“She's quite right,” said Davis; “you must remain.”
And the words were uttered with a certain significance that Beecher well understood as a command.
It was past midnight when Annesley Beecher returned to the hotel, and both Davis and his daughter had already gone to their rooms.
“Did your master leave any message for me?” said he to the groom, who acted as Davis's valet.
“No, sir, not a word.”
“Do you know, would he see me? Could you ask him?” said he.
The man disappeared for a few minutes, and then coming back, said, “Mr. Davis is fast asleep, sir, and I dare not disturb him.”
“Of course not,” said Beecher, and turned away.
“How that fellow can go to bed and sleep, after such a business as that!” muttered Beecher, as he drew his chair towards the fire, and sat ruminating over the late incident. It was in a spirit of triumphant satisfaction that he called to mind the one solitary point in which he was the superior of Davis,—class and condition,—and he revelled in the thought that men like Grog make nothing but blunders when they attempt the habits of those above them. “With all his shrewdness,” said he to himself, half aloud, “he could not perceive that he has been trying an impossibility. She is beyond them all in beauty, her manners are perfect, her breeding unexceptionable; and yet, there she is, Grog Davis's daughter! Ay, Grog, my boy, you 'll see it one of these days. It 's all to no use. Enter her for what stakes you like, she 'll be always disqualified. There 's only one thing carries these attempts through,—if you could give her a pot of money. Yes, Master Davis, there are fellows—and with good blood in their veins—that, for fifty or sixty thousand pounds, would marry even your daughter.” With this last remark he finished all his reflections, and proceeded to prepare for bed.
Sleep, however, would not come; he was restless and uneasy; the incident in the theatre might get abroad, and his own name be mentioned; or it might be that Hamilton, knowing well who and what Davis was, would look to him, Beecher, for satisfaction. There was another pleasant eventuality,—to be drawn into a quarrel and shot for Grog Davis's daughter! To be the travelling-companion of such a man was bad enough; to risk being seen with him on railroads and steamboats was surely sufficient; but to be paraded in places of public amusement, to be dragged before the well-dressed world, not as his chance associate, but as a member of his domestic circle, chaperoning his daughter to the opera, was downright intolerable! And thus was it that this man, who had been dunned and insulted by creditors, hunted from place to place by sheriff's officers, browbeaten by bankruptcy practitioners, stigmatized by the press, haunted all the while by a conscience that whispered there was even worse hanging over him, yet did he feel more real terror from the thought of how he would be regarded by his own “order” for this unseemly intimacy, than shame for all his deeper and graver transgressions.