“Rise?” The Squire glared at him from under his great bushy eyebrows. “It’s not to his rise, it’s to your fall I object, sir. A d—d silly scheme this, and one I won’t have. D’you hear, I won’t have it.”
Arthur kept his temper, oppressed by the other’s violence. “Still, you must own, sir, that times are changed,” he said.
“Changed? Damnably changed when a Griffin wants to go into trade in Aldersbury.”
“But banking is hardly a trade.”
“Not a trade? Of course it’s a trade—if usury is a trade! If pawn-broking is a trade! If loan-jobbing is a trade! Of course it’s a trade.”
The gibe stung Arthur and he plucked up spirit. “At any rate, it is a lucrative one,” he rejoined. “And I’ve never heard, sir, that you were indifferent to money.”
“Oh! Because I’m going to charge your mother rent? Well, isn’t the Cottage mine? Or because fifty years ago I came into a cumbered estate and have pinched and saved and starved to clear it? Saved? I have saved. But I’ve saved out of the land like a gentleman, and like my fathers before me, and not by usury. Not by money-jobbing. And if you expect to benefit—but there, fill your glass, and let’s hear your tongue. What do you say to it?”
“As to the living,” Arthur said mildly, “I don’t think you consider, sir, that what was a decent livelihood no longer keeps a gentleman as a gentleman. Times are changed, incomes are changed, men are richer. I see men everywhere making fortunes by what you call trade, sir; making fortunes and buying estates and founding houses.”
“And shouldering out the old gentry? Ay, damme, and I see it too,” the Squire retorted, taking the word out of his mouth. “I see plenty of it. And you think to be one of them, do you? To join them and be another Peel, or one of Pitt’s money-bag peers? That’s in your mind, is it? A Mr. Coutts? And to buy out my lord and drive your coach and four into Aldersbury, and splash dirt over better men than yourself?”
“I should be not the less a Griffin.”