Tristram of Blent by Antonio Hope

The man with whom the fighters and the doubters were concerned, in whose defence or attack efforts and hopes were enlisted, round whom hesitation and struggles gathered, was thinking very little about his champions or his enemies. No fresh whispers of danger had come to Harry Tristram's ears. He knew nothing of Neeld and could not think of that quiet old gentleman as a possible menace to his secret. He trusted Mina Zabriska and relied on the influence which he had proved himself to possess over her. He did not believe that Duplay would stick to his game, and was not afraid of him if he did. The engagement was accomplished; the big check, or the prospect of it, lay ready to his hand; his formal proofs, perfect so long as they were unassailed, awaited the hour when formal proofs would be required. To all appearance he was secure in his inheritance and buttressed against any peril. No voice was raised, no murmur was heard, to impugn the right of the new Lord Tristram of Blent. The object of all those long preparations, which had occupied his mother and himself for so many years, was achieved. He sat in Addie Tristram's place, and none said him nay.

His mind was not much on these matters at all. Even his engagement occupied him very little. Janie's letter had arrived and had been read. It came at mid-day, and the evening found it still unacknowledged. It had broken in from outside as it were, intruding like something foreign into the life that he had begun to live on the evening before Addie Tristram was buried, the evening when for an instant he had thought he saw her phantom by the Pool; a life foreshadowed by the new mood which Mina had noticed in him while Lady Tristram still lived, but brought into reality by the presence of another. It seemed a new life coming to one who was almost a new man, so much of the unexpected in him did it reveal to himself. He had struggled against it, saying that the Monday morning would see an end of this unlooked-for episode of feeling and of companionship. Accident stepped in; Gainsborough lay in bed with a chill and could not move. Harry acquiesced in the necessity of his remaining, not exactly with pleasure, rather with a sense that something had begun to happen, not by his will, but affecting him deeply. What would come of it he did not know; that it would end in a day or two, that it would be only an episode and leave no permanent mark seemed now almost impossible; it was fraught with something bigger than that.