Chapter 16

A slight note I have about me for you, for the delivery of which
you must excuse me. It is an offer that friendship calls upon me
to do, and no way offensive to you, since I desire nothing but
right upon both sides.

King and no King.

WHEN Ravenswood and his guest met in the morning, the gloom of the
Master's spirit had in part returned. He, also, had passed a night
rather of reflection that of slumber; and the feelings which he could
not but entertain towards Lucy Ashton had to support a severe conflict
against those which he had so long nourished against her father. To
clasp in friendship the hand of the enemy of his house, to entertain him
under his roof, to exchange with him the courtesies and the kindness of
domestic familiarity, was a degradation which his proud spirit could not
be bent to without a struggle.

But the ice being once broken, the Lord Keeper was resolved it should
not have time against to freeze. It had been part of his plan to stun
and confuse Ravenswood's ideas, by a complicated and technical statement
of the matters which had been in debate betwixt their families, justly
thinking that it would be difficult for a youth of his age to follow
the expositions of a practical lawyer, concerning actions of compt and
reckoning, and of multiplepoindings, and adjudications and wadsets,
proper and improper, and poindings of the ground, and declarations of
the expiry of the legal. "Thus," thought Sir William, "I shall have
all the grace of appearing perfectly communicative, while my party will
derive very little advantage from anything I may tell him." He therefore
took Ravenswood aside into the deep recess of a window in the hall, and
resuming the discourse of the proceeding evening, expressed a hope that
his young friend would assume some patience, in order to hear him enter
in a minute and explanatory detail of those unfortunate circumstances
in which his late honourable father had stood at variance with the Lord
Keeper. The Master of Ravenswood coloured highly, but was silent; and
the Lord Keeper, though not greatly approving the sudden heightening
of his auditor's complexion, commenced the history of a bond for twenty
thousand merks, advanced by his father to the father of Allan Lord
Ravenswood, and was proceeding to detail the executorial proceedings
by which this large sum had been rendered a debitum fundi, when he was
interrupted by the Master.

"It is not in this place," he said, "that I can hear Sir William
Ashton's explanation of the matters in question between us. It is not
here, where my father died of a broken heart, that I can with decency
or temper investigate the cause of his distress. I might remember that I
was a son, and