he announced the first, yet they came upon Sir Everard gradually,
and drop by drop, as it were, distilled through the cool and
procrastinating alembic of Dyer's 'Weekly Letter.' [Footnote: See Note I.
] For it may be observed in passing, that instead of those mail-coaches,
by means of which every mechanic at his six-penny club, may nightly learn
from twenty contradictory channels the yesterday's news of the capital, a
weekly post brought, in those days, to Waverley-Honour, a Weekly
Intelligencer, which, after it had gratified Sir Everard's curiosity, his
sister's, and that of his aged butler, was regularly transferred from the
Hall to the Rectory, from the Rectory to Squire Stubbs's at the Grange,
from the Squire to the Baronet's steward at his neat white house on the
heath, from the steward to the bailiff, and from him through a huge
circle of honest dames and gaffers, by whose hard and horny hands it was
generally worn to pieces in about a month after its arrival.
This slow succession of intelligence was of some advantage to Richard
Waverley in the case before us; for, had the sum total of his enormities
reached the ears of Sir Everard at once, there can be no doubt that the
new commissioner would have had little reason to pique himself on the
success of his politics. The Baronet, although the mildest of human
beings, was not without sensitive points in his character; his brother's
conduct had wounded these deeply; the Waverley estate was fettered by no
entail (for it had never entered into the head of any of its former
possessors that one of their progeny could be guilty of the atrocities
laid by Dyer's 'Letter' to the door of Richard), and if it had, the
marriage of the proprietor might have been fatal to a collateral heir.
These various ideas floated through the brain of Sir Everard without,
however, producing any determined conclusion.
He examined the tree of his genealogy, which, emblazoned with many an
emblematic mark of honour and heroic achievement, hung upon the
well-varnished wainscot of his hall. The nearest descendants of Sir
Hildebrand Waverley, failing those of his eldest son Wilfred, of whom Sir
Everard and his brother were the only representatives, were, as this
honoured register informed him (and, indeed, as he himself well knew),
the Waverleys of Highley Park, com. Hants; with whom the main branch,
or rather stock, of the house had renounced all connection since the
great law-suit in 1670.
Th
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