"Tell me all, mother; tell me every thing; I adjure you to keep nothing back. To think and guess and fear, in a place like this, is worse than not to know the worst. Trevethick is a miser, and yet you say he is spending with a lavish hand. How is it you know that?"
"Why, Mr. Smoothbore's clerk is a friend of Mr. Weasel's, and he hears from him that his master has never received so large a retaining fee as on this occasion. The sum we offered, two days afterward, though larger than is customary, was, he said, but a trifle compared with it."
"You have something else to tell me yet, mother—I see it in your eyes.
If you go away with it untold, you leave me on the rack."
"There is nothing more," answered his mother, hesitatingly, "or almost nothing."
"What is it?" cried Richard, hoarsely—"what is it?"
"Well, merely this: that thinking that no money should be spared to help you in this dreadful trouble, Richard, and having but a very little of my own, I—I forgot my pride and steadfast resolution never to ask your father—"
"You did not apply to Carew for money, surely?" ejaculated Richard, angrily. "To let him know that I was here was ruin."
"It may have been ill judged, indeed, dear Richard," replied his mother, quietly; "but it was not ill meant. Do you suppose it cost me nothing to be his suppliant? Do you suppose I have no scorn nor hate, as you have, for those who have wronged me and you? If fury could avail to set you free, your mother would be as the tigress robbed of her young. It is an easy thing enough to fume and foam; it is hard to have to clasp the knees of those whom you despise, in vain."
"He refused you, then—this man?"
"He did, Richard. He told me—what I had not learned from you; I do not say it to reproach you, dear—what it was that had so long detained you at Gethin. He mentioned, in coarsest terms, your love for Harry, and how you had misrepresented yourself to Trevethick as the heir of Crompton in order to win her. He expressed a callous indifference to your present peril, and added something more in menace than in warning respecting that affair with Chandos which caused you to leave his roof. Since it seemed you had made no secret of the matter to Mr. Weasel, I showed him Carew's note; and his opinion is that Trevethick has spies at work to track your past. This may or may not injure you. Mr. Weasel thinks that it will not; but it shows the rancor with which this case is pressed by Trevethick—a malice which we are altogether at a loss to understand."