So early as next morning the messenger of vengeance had gone like a fiery cross all over Eskside--up the water and down the water, placarded in the hamlets, sent flying by the post over all the county. It came by the morning’s post to Rosscraig itself. The man who went for the letters got a copy from somebody, which was given with much solemnity and secrecy to Harding the butler for his private information. The upper servants laid their heads together over it in the housekeeper’s room with fright, and yet with that almost agreeable excitement which moves a little community when any great event happens to the heads of it. Excitement is sweet, howsoever it comes; and the grim pleasure which servants often seem to enjoy even in “a death in the family,” is curious to behold. This was much more piquant than a death, and nobody could tell to what it might lead; and then there was the thrilling suspense as to who should venture to tell it to my lord and my lady, and how they would take it when they found it out. As was to be expected, it was through Harding’s elaborate care to keep it from his master that it was found out. Lord Eskside was in his library before breakfast, very busy with his lists of voters, and the calculations of each district and polling-place, all of which agreed so delightfully in the certain majority which must carry Val triumphantly to his place in Parliament--a triumph which, all the more perfect that it was late, filled the old lord’s heart. His wrinkled forehead was smoothed out as if he had swallowed an elixir of life; his shaggy eyebrows, almost white now, were still, or nearly so; his under lip had subsided peacefully. How many disappointments had passed over that rugged old head! His son Richard had been nothing but one disappointment from beginning to end, sometimes giving acute pain--always a dormant dissatisfaction to his parents. For years and years he had been lost to them altogether: he had sinned like a prodigal, bringing in a wild and miserable romance into the family records, without making up for his sin by the prodigal’s compensating qualities,--the readiness to confess, the humility of asking pardon. Richard had done badly by his family, yet was as proud, and took up as superior a position, as if he had done well. He had not only disappointed but scorned his father’s hopes. Neither father nor mother had any comfort in him, any good of him, any more than if they had no son.