised to see him—wondered too why she looked so troubled.

"What does this telegram mean?" she asked.

"I don't know, mother," he replied. "Won't you give me a kiss first?"

She threw her arms about him. "You won't give up saying mother to me, will you?" she pleaded, fighting with her emotion.

"It will be a bad day for me when I do!" he answered. "My mother you are and shall be. But I don't understand it!"

The telegram let him know that sir Wilton and his grandfather had been in communication, and gave him hope that things might be accommodated between him and his father.

"You've got your real father now, Richard!" said his mother.

But she saw an expression on his face that made her add,—

"You must respect your father, Richard—now you know him for your father."

"I can't respect him, mother. He is not a good man. I can only love him."

"You have no right to find fault with him. He was not to blame that I carried you away when your mother died! I was terrified at your stepmother!"

"I don't wonder at that, mother!—Ah, now I begin to understand it all!—But, mother, if my father had been a good man, I don't believe you would hare carried me away from him!"

"Very likely not, my boy—though he did make me that angry by calling you ugly! And I don't believe I should have taken you at all, if that woman hadn't sent me away for no reason but to have a nurse of her choosing. How could I leave my sister's child in the power of such a woman! Day and night, Richard, was I haunted with the sight of her cold face hanging over you. I was certain the devil might have his way with her when he chose: there was no love in her to prevent him. In my dreams I saw her giving you poison, or with a pen-knife in her hand, and her eyes shining like ice. I could not bear it. I should have gone mad to leave you there. I knew I was committing a crime in the eyes of the law; but I felt a stronger law compelling me; and I said to myself, 'I will be hanged for my child, rather than my child should be murdered! I will not leave him with that woman!' So I took you, Richard!"

"Thank you, mother, a thousand times! I am sure it was right, and every way best for me! Oh, how much I owe you and my—uncle! I must call you mother still, but I'm afraid I shall have to call my father uncle!"

"It won't hurt him, Richard; he has been a good uncle to you, but I don't think he would have taught you the things he did, if you had been his very own child!"

"He has done me no harm, mother,—nothing but good," said Richard. "—And so you are my own mother's sister?"

"Yes, and a good mother she would have been to you! You must not think of her as a grim old woman like me! She was but six and twenty when you were born and she died! She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, Richard!—Never another woman's hand has touched your body but hers and mine, Richard!"

He took her hand and kissed it. Jane Tuke had never had her hand kissed before, and would have drawn it away. The lady within was ashamed of her rough gloves, not knowing they had won her her ladyhood. In the real world, there are no ladies but true women. Also they only are beautiful. All there show what they are, and the others are all more or less deformed. Oh, what lovely ladies will walk into the next world out of the rough cocoon of their hard-wrought bodies—not because they have been working women, but because they have been true women. Among working women as among countesses, there are last that shall be first, and first that shall be last. What kind of woman will be the question. Alas for those, whether high or low or in the middle, whose business in life has been to be ladies! What poor, mean, draggled, unangelic things will come crawling out of the husk they are leaving behind them, which yet, perhaps, will show a glimmer, in the whiteness of death, of what they were meant to be, if only they had lived, had been, had put forth the power that was in them as their birthright! Not a few I know will crawl out such, except they awake from the dead, and cry for life. Perhaps one and another in the next world will say to me, "You meant me! I know now why you were always saying such things!" For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think—only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar.

"No, Richard," resumed his aunt, "your father was not a good man, but he may be better now, and perhaps you will help him to be better still."

"It's doubtful if ever I have the chance," returned Richard. "We've had a pretty fair quarrel already!"

"He can't take your birthright from you!" she cried.

"That may be—but what is my birthright? He told me the land was not entailed; he can leave it to anybody he likes. But I'm not going to do what he would have me do—that is if it be wrong," added Richard, not willing to start the question about the Mansons. "To be a sneak would be a fine beginning! If that's to be a gentleman, I will be no gentleman!"

"Right you are, my son!" said Tuke, who that moment came in.

"Oh uncle!" cried Richard, starting to his feet.

"Uncle!—Ho! ho! What's up now?"

"Nothing's up, but all's out, father!" answered Richard, putting his hand in that of the bookbinder. "You knew, and now I know! How shall I ever thank you for what you have done for me, and been to me, and given me!"

"Precious little anyway, my boy! I wish it had been a great deal more."

"Shall I tell you what you have done for me I—You made a man of me first of all, by giving me a trade, and making me independent. Then again, by that trade you taught me to love the very shape of a book. Baronet or no baronet,—"

"What do you mean?"

"My father threatens to disown me."

"He can't take your rank from you. We'll have you sir Richard anyhow!—An' I'd let 'em see that a true baronet—"

"—is just a true man, uncle." interposed Richard; "and that you've helped to make me. It's being independent and helping others, not being a baronet, that will make a gentleman of me! That's how it goes in the true world anyhow!"

"The true world! Where's that?" rejoined Tuke, with what would have been a sneer had there been ill-nature in it.

"And that reminds me of another precious thing you've given me," Richard went on: "You've taught me to think for myself!"

"Think for yourself indeed, and talk of any world but the world we've got!"

"If you hadn't taught me," returned Richard, "to think for myself, I should have thought just as you did. But I've been thinking for myself a great deal, and I say now, that, if there be no more of it after we die, then the whole thing is such a sell as even the dumb, deaf, blind, heartless, headless God you seem to believe in, could not have been guilty of!"

"Ho! ho!—that's the good my teaching has done you? Well, we'll have it out by and by! In the meantime, tell us how it all came about—how you came to know, I mean. You're a good sort, whatever you believe or don't believe, and I wish you were ours in reality!"

"It's just in reality that I am yours!" protested Richard; but his mother broke in.

"Would you dare, John," she cried, "to wish him ours to his loss?"

"No, no, Jane! You know me! It was but a touch of what you call the old Adam—and I the old John! We've got to take care of each other! We're all agreed about that!"

"And you do it, father, and that's before any agreeing about it!"

"Come and let's have our tea!" said the mother; "and Richard shall tell us how it worked round that the old gentleman knew him. I remember him young enough to be no bad match for your mother, and that's enough to say for any man—as to looks, I mean only. There wasn't a more beautiful woman than my sister Robina in all England—and I'm bold to say it—not that it wants much boldness to say the truth!"

"It wants nearly as much at this moment as I have got," returned Richard; for his narrative required, as an essential part of it, that he should tell what had made him go to his father.

He had but begun when a black cloud rose on his mother's face, and she almost started from her seat.

"I told you, Richard, you were to have nothing to do with those creatures!" she cried.

"Mother," answered Richard, "was it God or the devil told me I must be neighbour to my own brother and sister? Hasn't my father done them wrong enough that you should side with him and want me to carry on the wrong? I heard the same voice that made you run away with me. You were ready to be hanged for me; I was ready to lose my father for them. He too said I must have done with them, and I told him I wouldn't. That was why I got you to put me on journeyman's wages, uncle. They were starving, and I had nothing to give them. What am I in the world for, if not to set right, so far as I may, what my father has set wrong? You see I have learned something of you, uncle!"

"I don't see what," returned Tuke.

He had been listening with a grave face, for he had his pride, and did not relish his nephew's being hand and glove with his base-born brother and sister.

"Don't you, father? Where's your socialism? I'm only trying to carry it out."

"Out and away, my boy, as Samson did the gates in my mother's old bible!" answered John.

"If a man's socialism don't apply to his own flesh and blood," resumed Richard, "where on earth is it to begin? Must you hate your own flesh, and go to Russia or China for somebody to be fair to? Ain't your own got as good a right to fair play as any, and ain't they the readiest to begin with? Is it selfish to help your own? It ain't the way you've done by me, uncle!"

"You mustn't forget," said John, "that a grave wrong is done the nation when marriage is treated with disrespect."

"It was my father did that! Was it Alice and Arthur that broke the marriage-law by being born out of wedlock?"

"If you treat them like other people, you slight that law."

"If sir Wilton Lestrange were to come into the room this minute, you would offer him a chair; his children you would order out of the house!"

"I wouldn't do that," said Mrs. Tuke.

"Mother, you turned them out of the house!—I beg your pardon, mother, but you know it was the same thing! You visited the sins of the father on the children!"

"Bravo!" cried his uncle; "I thought you couldn't mean the rot!"

"What rot, father?"

"That rot about God you flung at me first thing."

"Father, it would take the life out of me to believe there was no God; but the God I hope in is a very different person from the God my mother's clergy have taught her to believe in. Father, do you know Jesus Christ!"

"I know the person you mean, my boy."

"I know what kind of person he is, and he said God was just like him, and in the God like him, if I can find him, I will believe with all my heart and soul—and so would you, father, if you knew him. You will say, perhaps, he ain't nowhere to know! but you haven't a right to say that until you've been everywhere to look; for such a God is no absurdity; it's nothing ridiculous to look for him. I beg your pardon, both of you, but I'm bound to speak. Jesus Christ said we must leave father and mother for him, because he is true; and I must speak for him what is true, even if my own father and mother should think me rude."

He had spoken eagerly; and man or woman who does not put truth first, may think he ought to have held his tongue. But neither father nor mother took offence. The mother, unspeakably relieved by what had taken place, was even ready to allow that her favourite preacher might "perhaps dwell too much upon the terrors of the law."



CHAPTER LIII.

MORNING.

The next post brought a letter from Simon Armour, saying, after his own peculiar fashion, that it was time the thing were properly understood between the parties concerned; but, that done, they must attend to the baronet's wish, and disclose nothing yet: he believed sir Wilton had his reasons. They must therefore, as soon as possible, make it clear to him that there was no break in the chain of their proof of Richard's identity. He proposed, therefore, that his daughter should pay her father a visit, and bring Richard.

The suggestion seemed good to all concerned. Criminal as she knew herself, Jane Tuke did not shrink from again facing sir Wilton, with the nephew by her side whom one and twenty years before she had carried in her arms to meet his unfatherly gaze! To her surprise she found that she almost enjoyed the idea.

Richard cashed the post-office-order the old man sent them, and they set out for his cottage.

The same day Simon went to Mortgrange and saw the baronet, who agreed at once to go to the cottage to meet his sister-in-law. The moment he entered the little parlour where they waited to receive him, he made Mrs. Tuke a polite bow, and held out his hand.

"You are the sister of my late wife, I am told," he said.

Jane made him a dignified courtesy, her resentment, after the lapse of twenty years, rising fresh at sight of the man who had behaved so badly to her sister.

"It was you that carried off the child?" said the baronet.

"Yes, sir," answered Jane.

"I am glad I did not know where to look for him. You did me the greatest possible favour. What these twenty years would have been like, with him in the house, I dare not think."

"It was for the child's sake I did it!" said Jane.

"I am perfectly aware it was not for mine!" returned sir Wilton. "Ha! ha! you looked as if you had come to stab me that day you brought the little object to the library, and gave me such a scare! You presented his fingers and toes to me as if, by Jove, I was the devil, and had made them so on purpose!—I tell you, Richard, if that's your name, you rascal, you have as little idea what a preposterously ugly creature you were, as I had that you would ever grow to be—well, half-fit to look at! I was appalled at the sight of you! And a good thing it was! If I had taken to you, and brought you up at home, it would scarcely have been to your advantage. You would have been worth less than you are, however little that may be! But it doesn't follow you're the least fit to be owned to! You're a tradesman, every inch of you—no more like a gentleman than—well, not half so like a gentleman as your grandfather there! By heaven, the anvil must be some sort of education! Why wasn't I bound apprentice to my old friend Simon there! But, Richard, you don't look a gentleman, though your aunt looks as if she would eat me for saying it.—Now listen to me—all of you. It's no use your saying I've acknowledged him. If I choose to say I know nothing about him, then, as I told the rascal himself the other day, you'll have to prove your case, and that will take money! and when you've proved it, you get nothing but the title, and much good that will do you! So you had better make up all your minds to do as I tell you—that is, not to say one word about the affair, but just hold your tongues.—Now none of that looking at one another, as if I meant to do you! I'm not going to have people say my son shows the tradesman in him! I'm not going to have the Lestranges knock under to the Armours! I'm going to have the rascal the gentleman I can make him!—You're to go to college directly, sir; and I don't want to hear of or from you till you've taken your degree! You shall have two hundred a year and pay your own fees—not a penny more if you go on your marrow-bones for it!—You understand? You're not to attempt communicating with me. If there's anything I ought to know, let your grandfather come to me. I will see him when he pleases—or go to him, if he prefers it, and I'm not too gouty! Only, mind, I make no promises! If I should leave all I have to the other lot, you will have no right to complain. With the education I will give you, and the independence your uncle has given you, and the good sense you have on your own hook, you're provided for. You can be a doctor or a parson, you know. There's more than one living in my gift. The Reverend sir Richard Lestrange!—it don't sound amiss. I'm sorry I shan't hear it. I shall be gone where they crop one of everything—even of his good works, the parsons say, but I shan't be much the barer for that! It's hard, confounded hard, though, when they're all a fellow has got!—Now don't say a word! I don't like being contradicted!—not at all! It sends one round on the other tack, I tell you—and there's my gout coming! Only mind this: if once you say who you are as long as you're at college, or before I give you leave, I have done with you. I won't have any little plan of mine forestalled for your vanity! Don't any of you say who he is. It will be better for him—much. If it be but hinted who he is, he'll be courted and flattered, and then he'll be stuck up, and take to spending money! But as sure as hell, if he goes beyond his allowance—well, I'll pay it, but it shall be his last day at Oxford. He shall go at once into the navy—or the excise, by George!"

This expression of the baronet's will, if not quite to the satisfaction of every one concerned, was altogether delightful to Richard.

"May I say one word, sir?" he asked.

"Yes, if it's not arguing."

"I've not read a page of Latin since I left school, and I never knew any Greek."

"Oh! ah! I forgot that predicament! You must have a tutor to prepare you!—but you shall go to Oxford with him. I will not have you loafing about here! You may remain with your grandfather till I find one, but you're not to come near Mortgrange."

