‘You offer me money,’ Mr. Richmond answered.

’That is one of the indignities belonging to a connection with a man like you.  You would have me sell my son.  To see my afflicted wife I would forfeit my heart’s yearnings for my son; your money, sir, I toss to the winds; and I am under the necessity of informing you that I despise and loathe you.  I shrink from the thought of exposing my son to your besotted selfish example.  The boy is mine; I have him, and he shall traverse the wilderness with me.  By heaven! his destiny is brilliant.  He shall be hailed for what he is, the rightful claimant of a place among the proudest in the land; and mark me, Mr. Beltham, obstinate sensual old man that you are!  I take the boy, and I consecrate my life to the duty of establishing him in his proper rank and station, and there, if you live and I live, you shall behold him and bow your grovelling pig’s head to the earth, and bemoan the day, by heaven! when you,—­a common country squire, a man of no origin, a creature with whose blood we have mixed ours—­and he is stone-blind to the honour conferred on him—­when you in your besotted stupidity threatened to disinherit Harry Richmond.’

The door slammed violently on such further speech as he had in him to utter.  He seemed at first astonished; but finding the terrified boy about to sob, he drew a pretty box from one of his pockets and thrust a delicious sweetmeat between the whimpering lips.  Then, after some moments of irresolution, during which he struck his chest soundingly and gazed down, talked alternately to himself and the boy, and cast his eyes along the windows of the house, he at last dropped on one knee and swaddled the boy in the folds of the shawl.  Raising him in a business-like way, he settled him on an arm and stepped briskly across gravel-walk and lawn, like a horse to whose neck a smart touch of the whip has been applied.

The soft mild night had a moon behind it somewhere; and here and there a light-blue space of sky showed small rayless stars; the breeze smelt fresh of roots and heath.  It was more a May-night than one of February.  So strange an aspect had all these quiet hill-lines and larch and fir-tree tops in the half-dark stillness, that the boy’s terrors were overlaid and almost subdued by his wonderment; he had never before been out in the night, and he must have feared to cry in it, for his sobs were not loud.  On a rise of the park-road where a fir-plantation began, he heard his name called faintly from the house by a woman’s voice that he knew to be his aunt Dorothy’s.  It came after him only once:  ’Harry Richmond’; but he was soon out of hearing, beyond the park, among the hollows that run dipping for miles beside the great highroad toward London.  Sometimes his father whistled to him, or held him high and nodded a salutation to him, as though they had just discovered one another; and his perpetual accessibility to the influences of spicy sugarplums, notwithstanding his grief, caused his father to prognosticate hopefully of his future wisdom.  So, when obedient to command he had given his father a kiss, the boy fell asleep on his shoulder, ceasing to know that he was a wandering infant:  and, if I remember rightly, he dreamed he was in a ship of cinnamon-wood upon a sea that rolled mighty, but smooth immense broad waves, and tore thing from thing without a sound or a hurt.