“It would not do for you, perhaps, to make any advances towards him.”
“I should like to see myself!” said Tony, half choking with angry impatience.
“I repeat, it would not do for you to take this step; but if you had a friend—a man of rank and station—one whose position your uncle could not but acknowledge as at least the equal of his own—”
“He could be no friend of mine who should open any negotiations on my part with a relation who has treated my mother so uncourteously, sir.”
“I think you are under a mistake, Tony. Mrs. Butler told me that it was rather her own fault than Sir Omerod's that some sort of reconciliation was not effected. Indeed, she once showed me a letter from your uncle when she was in trouble about those Canadian bonds.”
“Yes, yes, I know it all,” said Tony, rising, as if all his patience was at last exhausted. “I have read the letter you speak of; he offered to lend her five or six hundred pounds, or to give it, I forget which; and he was to take me”—here he burst into a fit of laughter that was almost hysterical in its harsh mockery—“to take me. I don't know what he was to do with me, for I believe he has turned Papist, Jesuit, or what not; perhaps I was to have been made a priest or a friar; at all events, I was to have been brought up dependent on his bounty,—a bad scheme for each of us. He would not have been very proud of his protégé; and, if I know myself, I don't think I 'd have been very grateful to my protector. My dear mother, however, had too much of the mother in her to listen to it, and she told him so, perhaps too plainly for his refined notions in matters of phraseology; for he frumped and wrote no more to us.”
“Which is exactly the reason why a friend, speaking from the eminence which a certain station confers, might be able to place matters on a better and more profitable footing.”
“Not with my consent, sir, depend upon it,” said Tony, fiercely.
“My dear Tony, there is a vulgar adage about the impolicy of quarrelling with one's bread-and-butter; but how far more reprehensible would it be to quarrel with the face of the man who cuts it?”
It is just possible that Sir Arthur was as much mystified by his own illustration as was Tony, for each continued for some minutes to look at the other in a state of hopeless bewilderment. The thought of one mystery, however, recalled another, and Tony remembered his mother's note.