"I may go to London with my mother, may I not?" said Richard.

"I see nothing against that. It will be the better way."

"If you please, sir Wilton," said Mrs. Tuke, "I left evidence at Mortgrange of what I should have to say."

"What sort of evidence?"

"Things that belonged to the child and myself."

"Where?"

"Hid in the nursery."

"My lady had everything moved, and the room fresh-papered after you left. I remember that distinctly."

"Did she say nothing about finding anything?"

"Nothing.—Of course she wouldn't!"

"I left a box of my own, with—"

"You'll never see it again."

"The things the child always wore when he went out, were under the wardrobe."

"Oblige me by saying nothing about them. I am perfectly satisfied, and believe every word you say. I believe Richard there the child of your sister Robina and myself; and it shall not be my fault if he don't have his rights! At the same time I promise nothing, and will manage things as I see best."

"At your pleasure, sir!" answered Mrs. Tuke.

"Should you mind, sir, if I went to see Mr. Wingfold before I go?" asked Richard.

"Who's he?"

"The clergyman of the next parish, sir."

"I don't know him—don't want to know him!—What have you got to do with him?"

"He was kind to me when I was down here before."

"I don't care you should have much to do with the clergy."

"You said, sir, I might go into the church!"

"That's another thing quite! You would have the thing in your own hands then!"

Richard was silent. There was no point to argue. The moment sir Wilton was gone, Simon turned to his grandson.

"It was a pity you asked him about Mr. Wingfold. The only thing is you mustn't let out his secret. As to seeing Mr. Wingfold, or Miss Wylder either, just do as you please."

"No, grandfather. If I had not asked him, perhaps I might; but to ask him, and then not do what he told me, would be a sneaking shame!"

"You're right, my boy! Hold on that way, and you'll never be ashamed—or make your people ashamed either."

For the meantime, then, Richard went to London with his mother; and so anxious was old Simon, stimulated in part by the faithfulness of his grandson, to do nothing that might thwart the pleasure of the tyrant, that when first Wingfold asked after Richard, he told him he was at home, and the next time that he was at work in the country.

Richard went on helping his uncle, and going often to see his brother and sister. When Arthur was able for the journey, both he and Alice went with him. At the station they were met by Simon, with an old post-chaise he had to mend up. Having seen Arthur comfortably settled, his brother and sister went back to London together—Alice to go into a single room, and betake herself once more to her work, but with new courage and hope; Richard to the book-binding till his father should have found a tutor for him.

The Tukes were slowly becoming used, if not reconciled, to his care of the Mansons. His mother, indignant for her deceased sister, stood out the stiffest; the bookbinder could not fail to see that the youth was but putting in practice the socialistic theories he had himself sought to teach him. True, the thing came straight from the heart of Richard, and went much farther than his uncle's theories; but his uncle counted it the result of his own training, and woke at last to the fact that his theories were better than he had himself known.

With the help of the head of the college to which sir Wilton had resolved to send his son, a tutor was at length found—happily for Richard, one of the right sort. They went together to Oxford, and set to work at once. It would be hard to say which of the two reaped the more pleasure from the relation, or which, in the duplex process of teaching and learning, gained the most. For the tutor had in Richard a pupil of practised brain yet fresh, a live soul ready, for its own need and nourishment, to use every truth it came near. His penetrative habit made not a few regard him as a bore: their feeble vitality was troubled by the energy of his; he could not let a thing go in which he descried a principle: he must see it close! To the more experienced he was one who had not yet learned, wisely fearful of the trampling hoof, to carry aside his oyster with its possible pearl before he opened it. In earnest about everything, he must work out his liberty before he could gambol. A slave will amuse himself in his dungeon; a free man must file through his chains and dig through his prison-walls before he can frolic. Sunlight and air came through his open windows enough to keep Richard alive and strong, but not enough yet to make him merry. He was too solemn, thus, for most of those he met, but, happily, not for his tutor. Finding Richard knew ten times as much of English literature as himself, he became in this department his pupil's pupil; and listening to his occasional utterance of a religious difficulty, had new regions of thought opened in him, to the deepening and verifying of his nature. The result for the tutor was that he sought ordination, in the hope of giving to others what had at length become real to himself.

Richard gained little distinction at his examinations. He did well enough, but was too eager after real knowledge to care about appearing to know.

He made friends, but not many familiar friends. He sorely missed ministration: it had grown a necessity of his nature. It was well that the habit should be broken for a time. For, laden with consciousness, and not full of God, the soul will delight in itself as a benefactor, a regnant giver, the centre of thanks and obligation: and will thus, with a rampart-mound of self-satisfaction, dam out the original creative life of its being, the recognition of which is life eternal. But it grew upon Richard that, if there be a God, it is the one business of a man to find him, and that, if he would find him, he must obey the voice of his conscience.

As to the outward show of the man, Richard's carriage was improving. Level intercourse with men of his own age but more at home in what is called society, influenced his manners both with and without his will, while, all the time, he was gathering the confidence of experience. His rowing, and the daily run to and from the boats, with other exercises prescribed by his tutor, strengthened the shoulders whose early stoop had threatened to return with much reading. He was fast growing more than presentable. With the men of his year, his character more than his faculty had influence.

Old Simon was doing his best for Arthur. He would not hear of his going back to London, or attempting anything in the way of work beyond a little in the garden. He was indeed nowise fit for more.

The blacksmith himself was making progress—the best parts of him were growing fast. Age was turning the strength into channels and mill-streams, which before, wild-foaming, had flooded the meadows.



CHAPTER LIV.

BARBARA AT HOME.

Barbara's brother, her father's twin, was fast following her mother's to that somewhere each of us must learn for himself, no one can learn from another. While they were in London, he was in the Isle of Wight with his tutor. His mother and sister had several times gone to see him, but he did not show much pleasure in their attentions, and was certainly happier with his tutor than with any one else. Disease, however, was making straight the path of Love. Now they were all at home at Wylder Hall, and Death was on his way to join them. Love, however, was watching, ready to wrest from him his sting—without which he is no more Death, but Sleep. As the poor fellow grew weaker, his tutor became less able to console him: and he could not look to his mother for the tenderness he had seen her lavish on his brother. But the love of his sister had always leaned toward him, ready, on the least opening of the door of his heart, to show itself in the chink; and at last the opportunity of being to him and doing for him what she could, arrived. One day, on the lawn, he tripped and fell. The strong little Barbara took him in her arms, and carried him to his room. When two drops of water touch, the mere contact is not of long duration: the hearts of the sister and the dying brother rushed into each other. After this, they were seldom apart. A new life had waked in the very heart of death, and grew and spread through the being of the boy. His eye became brighter, not with fever only, but with love and content and hope; for Barbara made him feel that nothing could part them; that they had been born into the world for the hour when they should find one another—as now they had found one another, to have one another to all eternity: it was an end of their being! He would come creeping up to her as she worked or read, and sit on a stool at her feet, asking for nothing, wishing for nothing, content to be near her. But then Barbara's book or work was soon banished. He was bigger than she, but the muscles of the little maiden were as springs of steel, informed with the tenderest, strongest heart in all the county, and presently he would find himself lifted to her lap, his head on her shoulder, the sweetest voice in all the world whispering loveliest secrets in his willing ear, and her face bent over him with the stoop of heaven over the patient, weary earth. In her arms his poor wasting body forgot its restlessness; the fever that irritated every nerve, burning away the dust of the world, seemed to pause and let him grow a little cool; and the sleep that sometimes came to him there was sweet as death. The face that had so long looked peevish, wore now a waiting look: in heaven, every one sheltered the other, and the arms of God were round them all!

