“Then his leaguing himself with midnight marauders, whose names he is ashamed to confess, shows what he is!” continued Peternot. “A boy is known by the company he keeps.”
“Isn’t a man as much?” retorted Jack, blazing up again. “What company did you keep yesterday? What day marauders did you league yourself with, to get the money away from me? Wonder if you are ashamed!”
“Jack! Jack! don’t be saucy!” said Mrs. Chatford.
“Let him speak out; then mebby you’ll see what the boy is,” said Peternot, chafing with anger. “He has no respect for age. He sassed me to my face yisterday as you never heard the lowest blackguard on the canal sass another. I am amazed that anybody in this house should be found to excuse or stand up for such a profane, house-breakin’, hardened little villain!”
“I don’t stand up for anything he has said or done that is wrong. But there is good in the boy, for all that,” cried Mrs. Chatford, in tones and with looks full of deep emotion, “and that I stand up for, as I would wish another to stand up for a son of mine in his place. This may be a turning-point in the boy’s life. He may be saved, he can and will be saved, if we are just and charitable towards him; but I shudder to think what may become of him if we cast him off. I fear he will go back to his old ways, and that his last state will be worse than his first. Then who will be answerable for his soul?”
“I have no ill-feelin’ towards the boy,” said the squire, coming now to a subject which he had been waiting for a favorable moment to introduce. “And if he will show that he repents of his inikity by askin’ pardon for his wholesale blasphemy, and abuse of me in the woods yisterday, and—and—give up the plunder he took from my house last night,—I don’t know,—peradventur’ I may be prevailed upon to let him off.”
“What do you say to that, Jack?” asked the deacon, anxious to see the matter settled. “Come! show yourself a brave, honest boy now, and the squire won’t be too hard on you. Give up the money, and he’ll return a fair share of it to you, I’m confident,—all you could reasonably expect, after the course you have taken to get the whole; won’t you, squire?”
“Sartin, I’ll be liberal with him; though I can’t make any bargain with a malefactor till he names his accomplices and gives up his booty.”
“And recant your falsehood about Phineas; that has hurt me more than anything else,” added Mr. Chatford, as Jack was hesitating.
“How can I recant what wasn’t a falsehood?” replied Jack.