He and the Vicar were left alone. The young man was greatly concerned at Mrs. Walter's sudden attack, which, however, he did not connect with his own arrival, and gave vent to many expressions of concern, of the nature of "Oh, I say!" "It's too bad, you know." "Poor lady! She did look bad, and no mistake!"
The Vicar, actually responsible for Mrs. Walter's collapse, and knowing it, yet felt his anger rising hot and uncontrollable against the intruder. His simple expressions of concern irritated him beyond bearing. He had just enough hold over himself not to break out, but said, in his most Oxford of voices: "Don't you think, sir, that as there's trouble in the house you would be better out of it?"
Bertie paused in his perambulation of the little room, and stared at him. Hostility was plainly to be seen in the way in which he met the look, and he said further: "In any case Mrs. Walter won't be able to come down, and my wife and I will have to be going in a few minutes. You can hardly expect Miss Walter to come and sit and talk alone with you while her mother is ill upstairs."
The Vicar's indefensible attack upon Mollie for her indelicacy in making friends with a young man not acceptable to himself had been hidden from Bertie, but some hint of his attitude had presented itself to him, perhaps by way of his sisters. He had given it no attention, esteeming it of no importance what a man so outside his own beat should be thinking of him. But here he was faced unmistakably with strong and unfriendly opposition, and it had to be met.
Bertie had been at Oxford himself, but had not acquired the 'manner,' whether as a weapon of claimed superiority or of offence. He said, quite directly, "What has it got to do with you whether I go or stay? You heard what Mrs. Walter said?"
"It has this to do with me, sir," said the Vicar, beginning to lose hold over himself, and exhibiting through his habitually clipped speech traces of a long since sacrificed Cockney accent, "that I am the man to whom these ladies look for help and advice in their unprotected lives. I'm not going to see them at the mercy of any young gentleman who pushes himself in, it's plain enough to see why, and gets them talked about."
"Gets who talked about and by who?" asked Bertie, innocent of grammatical niceties, but temperamentally quick to seize a salient point.
His firm attitude and direct gaze, slightly contemptuous, and showing him completely master of himself in face of a temper roused to boiling-point, added fuel to keep that temper boiling, though it was accompanied now with trembling of voice and hands, as weakness showed itself to be at its source, and no justified strength of passion.
"Your attentions to Miss Walter have been remarked upon by everybody, sir," continued the furious man. "They are dishonouring to her, and are not wanted, sir. My advice to you is to keep away from the young lady, and not get her talked about. It does her no good to have her name connected with yours. And I won't have her persecuted. I won't have it, I say. Do you hear that?"
"Oh, I hear it all right," said Bertie. "They'll hear it upstairs too if you can't put the curb on yourself a bit. What I ask you is what you've got to do with it. You heard what Mrs. Walter said. That's enough for me, and it'll have to be enough for you. All the rest is pure impudence, and I'm going to take no notice of it."