“Elsie,” said Uncle gravely, “we owe a debt of gratitude to our
forefathers. This land is to-day drunk with prosperity, yet every foot
of our broad acres, these miles and miles of fertile fields, have been
won by the sweat of toiling manhood, supported by the tears of trusting,
oftentimes gentle, womanhood. I am afraid the fruit of all these
sacrifices are not falling into the hands of those who are worthiest of
them.”
“That might be said of any land,” objected Mumsie. “I suppose all land
was wild once upon a time.”
“In Europe the land was cleared two or three thousand years ago; our
land has been cleared within the last few generations,” retorted Uncle.
“I don’t suppose our ancestors in the British Isles or in Normandy found
it much hardship to live in log huts, to do their own washing, or to
forego their morning paper.”
“That is where the Lien money came from—from grinding these poor
farmers’?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I was not sorry for the reply, because it showed I was not wrong in my
instinctive dislike of the good lady.
“And what does the present Mr. Lien do?”
“He’s a stockbroker. When a rich man dies and leaves a son of no
particular abilities they make a broker of him. The stock market covers
a multitude of sins.” Uncle was smiling again.
“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.”
“George! What a Tory!”
“Thank God!” replied Uncle, and shaking his finger at me: “Remember,
Elsie, if Belle takes you to call on Mrs. Lien, you call on her money,
on her father’s guilty money, remember that!”
“George, you dear old ass. Why do you put such ideas into the child’s
head’?” (Child indeed!) Then turning to me: “Don’t pay any attention to
what he says, Elsie. Old man Lien—as your Uncle calls him—may have
made his start that way, but the great fortune they now have has grown
from wise investment.”
“Exactly, if I sow a kernel of wheat and it produces twenty, it is the
same wheat,” retorted Uncle.
“Nonsense!”
That was the end of it for a time, as we rose from the table. Mumsie put
her arm about me and said: “Pay no attention to George, to what he says,
when in a teasing mood. He’s incorrigible!” and she made a grimace at
him which seemed to please him, for he seized her hand and squeezed it.
“I like him,” I said, when she and I were alone, and I think my tribute
pleased her.