“I would ask nothing, I would take nothing,” he said, as calmly as he could, though his voice trembled, and his heart throbbed with the beginnings of love, “from a man who had wronged my mother!”
“Damn the rascal! I never wronged his mother!—Who said I wronged your mother, you scoundrel? I'll take my oath she never did! Answer me directly who told you so!”
His voice had risen to a roar of anger.
His son could do the dead no wrong by speaking the truth.
“Mrs. Manson told me,” he began, but was not allowed to finish the sentence.
“Damned liar she always was!” cried the baronet—with such a fierceness in his growl as made Richard call to mind a certain bear in the Zoological gardens. “Then it was she that had you stolen! The beast ought to have died on the gallows, not in her bed! Ah, she was the one to plot, the snake! In this whole curse of a world, she was the meanest devil I ever came across, and I've known more than a few!”
“I know nothing about her, sir, except as the mother of Arthur, my schoolfellow. She seemed to hate me! She said I belonged to you, and had no right to be better off than her children!”
“How did she know you?”
“I can't tell, sir.”
“You are like your mother, but the snake never can have set eyes on her!—Give me that cheque. Her fry shan't have a farthing! Let them rot alive with their dead dam!”