One day the mother peeped in, and saw them seated thus. Motherhood, strong in her, though hitherto, as regarded the boy, poisoned by her strife with her husband, moved and woke at the sight of her natural place occupied by her daughter.

"Let me take him, poor fellow!" she said.

Delighted that her mother should do something for him, Barbara rose with him in her arms. The mother sat down, and Barbara laid him in her lap. But the mother felt him lie listless and dead; no arm came creeping feebly up to encircle her neck. One of her babies died unborn, and she knew the moment the strange sad feeling of the time came back to her now; she felt through all her sensitive maternal body that her child did not care for her. Grown, through her late illness, at once weaker and tenderer, she burst into silent weeping. He looked up; the convulsion of her pain had roused him from a half-sleep. A tear dropped on his face.

"Don't rain, mamma! I will be good!" he said, and held his mouth to be kissed.

He was much too old for such baby-speech, but as he grew weaker, he had grown younger; and it seemed now as if, in his utter helplessness, he would go back to the bosom of his mother. She clasped him to her, and from that moment she and Barbara shared him between them.

So for a while, Barbara had not the same room to think about Richard; but when she did think of him, it was always in the some loving, trusting, hoping way.

When in London, she went to all the parties to which she was expected to go, and enjoyed them—after her own fashion. She loved her kind, and liked their company up to a point. But often would the crowd and the glitter, the motion and iridescence, vanish from her, and she sit there a live soul dreaming within closed doors. She would be pacing her weary pony through a pale land, under a globose moon, homeward; or, on the back of one of her father's fleet horses, sweeping eastward over the grassy land, in the level light of the setting sun, watching the strange herald-shadow of herself and her horse rushing away before them, ever more distort as it fled:—like some ghastly monster, in horror at itself, it hurried to the infinite, seeking blessed annihilation, and ever gathering speed as the sun of its being sank, till at last it gained the goal of its nirvana, not by its well run race, but in the darkness of its vanished creator. Then with a sigh would Barbara come to herself, the centre of many regards.

Arthur Lestrange found himself no nearer to her than before—farther off indeed; for here he was but one among many that sought her. But her behaviour to him was the same in a crowded room in London as in the garden at Mortgrange. She spoke to him kindly, turned friendly to him when he addressed her, and behaved so that the lying hint of lady Ann, that they had been for some time engaged, was easily believed. A certain self-satisfied, well-dressed idiot, said it was a pity a girl like that, a little Amazon, who, for as innocent as she looked, could ride backward and steer her steed straight, should marry a half-baked brick like Lestrange: Arthur, though he was not one of the worthiest, was worth ten of him, faultless as were his coats and neckties!

Her father had several times said to her that it was time she should marry, but had never got nearer anything definite; for there her eyes would flash, and her mouth close tight—compelling the reflection that her mother had been more than enough for him, and he had better not throw his daughter into the opposition as well. He could not, he saw clearly, prevail with her against her liking; but it would be an infernal pity, he thought, seeing poor Marcus must go, if she would not have Lestrange; for the properties would marry splendidly, and then who could tell what better title might not stand on the top of the baronetcy!

Lady Ann would not let her hope go. She grew daily more fearful of the cloud that hung in the future: out of it might at any moment step the child of her enemy, the low-born woman who had dared to be lady Lestrange before her! Then where would she and her children be! That her Arthur would not succeed him, would be a morsel to sweeten her husband's death for him! It would be life in death to him to spite the woman he had married! At one crisis in their history, he had placed in her hands a will that left everything to her son; but he might have made ten wills after that one! She knew she had done nothing to please him: she had in fact never spent a thought on making life a good thing to the man she had married. She wished she had endeavoured or might now endeavour to make herself agreeable to him. But it was too late! Sir Wilton would instantly imagine a rumour of the lost heir, and be on the alert for her discomfiture! If only he had not yet made a later will! He must die one day: why not in time to make his death of use when his life was of none! No one would wonder he had preferred the offspring of her noble person to the lost brat of the peasant woman!

How far over the line that separates guilt from greed, lady Ann might not have gone had she been sure of not being found out, she herself could not have told. The look of things is very different at night and in the morning; the bed-chamber can shelter what would be a horror in a court of justice; a conscience at peace in its own darkness will shudder in the gaslight of public opinion. It is marvellous that what we call the public, a mere imbecile as to judgment, should yet possess the Godlike power of awakening the individual conscience—and that with its own large dullness of conscience! Truly the relation of the world to its maker cannot primarily be an intellectual one; it must be a relation tremendously deeper! We do not, I mean, to speak after the manner of men, come of God's intellect, but of his imagination. He did not make us with his hands, but loved us out of his heart.

The same week in which sir Wilton gave that will into his lady's keeping, he executed a second, in which he made the virtue of the former depend on the non-appearance of the lost heir. Of this will he said nothing to his wife. Even from the grave he would hold a shadowy yet not impotent rod over her and her family! Lady Ann suspected something of the sort, and spent every moment safe from his possible appearance, in searching for some such hidden torpedo. But there was one thing of which sir Wilton took better care than of his honour—and that was his bunch of keys.

After the return of the Lestranges and the Wylders to their country-homes, lady Ann, having prevailed, on Mrs. Wylder to pay her a visit, initiated an attempt to gain her connivance in her project for the alliance of the houses. For this purpose she opened upon her with the same artillery she had employed against her husband. Mrs. Wylder sat for some time quietly listening, but looking so like her daughter, that lady Ann saw the mother's and not the father's was the alliance to seek. Thereupon she plucked the tompion out of the best gun in her battery, as she thought, and began to hint a fear that Miss Wylder had taken a fancy to a person unworthy of her.

"Girls who have not been much in society," she said, "are not unfrequently the sport of strange infatuations! I have myself known an earl's daughter marry a baker! I do not, of course, imagine your daughter guilty of the slightest impropriety,—"

Scarcely had the word left her lips, when a fury stood before her—towered above her, eyes flashing and mouth set, as if on the point of tearing her to pieces.

"Say the word and my Bab in the same breath again, and I'll throttle you, you vile woman!" cried Mrs. Wylder, and hung there like a thunder-cloud, lightening continuously.

Lady Ann was not of a breed familiar with fear, but, for the first time in her life, except in the presence of her mother, a far more formidable person than herself, she did feel afraid—of what, she would have found it hard to say, for to acknowledge the possibility of personal violence would be almost as undignified as to threaten it!

