“Oh, come, sir, you’re too hard,” protested Chris with real warmth, and with more earnestness than he had shown on the subject either of his own career or of Bram’s. “I’d stake my head for what it’s worth, and I suppose you’d say that isn’t much, on the girl’s being all right.”
But this championship did not please his father at all. Josiah Cornthwaite’s bushy white eyebrows met over his black eyes, and his handsome, ruddy-complexioned face lost its color. Chris was astonished, and regretted his own warmth, as his father answered in the tones he could remember dreading when he was a small boy—
“Whether she’s all right or all wrong, I warn you not to trouble your head about her. You may rely upon my doing the best I can for her, on account of my relationship to her mother. But I would never countenance an alliance between the family of that old reprobate and mine.”
But to this Chris responded with convincing alacrity—
“An alliance! Good heavens, no, sir! We suffer quite enough at the hands of the old nuisance already. And I have no idea, I assure you, of throwing myself away.”
Josiah Cornthwaite still kept his shrewd black eyes fixed upon his son, and he seemed to be satisfied with what he read in the face of the latter, for he presently turned away with a nod of satisfaction as Theodore Biron and his daughter, who had perhaps been lingering a little until the great man’s first annoyance at the sight of them had blown over, came near enough for a meeting.
“Ah, Mr. Cornthwaite, surely there’s no sight in the world to beat this,” began the dapper little man airily as he held out a small, slender, and remarkably well-shaped hand with a flourish, and kept his eyes all the time upon the men at work in the nearest shed as if the sight had too much fascination for him to be able readily to withdraw his eyes. “This,” he went on, apparently not noticing that Mr. Cornthwaite’s handshake was none of the warmest, “of a whole community immersed in the noblest of all occupations, the turning of the innocent, lifeless substances of the earth into tool and wheel, ship and carriage! I must say that this place has a charm for me which I have never found in the fairest spots of Switzerland; that after seeing whatever was to be seen in California, the States, the Himalayas, Russia, and the rest of it, I have always been ready to say, not exactly with the poet, but with a full heart, ‘Give me Sheffield!’ And to-day, when I came to have a look at the works,” he wound up in a less lofty tone, “I thought I would bring my little Claire to have a peep too.”
“Ah, Mr. Cornthwaite, surely there’s no sight in the world to beat this.”—Page 10.
In spite of the absurdity of his harangue, Theodore Biron knew how to throw into his voice and manner so much fervor. He spoke, he gesticulated with so much buoyancy and effect, that his hearers were amused and interested in spite of themselves, and were carried away, for the time at least, into believing, or half-believing, that he was in earnest.