“I swear to you, sir Wilton,” he said, “by all that men count sacred, I come only to tell you that Arthur and Alice Manson, your son and daughter, are in dire want. Your son may be dead; he looked like it three days ago, and had no one to attend to him; his sister had to leave him to earn their next day's food. Their mother lay a corpse in the other of their two rooms.”
“Oh! she's gone, is she! That alters the case. But what became of all the money I gave her? It was more than her body was worth; soul she never had any!”
“She lost it somehow, and her son and daughter starved themselves to keep her in plenty, so that by the time she died, they were all but dead themselves.”
“A pair of fools.”
“A good son and daughter, sir!”
“Attached to the young woman, eh?” asked the baronet, looking hard at him.
“Very much; but hardly more than to her brother,” answered Richard. “God knows if I had but my strength,” he cried, almost in despair, and suddenly shooting out his long thin arms, with his two hands, wasted white, at the ends of them, “I would work myself to the bone for them, and not ask you for a penny!”
“I provided for their mother!—why didn't they look after the money? I'm not accountable for them!”
“Ain't you accountable for giving the poor things a mother like that, sir?”
“By Jove, you have me there! She was a bad lot—a damned liar!—Young fellow, I don't know who you are, but I like your pluck! There ain't many I'd let stand talking at me like that! I'll give you something for the poor creatures—that is, mind you, if you've told me the truth about their mother! You're sure she's dead? Not a penny shall they have if she's alive!”