"I did not mean to offend you," she said, growing a little paler, but at the same time more rigid.

"What sort of mother do you take me for? Offended, indeed! Would you be all honey, I should like to know, if I had the assurance, to say such a thing of one of your girls?"

"I spoke as to a mother who knew what girls are like!"

"You don't know what my girl Bab is like!" cried Mrs. Wylder, with something that much resembled an imprecation: the word she used would shock thousands of mothers not comparable to her in motherhood. If propriety were righteousness, the kingdom of heaven would be already populous.

Lady Ann was offended, and seriously: was alliance with such a woman permissible or sufferable? But she was silent. For once in her life she did not know the proper thing to say. Was the woman mad, or only a savage?

Mrs. Wylder's eloquence required opposition. She turned away, and with a backward glance of blazing wrath, left the room and the house.

"Home like the devil!" she said to the footman as he closed the door of the carriage—and she disappeared in a whirlwind.

From the library sir Wilton saw her stormy exit and departure. "By Jove!" he said to himself, "that woman must be one of the right sort! She's what my Ruby might have been by this time if she'd been spared! A hundred to one, my lady was insolent to her!—said something cool about her mad-cap girl, probably! She's the right sort, by Jove, that little Bab! If only my Richard now, leathery fellow, would glue on to her! There's nothing left in this cursed world of the devil and all his angels that I should like half so well! I'll put him up to it, I will! Arthur and she indeed! As if a plate of porridge like Arthur would draw a fireflash like Bab! I'd give the whole litter of 'em, and throw in the dam, to call that plucky little robin my girl! I'd give my soul to have such a girl!"

It did not occur to him that his soul for Barbara would scarcely be fair barter.

"Dick's well enough," he went on, "but he's a man, and you've got to quarrel with him! I'm tired of quarrelling!"

The instant she reached home, Mrs. Wylder sent for her daughter, and demanded, fury still blazing in her eyes, what she had been doing to give that beast of a lady Ann a right to talk.

"Tell me first how she talked, mamma," returned Barbara, used to her mother's ways, and nowise annoyed at being so addressed. "I can't have been doing anything very bad, for she's been doing what she can to get me and keep me."

"She has?—And you never told me!"

"I didn't think it worth telling you.—She's been setting papa on to me too!"

"Oh! I see! And you wouldn't set him and me on each other! Dutiful child! You reckoned you'd had enough of that! But I'll have no buying and selling of my goods behind my back! If you speak one more civil word to that young jackanapes Lestrange, you shall hear it again on both your ears!"

"I will not speak an uncivil word to him, mamma; he has never given me occasion; but I shan't break my heart if I never see him again. If you like, I won't once go near the place. Theodora's the only one I care about—and she's as dull as she is good!"

"What did the kangaroo mean by saying you were sweet on somebody not worthy of you?"

"I know what she meant, mother; but the man is worthy of a far better woman than me—and I hope he'll get her some day!"

Thereupon little Bab burst into tears, half of rage, half of dread lest her good wish for Richard should be granted otherwise than she meant it. For she did not at the moment desire very keenly that he should get all he deserved, but thought she might herself just do, while she did hope to be a better woman before the day arrived.

"Come, come, child! None of that! I don't like it. I don't want to cry on the top of my rage. What is the man? Who is he? What does the woman know about him?"

At once Barbara began, and told her mother the whole story of Richard and herself. The mother listened. Old days and the memory of a lover, not high in the social scale, whom she had to give up to marry Mr. Wylder, came back upon her and her heart went with her daughter's before she knew what it was about; her daughter's love and her own seemed to mingle in one dusky shine, as if the daughter had inherited the mother's experience. The heart of the mother would not have her child like herself gather but weed-flowers of sorrow among the roses in the garden of love. She had learned this much, that the things the world prizes are of little good to still the hearts of women But when Barbara told her how lady Ann would have it that this same Richard, the bookbinder, was a natural son of sir Wilton, she started to her feet, crying,

"Then the natural bookbinder shall have her, and my lady's fool may go to the devil! You shall have my money, Bab, anyhow."

"But, mammy dear," said Barbara, "what will papa say?"

"Poof!" returned her mother. "I've known him too long to care what he says!"

"I don't like offending him," returned Barbara.

"Don't mention him again, child, or I'll turn him loose on your bookbinder. Am I to put my own ewe-lamb to the same torture I had to suffer by marrying him! God forbid I When you're happy with your husband, perhaps you'll think of me sometimes and say, 'My mother did it! She wasn't a good woman, but she loved her Bab!'"

A passionate embrace followed. Barbara left the room with a happy heart, and went—not to her own to brood on her love, but to her brother's, whose feeble voice she heard calling her. Upon him her gladness overflowed.



CHAPTER LV.

MISS BROWN.

The same evening Barbara rode to the smithy, in the hope of hearing some news of Richard from his grandfather. The old man was busy at the anvil when he heard Miss Brown's hoofs on the road. He dropped his hammer, flung the tongs on the forge, and leaving the iron to cool on the anvil, went to meet her.

"How do you do, grandfather?" said Barbara, with unconscious use of the appellation.

Simon was well pleased to be called grandfather, but too politic and too well bred to show his pleasure.

"As well as hard work can help me to. How are you yourself, my pretty?" returned Simon.

"As well as nothing to do—except nursing poor Mark—will let me," she answered. "Please can you tell me anything about Richard yet?"

"Can you keep a secret, honey?" rejoined Simon. "I ain't sure as I'm keeping strict within the law, but if I didn't think you fit, I shouldn't say a word."

"Don't tell me, if it be anything I ought to tell if I knew it."

"If you can show me you ought to tell any one, I will release you from your promise. But perhaps you feel you ought to tell everything to your mother?"

"No, not other people's secrets. But I think I won't have it. I don't like secrets. I'm frightened at them."

"Then I'll tell you at my own risk, for you're the right sort to trust, promise or no promise. I only hope you will not tell without letting me know first; because then I might have to do something else by way of—what do they call it when you take poison, and then take something to keep it from hurting you?—Richard's gone to college!"

Bab slid from Miss Brown's back, flung her arms, with the bridle on one of them, round the blacksmith's neck, and, heedless of Miss Brown's fright, jumped up, and kissed the old man for the good news.

"Miss! miss! your clean face!" cried the blacksmith.

"Oh Richard! Richard! you will be happy now!" she said, her voice trembling with buried tears. "—But will he ever shoe Miss Brown again, grandfather?"

"Many's the time, I trust!" answered Simon. "He'll be proud to do it. If not, he never was worth a smile from your sweet mouth."

"He'll be a great man some day!" she laughed, with a little quiver of the sweet mouth.

"He's a good man now, and I don't care," answered the smith. "As long as son of mine can look every man in the face, I don't care whether it be great or small he is."

"But, please, Mr. Armour," said Bab timidly, "wouldn't it be better still if he could look God in the face?"

