“Well, if Anthony Miles knew who it was,” said Mrs Featherly, tartly, “he showed a very proper spirit, a dissenter and all. Dissenters are never to be trusted, and this one behaved in a most reprehensible manner, going about in my husband’s parish and making himself exceedingly troublesome,—though I should be the last person to speak ill of the dead.”
“It is unsatisfactory, as you say, because they can’t feel it,” put in Mr Wood again, in a tone of assent, which Mrs Featherly accepted as a tribute to her argument.
“I have no doubt that it is all true so far as that David Stephens acted very wrongly,” she continued, “but then I do feel that if one hears part one should hear all. I should like to know, if Anthony Miles did not get the letter, who did?”
Mr Mannering had already laid down his knife and fork, and joined the tips of his fingers together, divided between a desire to speak and a fear of impoliteness.
“Excuse me,” he said, in his pleasant, courteous tones, “but I cannot but feel with Lady Milman that here we open another subject. I am sure Mrs Featherly, with her usual candour, will admit that Anthony Miles’s conduct may be considered blameless in the matter?”
“Indeed, I am not so presumptuous as to call any human being’s conduct blameless,” said Mrs Featherly aggressively, “especially that of a young man who has the snare of no profession. Not that anything seems to have any effect nowadays. There is that young Warren, good for nothing but to dance attendance upon Miss Ada Lovell. I have told Mr Featherly he really must make a point before long of speaking to Mr Bennett.”
“Warren?” said Sir Thomas Milman, joining in from the end of the table. “That will be his cousin whose death was in yesterday’s paper. It must have been sudden, very sudden. He only came to the title about four months ago, and now it goes, I should say, to this young fellow’s father. Isn’t it so, Mannering?—you’re up in all this sort of thing.”
“Sir Henry Warren is undoubtedly dead, and if this young man’s father is his uncle, it must be as you say,” said Mr Mannering, a little startled. “But I always understood theirs to be a family of great possessions. I had no idea this young Warren belonged to them.”
“Well, as often as not there’s a poor branch hanging on to the big stem, though they don’t very often get such a puff of good luck as this to set them straight. But there’s no doubt about the money.”
“O, they creak of money,” said Mr Wood. “Their pedigree is not long enough to have given them time to spend it as yet. They must wait for that till they get a little good blood into the family.”