"Now, my man, why do I keep you here?"
"To take care of your game, Squire, I do suppose."
"What? when you are the worst gamekeeper in the county. How many poachers do you catch in the year? They have only to set one of their gang to treat you at the public-house on a moonshiny night, and the rest can have all my pheasants at roost while you are boosing and singing."
"Like my betters in the parlor," muttered Tom.
"But that is not all," continued Gaunt, pretending not to hear him. "You wire my rabbits, and sell them in the town. Don't go to deny it; for I've half a dozen to prove it." Mr. Leicester looked very uncomfortable. His master continued: "I have known it this ten months, yet you are none the worse for 't. Now, why do I keep you here, that any other gentleman in my place would send to Carlisle jail on a justice's warrant?"
Mr. Leicester, who had thought his master blind, and was so suddenly undeceived, hung his head and snivelled out, "'T is because you have a good heart, Squire, and would not ruin a poor fellow for an odd rabbit or two."
"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Gaunt. "Speak your mind, for once, or else begone for a liar as well as a knave."
Thus appealed to, Leicester's gypsy eyes roved to and fro as if he were looking for some loophole to escape by; but at last he faced the situation. He said, with a touch of genuine feeling, "D——n the rabbits! I wish my hand had withered ere I touched one on them." But after this preface he sunk his voice to a whisper, and said, "I see what you are driving at, Squire; and since there is nobody with us" (he took off his cap,) "why, sir, 't is this here mole I am in debt to, no doubt."
Then the gentleman and his servant looked one another silently in the face, and what with their standing in the same attitude and being both excited and earnest, the truth must be owned, a certain family likeness came out. Certainly their eyes were quite unlike. Leicester had his gypsy mother's: black, keen, and restless. Gaunt had his mother's: brown, calm, and steady. But the two men had the same stature, the same manly mould and square shoulders; and, though Leicester's cheek was brown as a berry, his forehead was singularly white for a man in his rank of life, and over his left temple, close to the roots of the hair, was an oblong mole as black as ink, that bore a close resemblance in appearance and position to his master's.