“You did not see him,” said Mary, faltering. “He is like--his father.”
“Like his father!” cried Lord Eskside; and he began to pace up and down the long, large, partially lighted room, a moving atom in it, yet supreme in his disturbed and disturbing humanity; “like his father!--very probably--but how can we tell who is his father? I think my lady, poor soul, has gone out of her mind.”
“But you have not seen him,” said Mary, softly, not knowing what to say.
“I have seen the creature, a little dark toad. Dick was always fair and feeble like my mother’s family, a fusionless being. We must write for him, and have his opinion. God bless me, Mary! if they both hold to it, mother and son, and this foundling grows up as heir to the property, how is he ever to establish his title? We’ll have Sandy Pringle down upon us with all the Scots law at his finger-ends--and what am I, a reasonable man, to do?”
“Oh, Lord Eskside, that is a long way off,” cried Mary, laying hold of the first argument that occurred to her.
“Things are none the easier for being a long way off,” said the old lord; and then he fell silent, pacing up and down the room, and finally returned to his place on the hearth-rug, where he stood pondering and waiting for his wife, whose hasty conclusions he so much objected to, yet whose presence and energy bore him up. Had she been there to argue with him, the strange thing that had occurred would have looked real. But in her absence what could Lord Eskside do but fret and fume? Mary and her gentle arguments were unsubstantial to him as any of the other shadows that filled the silent and deserted room.
Richard Ross had not visited his parents for years. He had scarcely been at home at all since the miserable catastrophe which had so fatally enlightened the world as to the folly of his marriage; and perhaps the certainty that he must come now contributed something to his mother’s rapture in the recovery of his child: for the instinct of nature overcomes all its unlikenesses; and Richard, though a man whom she would have laughed at and scorned had he not been her son, was, being her son, dearer than all the world to Lady Eskside. The new event which had happened was important enough, and his mother’s appeal was still more urgent and imperative; but I doubt if it would be true to say that there was any excitement of feeling, any happiness of anticipation in Richard’s mind as he travelled home in obedience to the call. Nearly seven years had elapsed since his children were taken from him, and they had been too young to take any permanent hold on his affections. That they were his children was all that could be said; and in Richard’s mind, as time went on and he began to regard his misfortunes with a kind of hopeless apathy, they had come to be more like shadows of their mother than independent beings possessing rights and claims of their own. The first effect of the news was to rouse him to a painful sense of his own dismal shipwreck and hopeless failure in life, rather than to any excitement of a more tender kind. Those great personal misfortunes which change the complexion of our lives may fall into the background, they may cease to render us actively and always wretched; but they lie in wait, keeping, as it were, ever within reach, to wake into hot recollection at a touch. Most of us prefer to avoid that touch when we can, and Richard had done this more persistently and with greater success than most people; but yet they lay there ready, the shame and the pain, wanting nothing but a jog to bring them out in full force.