“Made of you,” he went on thoughtfully, “a selfish, idle vagabond, with only wit enough to waste the money his father has made.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Chris, quite cheerfully. “If that’s the best the works have done for me, why should I love them?”
At that moment young Elshaw passed before his eyes again, and recalled Christian’s attention to a subject which would, he shrewdly thought, divert the current of his father’s thoughts from his own deficiencies.
“I wonder, sir,” he said, “that you don’t put Bram Elshaw into the office. He’s fit for something better than this sort of thing.”
And he waved his hand in the direction of the group in the middle of which stood Elshaw, rod in hand, with his lean, earnest face intent on his work.
Josiah Cornthwaite’s eyes rested on the young man. Bram was a little above the middle height, thin, sallow, with shoulders somewhat inclined to be narrow and sloping, but with a face which commanded attention. He had short, mouse-colored hair, high cheek bones, a short nose, a straight mouth, and a very long straight chin; altogether an assemblage of features which promised little in the way of attractiveness.
And yet attractive his face certainly was. Intelligence, strength of character, good humor, these were the qualities which even a casual observer could read in the countenance of Bram Elshaw.
But the lad had more in him than that. He had ambition, vague as yet, dogged tenacity of purpose, imagination, feeling, fire. There was the stuff; of a man of no common kind in the young workman.
Josiah Cornthwaite looked at him long and critically before answering his son’s remark.
“Yes,” said he at last slowly, “I daresay he’s fit for something better—indeed, I’m sure of it. But it doesn’t do to bring these young fellows on too fast. If he gets too much encouragement he will turn into an inventor (you know the sort of chap that’s the common pest of a manufacturing town, always worrying about some precious ‘invention’ that turns out to have been invented long ago, or to be utterly worthless), and never do a stroke of honest work again.”