'And who is this Mr. Hawkey Sharpe, who seems to have installed himself at Earlshaugh?' asked Roland, after a brief pause.
'No one knows but your—your stepmother,' replied Sir Harry, with a grimace, as he kicked a hassock from under his foot. 'No one but she apparently; he seems a sharp fellow, in whom she trusts implicitly in all regarding the estate.'
'Where did he come from?'
'God knows; but he seems to be what our American cousins deem the acme of 'cuteness.'
'And that is——'
'A Yankee Jew attorney of English parentage,' replied Sir Harry, with a kind of smile, in which his nephew did not join.
'Earlshaugh is a fine properly, as we all know, uncle; but it was deuced hard for me, when I thought I had come into it, to find this stepmother—a person I can barely remember acting as my mother's amanuensis, factotum, and toady—constituted a species of guardian to me—to me, a captain in my twenty-seventh year, and to be told that I must for the time content me with my old allowance, as the pater had been—she said—rather extravagant, and so forth. I can't make it out.'
'Neither can I, nor any other fellow,' said the old General testily. 'I only know that your father made a very idiotic will, leaving all to that woman.'
'If he actually did so,' said Roland.
'No doubt about it—I heard it read.'