Sir Pitt Crawley was off
and alarmed. And he began a long speech, explaining how straitened he himself
was in money matters: how the tenants would not pay; how his father's affairs,
and the expenses attendant upon the demise of the old gentleman, had involved
him; how he wanted to pay off encumbrances; and how the bankers and agents were
overdrawn; and Pitt Crawley ended by making a compromise with his sister-in-law,
and giving her a very small sum for the benefit of her little boy.
    Pitt knew how poor his brother and his brother's family must be. It could
not have escaped the noticed of such a cool and experienced old diplomatist that
Rawdon's family had nothing to live upon, and that houses and carriages are not
to be kept for nothing. He knew very well that he was the proprietor or
appropriator of the money which, according to all proper calculation, ought to
have fallen to his younger brother, and he had, we may be sure, some secret
pangs of remorse within him which warned him that he ought to perform some act
of justice, or let us say compensation, towards these disappointed relations. A
just, decent man, not without brains, who said his prayers, and knew his
catechism, and did his duty outwardly through life, he could not be otherwise
than aware that something was due to his brother at his hands, and that morally
he was Rawdon's debtor.
    But as one reads in the columns of The Times newspaper every now and then
queer announcements from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, acknowledging the
receipt of £50 from A.B., or £10 from W.T., as conscience-money, on account of
taxes due by the said A.B. or W.T., which payments the penitents beg the
honourable gentleman to acknowledge through the medium of the public press, - so
is the Chancellor no doubt, and the reader likewise, always perfectly sure that
the above-named A.B. or W.T. are only paying a very small instalment of what
they really owe, and that the man who sends up a twenty-pound note has very
likely hundreds or thousands more for which he ought to account. Such, at least,
are my feelings when I see A.B. or W.T.'s insufficient acts of repentance. And I
have no doubt that Pitt Crawley's contrition, or kindness if you will, towards
his younger brother, by whom he had so much profited, was only a very small