This slow succession of intelligence was of some advantage to Richard Waverley in the case before us; for, had the sum total of his enormities reached the ears of Sir Everard at once, there can be no doubt that the new commissioner would have had little reason to pique himself on the success of his politics.  The Baronet, although the mildest of human beings, was not without sensitive points in his character; his brother’s conduct had wounded these deeply; the Waverley estate was fettered by no entail (for it had never entered into the head of any of its former possessors that one of their progeny could be guilty of the atrocities laid by DYER’S letter to the door of Richard), and if it had, the marriage of the proprietor might have been fatal to a collateral heir.  These various ideas floated through the brain of Sir Everard, without, however, producing any determined conclusion.

He examined the tree of his genealogy, which, emblazoned with many an emblematic mark of honour and heroic achievement, hung upon the well-varnished wainscot of his hall.  The nearest descendants of Sir Hildebrand Waverley, failing those of his eldest son Wilfred, of whom Sir Everard and his brother were the only representatives, were, as this honoured register informed him (and, indeed, as he himself well knew), the Waverleys of Highley Park, com.  Hants; with whom the main branch, or rather stock, of the house had renounced all connexion, since the great lawsuit in 1670.

This degenerate scion had committed a further offence against the head and source of their gentility, by the intermarriage of their representative with Judith, heiress of Oliver Bradshawe, of Highley Park, whose arms, the same with those of Bradshawe the regicide, they had quartered with the ancient coat of Waverley.  These offences, however, had vanished from Sir Everard’s recollection in the heat of his resentment; and had Lawyer Clippurse, for whom his groom was dispatched express, arrived but an hour earlier, he might have had the benefit of drawing a new settlement of the lordship and manor of Waverley-Honour, with all its dependencies.  But an hour of cool reflection is a great matter, when employed in weighing the comparative evil of two measures, to neither of which we are internally partial.  Lawyer Clippurse found his patron involved in a deep study, which he was too respectful to disturb, otherwise than by producing his paper and leathern ink-case, as prepared to minute his honour’s commands.  Even this slight manoeuvre was embarrassing to Sir Everard, who felt it as a reproach to his indecision.  He looked at the attorney with some desire to issue his fiat, when the sun, emerging from behind a cloud, poured at once its chequered light through the stained window of the gloomy cabinet in which they were seated.  The Baronet’s eye, as he raised it to the splendour, fell right upon the central scutcheon, impressed with the same device which his ancestor was said to have borne in the field of Hastings; three ermines passant, argent, in a field azure, with its appropriate motto, sans LACHE.  ‘May our name rather perish,’ exclaimed Sir Everard, ’than that ancient and loyal symbol should be blended with the dishonoured insignia of a traitorous Roundhead!’