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 round, and was off homeward, straight as an arrow.

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

Short as was his visit, he had gotten from it not merely all he had hoped for, but almost all he needed. His weakness had left him. He had twenty pounds for his brother and sister.

And was he not also a little step nearer to Barbara? True, with the very revelation he had been disowned—but he had lived without his father till now, and could very well go on to live without such a father! As long as he did what was right, 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.

Borne swiftly back to London, his heart was full of gladness with which to console the heavy hearts of Arthur and Alice. Twenty pounds was a huge sum to take them—as much as Alice could earn in six months or a year! He could himself earn such an amount in a little while—possibly in two or three months if he applied himself, but how long would it take him to save this much? Now here it was, whole and free, powerfully ready to be turned at once into food and warmth and hope!

— Thirty-Seven —

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 have risked it.

He liked Richard’s looks and carriage. He liked also his spirit and determination, though he wished his first experience of them different. Very little refining would make him a man fit to show to the world and be proud of as his son. His satisfaction with Richard on these grounds was augmented by an additional, peculiar, secret pleasure in the discovery of him—the youth was a lump of dynamite under his wife’s lounge, of which no one knew but himself, 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 his lady and her brood lived!

But already, through his own hot-headed precipitation, his precious secret was in peril!

The fact that he had let Richard slip away gave him considerable uneasiness. His thought was, at the ripest moment of lady Ann’s frosty indifference, to make her palace of ice fly into pieces about her with his revelation. What a delight it would be to watch her perturbation! And now he had opened his hand and let his bird fly!