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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.