“So you’ve been plotting with your mother,” Joscelvn had said. “What the blank has she to do with it? What the dash does she mean by interfering? I’ve a good mind to kick you out of the house—both her and you.”
“It is her money,” said Harry, confronting his father; though, indeed, had it not been for necessity and opposition the idea of anything belonging to his mother was the last thought that would have occurred to him.
“Her money!” Joscelvn had cried out in a tempest of scorn and wrath, filling the room with whirlwinds of oaths; and what with the fierce impulse of contradiction in him, and the desire he had to have his way, Harry had felt his genuine germ of affection for his mother blown up into red hot heat and passion by all that his father proceeded to say. “Her money! Let her dare to say it was her money—to a man that had supported and put up with a dashed useless blank all this time that was no more good in a house than an old rag! Let her just come and say it was her money—he would show her the difference; he would tell her whose money it was that kept up her dashed pretensions. To be sure it was a lady she was—a parson’s daughter with a fortune of her own. Oh, dash it all—her money; this was about too much for any man to bear.” Harry had made a great effort to keep his temper, and he had allowed all this flood to pour itself out. He was very much in earnest, and anxious, now that he had opened the question, to get some advantage from it. Then he tried another expedient.
“I have never cost you a penny,” he said; “the others have all got something out of you. You have never spent a penny upon me.”
And then the veins swelled upon Joscelyn’s forehead. He swore half a million of oaths, cursing his son by every possible mode of imprecation.
“Cost me nothing! you dashed puppy!” he cried; “you’ve cost me a deal more than money, you ——!” (Though it takes away the spirit and energy of his style, and turns it into tameness, I cannot pretend to report Mr. Joscelyn’s expletives, having no sufficient knowledge of the variations to help me in rendering them) “You’ve cost me that woman’s dashed smirking and smiling, and that old scarecrow’s brags and blows. I’d sooner you had cost me a fortune. I’ve had that to put up with as I’ll put up with again from nobody. Made me feel like a beggar, by ——! with that old blank grinning at me, and poking his advices at me. If it was for nothing but to spite him you shouldn’t have a penny from me.”
“And do you mean to say,” cried Harry, indignant, “that you will sacrifice my prospects to show your independence of my uncle? I could believe a great deal of you, father (which was a wrong thing to say), but I couldn’t have believed anything so bad as that.”
And then it was that Joscelyn pushed back his chair, and clenched his fist, and gave his son to understand what he thought of him.
“There’s not one of the others but is worth two of you,” he said, “they’re a bit like Joscelyns; you’re your mother’s breed, you white-faced shop-keeping cur. And ask me to put my money in a filthy concern across a counter, me that have the best blood in all Cumberland in my veins, and my name to keep up; I’ll see you at—Jericho first; I’ll see you in the churchyard first. D’ye think I want you to keep up the family? If you were the heir there might be something to be said. Heir, yes! and something worth being heir to: Joscelyns. Put your finger on one blessed peerage in the country that has as good blood as mine to go with it; but I’ve plenty of lads worth counting on, I don’t want anything to say to you.”
“Blood won’t do much for us, without a little money,” Harry said.