“Are your children low company, sir?”
“Yes; I am sorry, but I must admit it. Their mother was low company.”
“She was in it at least, when she was in yours!” had all but escaped Simon's lips, but he caught the bird by the tail.—
“The children are not the mother!” he said. “I know the girl, and she is anything but low company. She lay ill in my house here for six weeks or more. Ask Miss Wylder.—If you want to be on good terms with your son, don't say a word, sir, against your daughter or her brother.”
“I like that! On good terms with my son! Ha, ha!”
“Remember, sir, he is independent of his father.”
“Independent! A beggarly bookbinder!”
“Excuse me, sir, but an honest trade is the only independence! You are dependent on your money and your land. Where would you be without them? And you made neither! They're yours only in a way! We, my grandson and I, have means of our own,” said the blacksmith, and held out his two brawny hands. “—The thing that is beggarly,” he resumed, “is to take all and give nothing. If your ancestors got the land by any good they did, you did not get it by any good you did; and having got it, what have you done in return?”
“By Jove! I didn't know you were such a radical!” returned the baronet, laughing.
“It is such as you, sir, that make what you call radicals. If the landlords had used what was given them to good ends, there would be no radicals—or not many—in the country! The landlords that look to their land and those that are on it, earn their bread as hardly as the man that ploughs it. But when you call it yours, and do nothing for it, I am radical enough to think no wrong would be done if you were deprived of it!”