“Maybe, Cornel, maybe—I say little of friends—friendship’s neither here nor there,” said the sergeant, waving his hand; “but the faother and moother I can speak to. Them that heeds not love, heeds shame.”
“You are oracular, Sergeant Kennedy,” said the Colonel, with a very little peevishness; “but I tell you the lad told me he had no friends.”
“Faother and moother, Cornel, as I say,” answered the persistent sergeant, with a little nod of his dogmatical head.
Colonel Sutherland got up and fell to pacing the room with great annoyance and agitation. After a little while, being somewhat obstinate himself, he seized Kennedy by the shoulder and shook him.
“You’re deaf!” said the Colonel, with a whimsical, half-angry transference of his own defect to the other; “you’re hard of hearing! I tell you the lad says he has no friends.”
“And I tell you, Cornel, he has faother and moother, if it was my last word!” said the sergeant once again.
“Your last word!—ay, you will always have the last word,” cried Colonel Sutherland, this time indeed hearing imperfectly; “there must be some mistake, I suppose. Never mind, we’ll inquire into it later. You must see me again, sergeant—I am going now to my young people. Good morning to you, my friend—ask for me here to-morrow.”
“Are the young gentlemen in these parts, Cornel?” said Kennedy, rising with a little reluctance; “I said to mysel’ the Cornel behooved to have his own occasions here.”
“Not my boys—my niece and nephew, people you never heard of,” said the Colonel, quickly. “Now, my man, good morning—I am pushed for time—you’ll come again to-morrow.”
Thus urged, Kennedy had no resource but to obey, which he did, however, very slowly, running over in his mind immediately all the “gentlemens’ families” of the district, with which he had any acquaintance, in a vain endeavour to ascertain who could be the niece and nephew of his “old Cornel.” Kennedy, as it happened, had not been at his usual post in the public room of the little inn on the previous night, and had consequently no intimation of any dawn of new fortune on Mr. Horry, whom he knew perfectly well, and at whose hands he had suffered contradiction enough to give him some interest in the young man’s fate. This information, however, he would have been pretty sure to receive, but that Colonel Sutherland had already sent for the landlady to give her his orders for the day.