At that the lady came after him in a fury; and immediately he flung up his hand, with a lorgnette in it, and says he: “If ye touch me, I’ll hwhang this on to the floor!”
“Fie, young gentleman!” said Mr. Tuke, who was standing near. “Is that your challenge to a lady?”
He got no profit of his question, however; for, while the boy only stared at him with an angry scowl, the dame spoke up with a fine contempt of his interference.
“We’re beholden to ye, sir,” said she. “But the Lord Byron will have his schooling in manners from better than a pouther’d fribble”—and, catching at the boy’s arm, the two passed on together, making common cause against the enemy.
That person laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and went in search of his friends.
There were many empty boxes round the middle tier, and some with liveried fellows sitting back in them to keep the seats against their masters’ coming. Once and again a man of them, his attention caught by some new arrival, would incautiously project his head, with the result that a storm of nuts and orange-peel, flying from the gallery, would send it jerking in again, to the huge merriment of the house. Amongst these “retainers” was one who wore the Dunlone livery of blue and silver. Mr. Tuke recognized it from where he stood, and a sudden thought, half-comical, twitched at his risibilities.
“What,” he mused, “if Dunlone is baiting a little trap? He will hardly want me to walk into it.”
The fiddles had squeaked and the curtain gone up while he waited; and at this moment he saw the very party he was in search of enter my lord’s box in company with that gentleman.
Miss Royston came to the front, sparkling and radiant as a post-prandial Hebe. She glanced round the house (it was a tribute to her attractiveness that the self-important boy-lord who sat opposite forgot the play a minute while he plied her with his lorgnette); caught sight of Mr. Tuke, and, treating that gentleman to a little cold bow, turned and addressed her witchery to the nobleman behind her, who was taking his seat with an insolence of clatter and chatter that greatly disturbed the audience.
Not in the least desiring, under the circumstances, to obtrude himself on her further notice—and that for many reasons—Tuke retired into the background and gave his most suave attention to the play. Of this he was afterwards conscious of having a very hazy recollection; and only its title, “What a Blunder!” seemed to stick in his memory from a certain impression it had conveyed of appropriateness with his own condition of mind. The scene had lain in Valencia—he remembered that, as also the presence thereon of a dashing English officer, whose complete mufti of white satin tights, trunk hose slashed with purple, spencer of violet velvet, diamond shoe-buckles, and a grey brigand’s hat with three enormous ostrich plumes in it, had presented such a coup de théâtre as ought to have fully compensated him for the wasteful hour, he might have been otherwise inclined to think, he had spent in the house.