“I don’t know what you refer to, sir.  I have certainly never borrowed any money on such an insecurity.  Please to explain.”

“No, sir, it’s you must explain.  I can alter my will yet, let me tell you.  I’m of sound mind—­can reckon compound interest in my head, and remember every fool’s name as well as I could twenty years ago.  What the deuce?  I’m under eighty.  I say, you must contradict this story.”

“I have contradicted it, sir,” Fred answered, with a touch of impatience, not remembering that his uncle did not verbally discriminate contradicting from disproving, though no one was further from confounding the two ideas than old Featherstone, who often wondered that so many fools took his own assertions for proofs.  “But I contradict it again.  The story is a silly lie.”

“Nonsense! you must bring dockiments.  It comes from authority.”

“Name the authority, and make him name the man of whom I borrowed the money, and then I can disprove the story.”

“It’s pretty good authority, I think—­a man who knows most of what goes on in Middlemarch.  It’s that fine, religious, charitable uncle o’ yours.  Come now!” Here Mr. Featherstone had his peculiar inward shake which signified merriment.

“Mr. Bulstrode?”

“Who else, eh?”

“Then the story has grown into this lie out of some sermonizing words he may have let fall about me.  Do they pretend that he named the man who lent me the money?”

“If there is such a man, depend upon it Bulstrode knows him.  But, supposing you only tried to get the money lent, and didn’t get it—­Bulstrode ’ud know that too.  You bring me a writing from Bulstrode to say he doesn’t believe you’ve ever promised to pay your debts out o’ my land.  Come now!”

Mr. Featherstone’s face required its whole scale of grimaces as a muscular outlet to his silent triumph in the soundness of his faculties.

Fred felt himself to be in a disgusting dilemma.

“You must be joking, sir.  Mr. Bulstrode, like other men, believes scores of things that are not true, and he has a prejudice against me.  I could easily get him to write that he knew no facts in proof of the report you speak of, though it might lead to unpleasantness.  But I could hardly ask him to write down what he believes or does not believe about me.”  Fred paused an instant, and then added, in politic appeal to his uncle’s vanity, “That is hardly a thing for a gentleman to ask.”  But he was disappointed in the result.

“Ay, I know what you mean.  You’d sooner offend me than Bulstrode.  And what’s he?—­he’s got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of.  A speckilating fellow!  He may come down any day, when the devil leaves off backing him.  And that’s what his religion means:  he wants God A’mighty to come in.  That’s nonsense!  There’s one thing I made out pretty clear when I used to go to church—­and it’s this:  God A’mighty sticks to the land.  He promises land, and He gives land, and He makes chaps rich with corn and cattle.  But you take the other side.  You like Bulstrode and speckilation better than Featherstone and land.”