“Suppose I refuse to do so?”
“Then you will have to take your 80 chances of life or death. You will give me satisfaction first; and if you escape the fate you well deserve, Brune may have better fortune.”
“Duelling is now murder, sir, unless we pass over to France.”
“I will not go to France. Wrestling is not murder, and we both know there is a ‘throw’ to kill; and I will ‘throw’ until I do kill,—or am killed. There’s Brune after me.”
“I have ceased to love your sister. I dare say she has forgotten me. Why do you insist on our marriage? Is it that she may be Lady Fenwick?”
“Look you, sir! I care nothing for lordships or ladyships; such things are matterless to me. But your desertion has set wicked suspicions loose about Miss Anneys; and the woman they dare to think her, you shall make your wife. By God in heaven, I swear it!”
“They have said wrong of Miss Anneys! Impossible!”
“No, sir! they have not said wrong. 81 If any man in Allerdale had dared to say wrong, I had torn his tongue from his mouth before I came here; and as for the women, they know well I would hold their husbands or brothers or sons responsible for every ill word they spoke. But they think wrong, and they make me feel it everywhere. They look it, they shy off from Aspatria,—oh, you know well enough the kind of thing going on.”
“A wrong thought of Miss Anneys is atrocious. The angels are not more pure.” He said the words softly, as if to himself; and William Anneys stood watching him with an impatience that in a moment or two found vent in an emphatic stamp with his foot.
“I have no time to waste, sir. Are you afraid to sup the ill broth you have brewed?”