“Go, and I will wait for you here,” said his father.

The wind that bowed the old elms, and shivered the dead leaves in the air, had a voice and a meaning for the baronet during that half-hour’s lonely pacing up and down under the darkness, awaiting his boy’s return.  The solemn gladness of his heart gave nature a tongue.  Through the desolation flying overhead—­the wailing of the Mother of Plenty across the bare-swept land—­he caught intelligible signs of the beneficent order of the universe, from a heart newly confirmed in its grasp of the principle of human goodness, as manifested in the dear child who had just left him; confirmed in its belief in the ultimate victory of good within us, without which nature has neither music nor meaning, and is rock, stone, tree, and nothing more.

In the dark, the dead leaves beating on his face, he had a word for his note-book:  “There is for the mind but one grasp of happiness:  from that uppermost pinnacle of wisdom, whence we see that this world is well designed.”

CHAPTER XI

Of all the chief actors in the Bakewell Comedy, Master Ripton Thompson awaited the fearful morning which was to decide Tom’s fate, in dolefullest mood, and suffered the gravest mental terrors.  Adrian, on parting with him, had taken casual occasion to speak of the position of the criminal in modern Europe, assuring him that International Treaty now did what Universal Empire had aforetime done, and that among Atlantic barbarians now, as among the Scythians of old, an offender would find precarious refuge and an emissary haunting him.

In the paternal home, under the roofs of Law, and removed from the influence of his conscienceless young chief, the staggering nature of the act he had put his hand to, its awful felonious aspect, overwhelmed Ripton.  He saw it now for the first time.  “Why, it’s next to murder!” he cried out to his amazed soul, and wandered about the house with a prickly skin.  Thoughts of America, and commencing life afresh as an innocent gentleman, had crossed his disordered brain.  He wrote to his friend Richard, proposing to collect disposable funds, and embark, in case of Tom’s breaking his word, or of accidental discovery.  He dared not confide the secret to his family, as his leader had sternly enjoined him to avoid any weakness of that kind; and, being by nature honest and communicative, the restriction was painful, and melancholy fell upon the boy.  Mama Thompson attributed it to love.

The daughters of parchment rallied him concerning Miss Clare Forey.  His hourly letters to Raynham, and silence as to everything and everybody there, his nervousness, and unwonted propensity to sudden inflammation of the cheeks, were set down for sure signs of the passion.  Miss Letitia Thompson, the pretty and least parchmenty one, destined by her Papa for the heir of Raynham, and perfectly aware of her brilliant future, up to which she had, since