"You're right there, my pretty dove!" replied the old man; "only a body can't say everything out in a breath!—But you're right, you are right!" he went on. "I remember well the time when I thought I had nothing to be ashamed of; but the time came when I was ashamed of many things, and I'd done nothing worse in the meantime either! When a man first gets a peep inside himself, he sees things he didn't look to see—and they stagger him a bit! Some horses have their hoofs so shrunk and cockled they take the queerest shoes to set them straight; an' them shoes is the troubles o' this life, I take it.—Now mind, I ain't told you what college he's gone to—nor whether it be at Oxford or at Cambridge, or away in Scotland or Germany—and you don't know! And if you don't feel bound to mention the name of the place, I'd be obliged to you not to. But I will let him know that I've told you what sort of a place he's at, because he couldn't tell you himself, being he's bound to hold his tongue."

Barbara went home happy: his grandfather recognized the bond between them! As to Richard, she had no fear of his forgetting her.

With more energy still, she went about her duties; and they seemed to grow as she did them. As the end of Mark's sickness approached, he became more and more dependent upon her, and only his mother could take her place with him. He loved his father dearly, but his father never staid more than a moment or two in the sick-chamber. Mark at length went away to find his twin; and his mother and Barbara wept, but not all in sorrow.

One morning, the week after Mark's death, Mr. Wylder desired Barbara to go with him to his study—where indeed about as much study went on as in a squirrel's nest—and there, after solemn prologue as to its having been right and natural while she was but a girl with a brother that she should be allowed a great deal of freedom, stated that now, circumstances being changed, such freedom could no longer be given her: she was now sole heiress, and must do as an heir would have had to do, namely, consult the interests of the family. In those interests, he continued, it was necessary he should strengthen as much as possible his influence in the county; it was time also that, for her own sake, she should marry; and better husband or fitter son-in-law than Mr. Lestrange could not be desired: he was both well behaved and good-looking, and when Mortgrange was one with Wylder, would have by far the finest estate in the county!

Filial obligation is a point upon which those parents lay the heaviest stress who have done the least to develop the relation between them and their children. The first duty is from the parent to the child: this unfulfilled, the duty of the child remains untaught.

"I am sorry to go against you, papa," said Barbara, "but I cannot marry Mr. Lestrange!"

"Stuff and nonsense! Why not?"

"Because I do not love him."

"Fiddlesticks! I did not love your mother when I married her!—You don't dislike him, I know!—Now don't tell me you do, for I shall not believe you!"

"He is always very kind to me, and I am sorry he should want what is not mine to give him."

"Not yours to give him! What do you mean by that? If it is not yours, it is mine! Have you not learned yet, that when I make up my mind to a thing, that thing is done! And where I have a right, I am not one to waive it!"

Where husband and wife are not one, it is impossible for the daughter to be one with both, or perhaps with either; and the constant and foolish bickering to which Barbara had been a witness throughout her childhood, had tended rather to poison than nourish respect. Whether Barbara failed to yield as much as Mr. Wylder had a right to claim, I leave to the judgment of my reader, reserving my own, and remarking only that, if his judgment be founded on principles differing from mine, our judgments cannot agree. The idea of parent must be venerated, and may cast a glow upon the actual parent, himself nowise venerable, so that the heart of a daughter may ache with the longing to see her father such that she could love and worship him as she would; but when it comes to life and action, the will of such a parent, if it diverge from what seems to the child true and right, ought to weigh nothing. A parent is not a maker, is not God. We must leave father and mother and all for God, that is, for what is right, which is his very will—only let us be sure it is for God, and not for self. If the parent has been the parent of good thoughts and right judgments in the child, those good thoughts and right judgments will be on the parent's side: if he has been the parent of evil thoughts and false judgments, they may be for him or against him, but in the end they will work solely for division. Any general decay of filial manners must originate with the parents.

"I am not a child. I am a woman," said Barbara; "and I owe it to him who made me a woman, to take care of her."

"Mind what you say. I have rights, and will enforce them."

"Over my person?" returned Barbara, her eyes sending out a flash that reminded him of her mother, and made him the angrier.

"If you do not consent here and now," he said sternly, "to marry Mr. Lestrange—that is, if, after your mother's insolence to lady Ann.—"

"My mother's insolence to lady Ann!" exclaimed Barbara, drawing herself, in her indignation, to the height of her small person: but her father would rush to his own discomfiture.

"—if, as I say," he went on, "he should now condescend to ask you—I swear—"

"You had better not swear, papa!"

"—I swear you shall not have a foot of my land."

"Oh! that is all? There you are in your right, and I have nothing to say."

"You insolent hussy! You won't like it when you find it done!"

"It will be the same as if Mark had lived."

"It's that cursed money of your mother's makes you impudent!" "If you could leave me moneyless, papa, it would make no difference. A woman that can shoe her own horse,—"

"Shoe her own horse!" cried her father.

"Yes, papa!—You couldn't!—And I made two of her shoes the last time! Wouldn't any woman that can do that, wouldn't she—to save herself from shame and disgust—to be queen over herself—wouldn't she take a place as house-maid or shop-girl rather than marry the man she didn't love?"

Mr. Wylder saw he had gone too far.

"You know more than is good!" he said. "But don't you mistake: you're mother's money is settled on you, but your father is your trustee!"

"My father is a gentleman!" rejoined Barbara—not so near the truth as she believed.

"Take you care how you push a gentleman," rejoined her father.

"Not to love is not to marry—not if the man was a prince!" persisted Barbara.

She went to her mother's room, but said nothing of what had passed. She would not heat those ovens of wrath, the bosoms of her parents.

The next morning she ran to saddle Miss Brown. To her astonishment, her friend was not in her box, nor in any stall in the stable; neither was any one visible of whom to ask what had become of her; for the first time in her life, everybody had got out of Barbara's way. In the harness-room, however, she came upon one of the stable-boys. He was in tears. When he saw her, he started and turned to run, looking as if he had had a piece of Miss Brown for breakfast, but she stopped him.

"Where is Miss Brown?" she said.

"Don' know, miss."

"Who knows, then?"

"P'raps master, miss."

"What are you crying for?"

"Don' know, miss."

"That's not true. Boys don't cry without knowing why?"

"Well, miss, I ain't sure what I'm crying for."

"Speak out, man! Don't be foolish."

"Master give me a terrible cut, miss!"

"Did you deserve it?"

"Don' know, miss."

"You don't seem to know anything this morning!"

"No, miss!"

"What did your master give you the cut for?"

"'Cause I was cryin'."

Here he burst into a restrained howl.

"What were you crying for?"

"Because Miss Brown was gone."

"And you cried without knowing where she was gone?" said Barbara, turning almost sick with apprehension.

"Yes, miss," affirmed the miserable boy.

"Is she dead?"

"No, miss, she ain't dead; she's sold!"

The words were not yet out of his mouth when he turned and bolted.

"That's my gentleman-papa!" said Barbara to herself before she could help it. Had she been any girl but Barbara, she would have cried like the boy.

Not once from that moment did she allude to Miss Brown in the hearing of father or servant.

One day her mother asked her why she never rode, and she told her. The wrath of the mother was like that of a tigress. She sprang to her feet, and bounded to the door. But when she reached it, Barbara was between her and the handle.

