CHAPTER LVIII.
UNCLE CORNY’S LOVE-TALE.
“A discontented and sour man,” said my Uncle Corny, one Saturday night when I had dropped into supper, “is as likely as not—unless he prays to God every morning of his life—to turn into a Liberal. I have known a lot do it, and being nabbed on the nail by the shady lot who are always near the corners, never get any chance again to come back into honesty. Kit, is that sort of thing going on with you?”
“Not likely,” I answered, for my principles were sound; “is it likely that I would join a party including Lord Roarmore and his grandson? Conservatives commit no outrage.”
My uncle considered that statement gravely. He was too large-minded and candid of nature to accept it without the support of fact. He was probing his memory, to see if this were so.
“Well,” he said at last, “there is some truth in it, though it seems at first sight to go a little too far. I have known many very tranquil Radicals, and one or two Tories of an energetic turn. All I feared was that you might be driven by the vile wrongs you have suffered into that miserable frame of mind, when people are hatched into Radicals. They injured me, not quite so much as you, my lad, but bitterly, very bitterly. Yet I carried my principles sound through it all.”
“Oh, uncle, you promised to tell me the story of the wrong done to you, in your early days. I have often longed to hear it; but was afraid to ask you, because of the trouble it has been to you. But if you could bring yourself, without feeling it too much, to tell me how that matter was, it would be a great satisfaction to me, and do me a lot of good, I do believe.”
“Well, my boy, it is a frosty night. How soon the year comes round again; though I do not think we shall have a winter fit to compare with the last one. But the east wind is coming up the lane pretty sharp, and we are likely to have a week of it. Let Tabby take the things away, and bring another log or two. You had better come down here, if the frost goes on. You will get frozen up there all alone.”
“Not I. I can keep the fire up, and I believe it is warmer up there than here, because of the wind from the river. How glad I am Bessy is still at Baycliff. They never feel the cold wind there. But go ahead, uncle, according to your promise; I don’t know how many times you have cheated me. Tabby, look sharp, and go home before it snows now.”
“Well, you must put up with my in and outs. I can lay a tree in straight enough, but I am out of my line telling things. And you wouldn’t believe, to see me now, that I was ever a brisk young chap, proud of the cut of his boots and breeches—for we used to wear no long slops then—and blushing at the mention of a pretty girl, and wondering what they were made of. But though you would not think it now, nor anybody else, except the young women that are dead and gone, I was quite as much the swell of Sunbury then, as you were before you fell into your bad luck; not so tall, of course, but I daresay quite as strong, and the master of any lad about the village.