“You are very good, sir,” said Fred, with a fine sense of contrast between the words and his feeling.
“Ay, rather a better uncle than your fine uncle Bulstrode. You won’t get much out of his spekilations, I think. He’s got a pretty strong string round your father’s leg, by what I hear, eh?”
“My father never tells me anything about his affairs, sir.”
“Well, he shows some sense there. But other people find ’em out without his telling. He’ll never have much to leave you: he’ll most-like die without a will—he’s the sort of man to do it—let ’em make him mayor of Middlemarch as much as they like. But you won’t get much by his dying without a will, though you are the eldest son.”
Fred thought that Mr. Featherstone had never been so disagreeable before. True, he had never before given him quite so much money at once.
“Shall I destroy this letter of Mr. Bulstrode’s, sir?” said Fred, rising with the letter as if he would put it in the fire.
“Ay, ay, I don’t want it. It’s worth no money to me.”
Fred carried the letter to the fire, and thrust the poker through it with much zest.
He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little ashamed before his inner self, as well as before his uncle, to run away immediately after pocketing the money.
Presently, the farm-bailiff came up to give his master a report, and Fred, to his unspeakable relief, was dismissed with the injunction to come again soon.