"Mother! mother dear!" she pleaded.

The mother took her by the shoulders, and thought to fling her across the room. But she was not so strong as she had been, and she found the little one hard as nails: she could not move her an inch.

"Get out of my way!" she cried, "I want to kill him!"

"Mammy dear, listen! It's a month ago! I said nothing—for love-sake!"

"Love-sake! I think I hear you! Dare to tell me you love that wretch of a father of yours! I will kill you if you say you love him!"

Barbara threw her arms round her mother's neck, and said, "Listen, mammy: I do love him a little bit: but it wasn't for love of him I held my tongue."

"Bah! Your bookbinder-fellow! What has be to do with it?"

"Nothing at all. It wasn't for him either, it was for God's sake I held my peace, mammy. If all his children quarrelled like you and dad, what a house he would have! It was for God's sake I said nothing; and you know, mammy, you've made it up with God, and you mustn't go and be naughty again!"

The mother stood silent and still. It seemed for an instant as if the old fever had come back, for she shivered. She turned and went to her chair, sat down, and again was still. A minute after, her forehead flushed like a flame, turned white, then flushed and paled again several times. Then she gave a great sigh, and the conflict was over. She smiled, and from that moment she also never said a word about Miss Brown.

But in the silence of her thought, Barbara suffered, for what might not be the fate of Miss Brown! No one but a genuine lover of animals would believe how she suffered. In her mind's eye she kept seeing her turn her head with sharp-curved neck in her stall, or shoot it over the door of her box, looking and longing for her mistress, and wondering why she did not come to pat her, or feed her, or saddle her for the joyous gallop across grass and green hedge; and the heart of her mistress was sore for her. But at length one day in church, they read the psalm in which come the words, "Thou, Lord, shalt save both man and beast!" and they went to her soul. She reflected that if Miss Brown was in trouble, it might be for the saving of Miss Brown: she had herself got enough good from trouble to hope for that! For she heartily believed the animals partakers in the redemption of Jesus Christ; and she fancied perhaps they knew more about it than we think,—the poor things are so silent! Anyhow she saw that the reasonable thing was to let God look after his own; and if Miss Brown was not his, how could she be?

But the mother was sending all over the country to find who had Miss Brown; and she had not inquired long before she learned that she was in the stables at Mortgrange. There she knew she would be well treated, and therefore told Barbara the result of her inquiries.



CHAPTER LVI.

WINGFOLD AND BARBARA.

Barbara went yet oftener to Mr. and Mrs. Wingfold. By this time, through Simon Armour, they knew something about Richard, but none of them all felt at liberty to talk about him.

Barbara had now a better guide in her reading than Richard. True reader as he had been, Wingfold's acquaintance both with literature and its history, that is, its relation to the development of the people, was as much beyond the younger man's as it ought to be. What in Barbara Richard had begun well, Wingfold was carrying on better.

With his help she was now studying, to no little advantage, more than one subject connected with the main interest common to her and Richard: and she thought constantly of what Richard would say, and how she would answer him. Hence, naturally, she had the more questions to put to her tutor. Now Wingfold had passed through all Richard's phases, and through some that were only now beginning to show in him; therefore he was well prepared to help her—although there was this difference between the early moral conditions of the two men, that Wingfold had been prejudiced in favour of much that he found it impossible to hold, whereas Richard had been prejudiced against much that ought to be cast away.

Richard suffered not a little at times from his enforced silence: what might not happen because he must not speak? But hearing nothing discouraging from his grandfather, he comforted himself in hope. He knew that in him he had a strong ally, and that Barbara loved the hot-hearted blacksmith, recognizing in him a more genuine breeding, as well as a far greater capacity, than in either sir Wilton or her father. He toiled on doing his duty, and receiving in himself the reward of the same, with further reward ever at the door. For there is no juster law than the word, "To him that hath shall be given."

"Why do I never see you on Miss Brown?" asked Wingfold one day of Barbara.

"For a reason I think I ought not to tell you."

"Then don't tell me," returned the parson.

But by a mixture of instinctive induction, and involuntary intuition, he saw into the piece of domestic tyranny, and did what he could to make up for it, by taking her every now and then a long walk or drive with his wife and their little boy. He gave her strong hopeful things to read—and in the search after such was driven to remark how little of the hopeful there is in the English, or in any other language. The song of hope is indeed written in men's hearts, but few sing it. Yet it is of all songs the sorest-needed of struggling men.

Heart and brain, Wingfold was full of both humour and pathos. In their walks and drives, many a serious subject would give occasion to the former, and many a merry one to the latter. Sometimes he would take a nursery-rime for his theme, and expatiate upon it so, that at one instant Barbara would burst into the gayest laughter, and the next have to restrain her tears. Rarely would Wingfold enter a sick-chamber, especially that of a cottage, with a long face and a sermon in his soul; almost always he walked lightly in, with a cheerful look, and not seldom an odd story on his tongue, well pleased when he could make the sufferer laugh—better pleased sometimes when he had made him sorry. He did not find those that laughed the readiest the hardest to make sorry. He moved his people by infecting their hearts with the feeling in his own.

Having now for many years cared only for the will of God, he was full of joy. For the will of the Father is the root of all his children's gladness, of all their laughter and merriment. The child that loves the will of the Father, is at the heart of things; his will is with the motion of the eternal wheels; the eyes of all those wheels are opened upon him, and he knows whence he came. Happy and fearless and hopeful, he knows himself the child of him from whom he came, and his peace and joy break out in light. He rises and shines. Bliss creative and energetic there is none other, on earth or in heaven, than the will of the Father.



CHAPTER LVII.

THE BARONET'S WILL.

Arthur Lestrange was sharply troubled when he found he was to see no more of Barbara. He went again and again to Wylder Hall, but neither mother nor daughter would receive him. When he learned that Miss Brown was for sale, he bought her for love of her mistress. All the explanation he could get from lady Ann was, that the young woman's mother was impossible; she was more than half a savage.

Time's wheels went slow thereafter at Mortgrange. Sir Wilton missed his firstborn. Whatever annoyed him in his wife or any of her children, fed the desire for Richard. Arthur did not please him. He had no way distinguished himself—and some men are annoyed when their sons prove only a little better than themselves. Percy was a poisoned thorn in his side: he was even worse than his father. All his thoughts took refuge in Richard.

He had become dissatisfied with his agent, and although he had never taken an interest in business, distrust made him now look into things a little. He called his lawyer from London, and had him make a thorough investigation. Dismissing thereupon his agent, he would have Arthur take charge of the estate; but the young man, with an inborn dislike to figures, flatly refused, saying he preferred the army. Sir Wilton did not like the army: he had been in it himself, and had left it in a hurry—no one ever knew why.

The only comfort in the house occupied the soul of lady Ann: it was that she heard nothing of the bookbinder fellow! She had grown so torpid, that while Danger was not flattening his nose against the window-pane, she was at peace. For the rest, a lawyer of her own had the will in his keeping, and she had come upon no trace of another.

