He bristled through all his yellow skin.
“Leave my house,” he said.
“I will leave it,” I answered, “but I will ask you another question first. What was my mother’s position, occupation, when she married?”
“Not another word,” he cried. “I have said too much already. O!”—he shook a wild finger at me—“why would she never accept my advice, given long ago, to place you out in some respectable family! I always foresaw that the time would come when you would begin to quarrel with your bread and butter—to bite the hand that fed you—to——”
“To put myself right with my stepfather,” I said.
“If you attempt it,” he cried—“if you dare—the wrath of the Almighty will fall upon your presumptuous head!”
I laughed.
“Well, I will think it over,” I said, and turned and left him.
CHAPTER VII.
MORGIANA
Near all that night I sat out in my den, wakeful and deeply meditative. Was I glad or sorry to have wormed out thus much of the truth? And of what potential profit to me was my new knowledge? As to the former, noblesse oblige: better be an unchristened vagabond than the legitimate hope of Mr Snooks, roturier. Nameless, I could make a name of my own; not be condemned all my days to the task of redeeming a vulgar one bequeathed me. Therein was signified, I thought, the true moral of all nomenclature. Why, for instance, should the son of Mr Rottengoose be handicapped from his birth with that imposed label and libel; be forced to carry throughout his blameless life that unasked and unmerited stigma of an ancestor’s villainous sobriquet; have to steel himself to the torture of the titter pursuing him over the edge of the dancing-card on which he had just impressed his awful identity; be obliged, perhaps, to advertise his ignominy on a brass plate, to stultify his fondest ideals, his most romantic passions, over the sign-manual of a decayed fowl—a name bestowed, probably, in the first instance on a village idiot; finally, be called upon to cheapen the nobility of his Last Will and Testament in the terms that “I, Robert Rottengoose, being of sound mind and in full hope of the resurrection, etc.”?