Adrian gave Sir Austin an able version of his son’s behaviour and adventures; dwelling upon this sudden taciturnity when he heard of his father’s resolution not to see him.  The wise youth saw that his chief was mollified behind his moveless mask, and went to bed, and Horace, leaving Sir Austin in his study.  Long hours the baronet sat alone.  The house had not its usual influx of Feverels that day.  Austin Wentworth was staying at Poer Hall, and had only come over for an hour.  At midnight the house breathed sleep.  Sir Austin put on his cloak and cap, and took the lamp to make his rounds.  He apprehended nothing special, but with a mind never at rest he constituted himself the sentinel of Raynham.  He passed the chamber where the Great-Aunt Grantley lay, who was to swell Richard’s fortune, and so perform her chief business on earth.  By her door he murmured, “Good creature! you sleep with a sense of duty done,” and paced on, reflecting, “She has not made money a demon of discord,” and blessed her.  He had his thoughts at Hippias’s somnolent door, and to them the world might have subscribed.

A monomaniac at large, watching over sane people in slumber! thinks Adrian Harley, as he hears Sir Austin’s footfall, and truly that was a strange object to see.—­Where is the fortress that has not one weak gate? where the man who is sound at each particular angle?  Ay, meditates the recumbent cynic, more or less mad is not every mother’s son?  Favourable circumstances—­good air, good company, two or three good rules rigidly adhered to—­keep the world out of Bedlam.  But, let the world fly into a passion, and is not Bedlam the safest abode for it?

Sir Austin ascended the stairs, and bent his steps leisurely toward the chamber where his son was lying in the left wing of the Abbey.  At the end of the gallery which led to it he discovered a dim light.  Doubting it an illusion, Sir Austin accelerated his pace.  This wing had aforetime a bad character.  Notwithstanding what years had done to polish it into fair repute, the Raynham kitchen stuck to tradition, and preserved certain stories of ghosts seen there, that effectually blackened it in the susceptible minds of new house-maids and under-crooks, whose fears would not allow the sinner to wash his sins.  Sir Austin had heard of the tales circulated by his domestics underground.  He cherished his own belief, but discouraged theirs, and it was treason at Raynham to be caught traducing the left wing.  As the baronet advanced, the fact of a light burning was clear to him.  A slight descent brought him into the passage, and he beheld a poor human candle standing outside his son’s chamber.  At the same moment a door closed hastily.  He entered Richard’s room.  The boy was absent.  The bed was unpressed:  no clothes about:  nothing to show that he had been there that night.  Sir Austin felt vaguely apprehensive.  Has he gone to my room to await me? thought the father’s heart.  Something