But when sir Wilton sent for his lawyer to look into his factor's accounts, he had a further use for him, of which his wife heard nothing: he made him draw up another will, in which he left everything to Richard, only son of his first wife, Robina Armour. With every precaution for secrecy, the will was signed and witnessed, but when the lawyer would have carried it with him, the baronet declined to give it up. He laid it aside for a week, then had the horses put to, and drove to find Mr. Wingfold, of whom he had heard from Richard. When he saw him, man of the world as he was, he was impressed by the simplicity of a clergyman without a touch of the clerical, without any look of what he called sanctity—the look that comes upon a man cherishing the notion that he is intrusted with things more sacred than God will put in the hands of his other children. Such men, and they are many, one would like to lay for a time in the sheet of Peter's vision, among the four-footed animals and creeping things, to learn that, as there is nothing common or unclean, so is there no class more sacred than another. Never will it be right with men, until every commonest meal is a glad recognition of the living Saviour who gives himself, always and perfectly, to his brothers and sisters.

The baronet begged a private interview, and told the parson he wanted to place in his keeping a certain paper, with the understanding that he would not open it for a year after his death, and would then act upon the directions contained in it.

"Provided always," Wingfold stipulated, "that they require of me nothing unfit, impossible, or wrong."

"I pledge myself they require nothing unworthy of the cloth," said sir Wilton.

"The cloth be hanged!" said Wingfold. "Do they require anything unworthy of a man—or if you think the word means more—of a gentleman?"

"They do not," answered the baronet.

"Then you must write another paper, stating that you have asked me to undertake this, but that you have given me no hint of the contents of the accompanying document. This second you must enclose with the first, sealing the envelope with your own seal."

Sir Wilton at once consented, and there and then did as Wingfold desired.

"I've check-mated my lady at last!" he chuckled, as he drove home. "She would have me the villain to disinherit my firstborn for her miserable brood! She shall find my other will, and think she's safe! Then the thunderbolt—and Dick master! My lady's dower won't be much for Percy the cad and Arthur the proper, not to mention Dorothy the cow, and Vixen the rat!"

He always spoke as if lady Ann's children were none of his. Her ladyship had taught him to do so, for she always said, "My children!"

That night he slept with an easier mind. He had put the deed off and off, regarding it as his abdication; but now it was done he felt more comfortable.

Wingfold suspected in the paper some provision for Richard, but could imagine no reason for letting it lie unopened until a year should have passed from the baronet's death. Troubling himself nothing, however, about what was not his business, he put the paper carefully aside—but where he must see it now and then, lest it should pass from his mind, and with sir Wilton's permission, told his wife what he had undertaken concerning it, that she might carry it out if he were prevented from doing so.

Time went on. Communication grew yet less between Mr. Wylder and his family. He had returned to certain old habits, and was spending money pretty fast in London. Failing to make himself a god in the house, he forsook it, and was rapidly losing this world's chance of appreciating a woman whose faults were to his as new wine to dirty water.

In the fourth year, Richard wrote to his father, through his grandfather of course, informing him he had got his B.A. degree, and was waiting further orders. The baronet was heartily pleased with the style of his letter, and in the privacy of his own room gave way to his delight at the thought of his wife's approaching consternation and chagrin. At the same time, however, he was not a little uneasy in prospect of the denouement. For the eyes of his wife had become almost a terror to him. Their grey ice, which had not grown clearer as it grew older, made him shiver. Why should the stronger so often be afraid of the weaker? Sometimes, I suppose, because conscience happens to side with the weaker; sometimes only because the weaker is yet able to make the stronger, especially if he be lazy and a lover of what he calls peace, worse than uncomfortable. The baronet dared not present his son to his wife except in the presence of at least one stranger. He wrote to Richard, appointing a day for his appearance at Mortgrange.



CHAPTER LVIII.

THE HEIR.

It was a lovely morning when Richard, his heart beating with a hope whose intensity of bliss he had never imagined, stopped at the station nearest to Mortgrange, and set out to walk there in the afternoon sun. June folded him in her loveliness of warmth and colour. The grass was washed with transparent gold: he saw both the gold and the green together, but unmingled. Often had he walked the same road, a contented tradesman; a gentleman now, with a baronet to his father, he loved, and knew he must always love the tradesman-uncle more than the baronet-father. He was much more than grateful to his father for his ready reception of him, and his care of his education; but he could not be proud of him as of his mother and his aunt and uncle and his grandfather. He held it one of God's greatest gifts to come of decent people; and if in his case the decency was on one side only, it was the more his part to stop the current of transmitted evil, and in his own person do what he might to annihilate it!

His only anxiety was lest his father should again lay upon him the command to cease communication with his brother and sister. He lifted up his heart to God, and vowed that not for anything the earth could give would he obey. The socialism he had learned from his uncle had undergone a baptism to something infinitely higher. He prayed God to keep him clean of heart, and able to hold by his duty. He promised God—it was a way he had when he would bind himself to do right—that he would not forsake his own, would not break the ties of blood for any law, custom, prejudice, or pride of man. The vow made his heart strong and light. But he felt there was little merit in the act, seeing he could live without his father's favour. He saw how much harder it would be for a poor tradeless man like Arthur Lestrange to make such a resolve. In the face of such a threat from his father what could he do?—where find courage to resist? Resist he must, or be a slave, but hard indeed it would be! Every father, thought Richard, who loved his children, ought to make them independent of himself, that neither clog, nor net, nor hindrance of any kind might hamper the true working of their consciences: then would the service they rendered their parents be precious indeed! then indeed would love be lord, and neither self, nor the fear of man, nor the fear of fate be a law in their life!

He had not sent word to his grandfather that he was coming, and had told his father that he would walk from the station—which suited sir Wilton, for he felt nervous, and was anxious there should be no stir. So Richard came to Mortgrange as quietly as a star to its place.

When he reached the gate and walked in as of old, he was challenged by the woman who kept it: of all the servants she and lady Ann's maid had alone treated him with rudeness, and now she was not polite although she did not know him. Neither was he recognized by the man who opened the door.

Sir Wilton sat in the library expecting him. A gentleman was with him, but he kept in the background, seemingly absorbed in the titles of a row of books.

"There you are, you rascal!" his father was on the point of saying as Richard came into the light of the one big bow-window, but, instead, he gazed at him for an instant in silence. Before him was one of the handsomest fellows his eyes had ever rested upon—broad-shouldered and tall and straight, with a thoughtful yet keen face, of which every feature was both fine and solid, and dark brown hair with night and firelight in it, and a touch of the sun here and there at moments. The situation might have been embarrassing to a more experienced man than Richard as he waited for his father to speak; but he stood quite at his ease, slightly bent, and motionless, neither hands nor feet giving him any of the trouble so often caused by those outlying provinces. The slight colour that rose in his rather thin cheeks, only softened the beauty of a face whose outline was severe. He stood like a soldier waiting the word of his officer.

"By Jove!" said his father; and there was another pause.

The baronet was momently growing prouder of his son. He had never had a feeling like it before. He saw his mother in him.