"Well, Miss Maude?" he cried, and fixing his eyes on her glowing face. Maude timidly continued.
"I thought you promised someone else the Upland Farm."
"That favourite of yours and of Rupert's, George Ryle? But I am not going to let him have it. Well, Mr. Chattaway?"
"What is the condition?" inquired Mr. Chattaway.
"That you use the land well. I shall have a clause inserted in the lease by which you may cease to be my tenant at any time by my giving you a twelvemonth's notice; and if I find you carrying your parsimonious nature into the management of the Upland Farm, as you have on this land, I shall surely take it from you."
"What's the matter with this land?" asked Mr. Chattaway.
"The matter is, that I find the land impoverished. You have spared money upon it in your mistaken policy, and the inevitable result has followed. You have been penny wise and pound foolish, Chattaway; as you were when you suffered the rick-yard to remain uninsured."
Mr. Chattaway's face darkened, but he made no reply to the allusion. "I'll undertake to do the farm justice, Squire Trevlyn, if you will lease it to me."
"Very well. Let me, however, candidly assure you that, but for Edith's sake, I'd see you starve before you should have had a homestead on this land. It is my habit to be plain-spoken: I must be especially so with you. I suffer from you in all ways, James Chattaway. I suffer always in my nephew Rupert. When I think of the treatment dealt out to him from you, I can scarcely refrain from treating you to a taste of the punishment you inflicted upon him. It is possible, too, that had the boy been more tenderly cared for, he might have had strength to resist this disease which has crept upon him. About that I cannot speak; it must lie between you and God; his father, with every comfort, could not escape it, it seems; and possibly Rupert might not have done so."
Mr. Chattaway made no reply. The Squire, after a pause, during which he had been plunged in thought, continued. "I suffer also in the matter of the two-thousand-pound debt of Thomas Ryle's, and I have a great mind—do you hear me, sir?—I have a great mind that the refunding it should come out of your pocket instead of mine; even though I had to get it from you by suing you for so much of the mesne profits."