This outraged Cashel. “I tell you again,” he said, in a menacing tone, “that your cousin is engaged to me. Now call me a liar, and hit me in the face, if you dare. Look here,” he added, taking a leather case from his pocket, and extracting from it a bank note, “I’ll give you that twenty-pound note if you will hit me one blow.”
Lucian, sick with fury, and half paralyzed by a sensation which he would not acknowledge as fear, forced himself to come forward. Cashel thrust out his jaw invitingly, and said, with a sinister grin, “Put it in straight, governor. Twenty pounds, remember.”
At that moment Lucian would have given all his political and social chances for the courage and skill of a prize-fighter. He could see only one way to escape the torment of Cashel’s jeering and the self-reproach of a coward. He desperately clenched his fist and struck out. The blow wasted itself on space; and he stumbled forward against his adversary, who laughed uproariously, grasped his hand, clapped him on the back, and exclaimed,
“Well done, my boy. I thought you were going to be mean; but you’ve been game, and you’re welcome to the stakes. I’ll tell Lydia that you have fought me for twenty pounds and won on your merits. Ain’t you proud of yourself for having had a go at the champion?”
“Sir—” began Lucian. But nothing coherent followed.
“You just sit down for a quarter of an hour, and don’t drink anything, and you’ll be all right. When you recover you’ll be glad you showed pluck. So, good-night, for the present—I know how you feel, and I’ll be off. Be sure not to try to settle yourself with wine; it’ll only make you worse. Ta-ta!”
As Cashel withdrew, Lucian collapsed into a chair, shaken by the revival of passions and jealousies which he had thought as completely outgrown as the school-boy jackets in which he had formerly experienced them. He tried to think of some justification of his anger—some better reason for it than the vulgar taunt of a bully. He told himself presently that the idea of Lydia marrying such a man had maddened him to strike. As Cashel had predicted, he was beginning to plume himself on his pluck. This vein of reflection, warring with his inner knowledge that he had been driven by fear and hatred into a paroxysm of wrath against a man to whom he should have set an example of dignified self-control, produced an exhausting whirl in his thoughts, which were at once quickened and confused by the nervous shock of bodily violence, to which he was quite unused. Unable to sit still, he rose, put on his hat, went out, and drove to the house in Regent’s Park.
Lydia was in her boudoir, occupied with a book, when he entered. He was not an acute observer; he could see no change in her. She was as calm as ever; her eyes were not even fully open, and the touch of her hand subdued him as it had always done. Though he had never entertained any hope of possessing her since the day when she had refused him in Bedford Square, a sense of intolerable loss came upon him as he saw her for the first time pledged to another—and such another!
“Lydia,” he said, trying to speak vehemently, but failing to shake off the conventional address of which he had made a second nature, “I have heard something that has filled me with inexpressible dismay. Is it true?”
“The news has travelled fast,” she said. “Yes; it is true.” She spoke composedly, and so kindly that he choked in trying to reply.