“Does he mean that he wants to go back of it?” asked Malone, with a calm and resolute look.
“Listen to me patiently, and you shall hear all.” It is not necessary I should weary my reader with a sermon where the text conveys so much. The chief burden of Grenfell’s argument was what he had addressed to Vyner; and upon this he expanded freely, laying much stress on the misfortune that must accrue to any young girl raised to a temporary elevation, from which she must come down to meet a life of perhaps privation and hardship. He pictured an existence of luxury on the one hand, and of poverty on the other, and asked what right had any one to expose another to such extremes—what preparation could ease and indulgence be to a life of toil and suffering? “How were the acquirements of the one to be made applicable to the other?—how,” he asked, “is the young lady—for she will have become a young lady—to change at once to the condition of the ill-fed, ill-dressed, hard-worked country girl?”
Had the orator only glanced as he spoke at the features of the listener, he would have seen what a lamentable blunder his rhetoric had made. At the mention of the words “young lady,” the whole expression of the old man’s face altered; his half-sullen obduracy, his rugged sternness, disappeared, his eyes lighted up; his lips parted, his nostrils dilated, and his whole face beamed with a joy that was positively triumphant. “Go on, Sir!—go on!” he cried, as though he yearned for a perfect picture of what imagination had but sketched an outline.
“You cannot mean, my good man,” said Grenfell, hastily, “that you would think it any benefit to be placed where you couldn’t remain?—to stand at a height where you couldn’t balance yourself? It’s not enough that people can dress well, and talk well, and look well; they must have, besides, the means to do all these, day after day, without an effort, without as much as a care or a thought about them. Do you understand me?”
“Sure, people wasn’t born ladies and gentlemen from the beginnin’ of the world?”
“No; great families took their rise in great actions. Some by courage, some by cleverness, some by skill, and some by great industry.”
“Just so!” broke in the old man. “There was always some one to begin it, and likely enough too in a mighty small way. Dare I ax your honour a question?”
“Ask freely, my good fellow.”
“Though I suppose your honour will have to go back very far, can you tell me what was the first of your own great family?”
From the purpose-like energy of the old peasant’s manner, and the steady and penetrating look of his bright eyes, Grenfell felt certain that the man had been prompted to put this insult upon him, and in a voice broken by passion, he said: