"O tempera! O mores!" says he, "In what degenerate days do we live! To think that this should be the grandson of such a grandsire! No; I cannot believe it of him; nay, I will not believe it of him."
You may guess that as there was a grandfather in the case I pricked up my ears at once, and on looking at the newspaper saw that which confirmed my premonition. There was a paragraph in the column of "Newest Intelligence" that ran in this wise:
"On Tuesday evening in the near neighbourhood of divers well-known coffee-and-chocolate-houses in Saint James's Street, Piccadilly, was found the body of Mr. Richard Burdock, of His Majesty's 4th Regiment of Horse Guards. The unfortunate gentleman had been done to death by a sword-wound in the upper part of the chest. Precisely in what manner the deceased came by his end is not at present known, but we are informed that on the following day an information was laid against the Earl of Tiverton, a nobleman whose name has been most unhappily notorious of late. A warrant was at once procured for the arrest of Lord Tiverton, and on an attempt being made to put it in force at his lordship's residence later in the day, a most desperate struggle ensued, and his lordship with the assistance of his household succeeded in effecting, for the time being, his escape. We learn, however, that the celebrated Mr. John Jeremy of Bow Street has the matter in hand; that Mr. Jeremy with his world-famed acumen is in possession of a clue as to Lord Tiverton's whereabouts; that Mr. Jeremy is already actively following up the same, and that presently an event may transpire that shall set all the town by the ears."
I directed Cynthia's attention to this account, and she was so startled by it that she changed colour, and offered so many visible evidences of her distress, that I feared she would have excited the suspicions of the parson, yet after all that must have been an impossible feat, for I am sure the honest parson was a man so utterly without guile, that he was incapable of harbouring any sort of suspicion against a fellow-creature. Besides he was still fully occupied in lamenting the low repute into which our name had fallen, with a grief so genuine that I did not know whether to be touched or amused by it.
However, I could not pay much heed to the parson at that minute, being deeply concerned for little Cynthia. I began to fear that I had done an ill-considered thing in allowing her to see the news-sheet. I had never tried to find out how far she was acquainted with my history of the past few years—my gaming, duels, intrigues and debts. That she must have known of it to some extent was certain. She had heard of them from my own lips in a haphazard sort of way; and again, they were too well known to be suppressed, as witness the conduct of her father in the matter of my suit. At his hands, and those of my friends, and of my rival too, they would certainly lose nothing of their magnitude. Whatever she had heard of me, she had been able to condone. But now confronted with a more circumstantial charge against me, clothed in all the authority of black and white, a charge of the most terrible character that can be preferred against any person, it came on her with a cruel force that almost crushed her down. She stood faltering, with the newspaper still clutched in her hands; her lips trembled, and the tears gathered slowly in her eyes.
"I don't believe it," said she, in a low, shaking voice.
She held out her hand, and I, despite the presence of the parson, took it to my lips with the same passion with which she had extended it to me. If a man in the midst of all the contumely and detraction of the world, can yet get one woman to believe in him, it is enough!
Meantime the parson, whatever he may have thought of our behaviour, not that it is altogether certain that he happened to witness it, was so strangely ingenuous that he took my little one's distress to spring from the same source as his own. He laid it all to that precious Commentary on the Analects of Confucius!
"Your grief does you honour, my dear madam, allow me to say," says he, wiping the memorials of his own from his red eyes. "It honours you vastly. It is something in this benighted age to know that the reverence for polite letters has not yet died out amongst us. And I, on my part, will never be persuaded that the descendant of so noble and learned a gentleman, whatever the errors of his youth, could fall into an act of such a hideous kind. I blame the publick press too for disseminating such a story. If it is false, as I believe it to be, oh, the pity of it! But if it should be true, the pity is the greater. With your permission, I will destroy this newspaper, lest this scandalous thing it contains should come under the eye of Blodgett, and she should spread it amongst the village folk."
I protest with all my settled views on life, and my arbitrary way of looking at things, I did not know whether to burst out into a shout of laughter, or fall a-weeping too, for, ecod! there was an affecting side to the affair when our simple old parson tore up the offending newspaper in a hundred pieces, all to preserve the fair name of that philosopher who had perished of the gout a full thirty years ago.