“Does it?” I asked innocently.
“Oh, yes, a multitude of sins. Now one may not keep a tavern and sell booze——”
“George!” exclaimed Mumsie with mock horror.
“I wanted to be frank, my dear.”
“You always do,” she complained cheerily.
“One may not keep a tavern or even be a brewer and keep respectability, but it is quite in order to hold stock in a brewery company or hotel.”
“What a cynic you are,” I cried.
“And what we have come to now! Old man Lien was kept in his place in the old days. He was a plain man with a hard fist. They are gentry. The son and his son’s wife lord it to-day. But the foundation of their fortune and proud estate was the life-blood of men and women whose veins ran with better blood, who had truer gentility than they can ever claim with all their social rudeness.”
“But Uncle,” I pleaded, “because the old man was a skin-flint, you would not visit his sins on the son and the son’s wife, would you?”
“ ‘The sins of the father,’ my young lady. I am no more charitable than my Maker. Without his money old Lien would never have had any notice taken of him; and, if you pay obeisance at his shrine, and drink his claret cup, you may, if your imagination be strong enough, taste the salt of tears shed long ago.”