“Our Queens, our Goddesses, our Nymphs, our Angels!” interrupted Villars, with his usual inspiration.
“Our fair ones!” echoed David, rising also; “indeed nothing could be more just than that we should devote the blood wrung from the grape that makes, as Colonel Harcourt truly says, heroes of mankind, to woman, that other spring of all our noble actions. Is it not so, my gallant Colonel?”
“Hear him, hear!” cried innocent Herrick, beating the table with an excited hand.
David’s glacial eye fell for a moment on the hot boy-face, and there flickered in it a kind of faint pity. So, one might fantastically fancy, would a spirit recently rent from the body by an agonising death, look from its own corpse upon those who had yet to die.
“Let us drink,” said David, and raised his glass, “to Woman! Without her what should we know of ourselves, of our friends, of the treasures of the human heart and the nobility of the human mind, of honour, of purity, of faithfulness!”
Dr. Tutterville looked up at the speaker, resting his hand on the table in the attitude of one prepared to spring forward in an emergency. As David’s voice rang out ever more incisive he was reminded of the breaking of sheets of ice under the stress of dark waters below.
“A moment, please,” here intervened Colonel Harcourt’s mellow note. “Friend Herrick’s excellent suggestion, and our host’s most eloquent adoption of it, can yet (craving your pardon, gentlemen) be amended. Let us not dilute the enjoyment of this excellent moment—let us concentrate it, as good Master Simon would say. Gentlemen, this glass not to women, but to the one woman! Come, parson, up with you! Fie—what would Madam Tutterville say? And he has but given half his heart who fears to proclaim its mistress. Hoy! Gone away! And out on you if you shy at the fence! I drink to Mistress Marvel—to the marvel of Marvels, aha!”
He tossed down his glass, looking coolly at David, while Herrick, leaning forward with the furious eyes of the young lover stung, glared across the table and balanced his own glass in his hand with an intent which another second had seen carried out, had not the parson’s fingers quietly closed upon his; had not the parson’s voice murmured in his ear:
“Remember, my young friend, that the imprudent champion is a lady’s greatest enemy.”
This while Villars, on his side, sputtering into silly laughter, protested that fair play was a jewel and that if Harcourt had stolen a march upon him, he Villars might yet be in “at the death!”