SCENE XXII
O'Hare drew himself up. He had grown all at once exceedingly still.
Mr. Stafford, gradually recovering from his paroxysms, had begun to bestow some intelligent interest upon the scene. There was a mist of doubt in his eyes as he gazed from the victimised, but very lively, lady to her crestfallen "violent abductor," and thence to the gloomy countenance of the new-comer on the threshold. There seemed to be, it struck him, a prodigious deliberation in Mistress Kitty's cry and start of surprise.
"What is my pretty Bellairs up to now? Well, poor Irish Denis, with all his wits, is no match for her anyhow, and, faith, she knows it," thought he. Aloud he said, with great placidity: "Fie, fie, this is shocking to hear!" and sat, the good-humoured Chorus to the Comedy, on the edge of the table, waiting for the development of the next scene. Sir Jasper, wiping a beaded brow and still staring, as if by the sheer fixing of his bloodshot eye he could turn these disappointing puppets into the proper objects of his vengeance, was quite unable to follow any current but the muddy whirl of his own thoughts.
Lord Verney alone it was, therefore, who rose at all to Mistress Kitty's situation.
"Are you the scoundrel, then," said he, marching upon O'Hara, "who dared to lay hands upon an unprotected lady in the very streets of Bath?"
"Monstrous!" remarked Captain Spicer behind him. Then jogging his patron's elbow, "'Twas well spoke, Verney, man. At him again, there's blood in this."
Mr. O'Hara looked steadily at Lord Verney, glancing contemptuously at Captain Spicer, and then gazed with long, full searching at the beguiling widow.
She thought to scent danger to herself in the air; and, womanlike, she seized unscrupulously upon the sharpest weapon in her armoury.