Not only to have suffered as you have formerly, for
obstinately persisting in a falsehood, but to persist in it thus to
the last, and to pass thus upon the world for a servant of your own
son! What interest can you have in all this? What can be your motive?"
"I see, sir," said Partridge, falling down upon his knees, "that
your honour is prepossessed against me, and resolved not to believe
anything I say, and, therefore, what signifies my protestations? but
yet there is One above who knows that I am not the father of this
young man."
"How!" said Allworthy, "will you yet deny what you was formerly
convicted of upon such unanswerable, such manifest evidence? Nay, what
a confirmation is your being now found with this very man, of all
which twenty years ago appeared against you! I thought you had left
the country! nay, I thought you had been long since dead.- In what
manner did you know anything of this young man? Where did you meet
with him, unless you had kept some correspondence together? Do not
deny this; for I promise you it will greatly raise your son in my
opinion, to find that he hath such a sense of filial duty as privately
to support his father for so many years."
"If your honour will have patience to hear me," said Partridge, "I
will tell you all.- "Being bid go on, he proceeded thus: "When your
honour conceived that displeasure against me, it ended in my ruin soon
after; for I lost my little school; and the minister, thinking, I
suppose, it would be agreeable to your honour, turned me out from
the office of clerk; so that I had nothing to trust to but the
barber's shop, which, in a country place like that, is a poor
livelihood; and when my wife died (for till that time I received a
pension of L12 a year from an unknown hand, which indeed I believe was
your honour's own, for nobody that ever I heard of doth these things
besides)- but, as I was saying, when she died, this pension forsook
me; so that now, as I owed two or three small debts, which began to be
troublesome to me, particularly one* which an attorney brought up by
law-charges from 15s.
Pages:
1149
1150
1151
1152
1153
1154
1155
1156
1157
1158
1159
1160
1161
1162
1163
1164
1165
1166
1167
1168
1169
1170
1171
1172
1173