“You are a malicious scoundrel, Spicer,” said Beecher, whose pale cheek now shook and trembled with passion.
“Well, I don't think so, my Lord,” said the other, quietly. “It is not, certainly, the character the world gives me. And as to what passed between her Ladyship and myself this afternoon, I did my very best to escape difficulties. I told her that the Brighton affair was almost forgotten now,—it was fully eighteen years since it happened; that as to Charles Herbert's death, there were two stories,—some averring that poor Charley had actually struck Grog; and then, though the York trial was a public scandal—Well, my Lord, don't look so angrily at me; it was by no fault of mine these transactions became notorious.”
“And what have you been all your whole life to this Davis but his cad and errand-boy,—a fellow he has sent with a bad horse,—for he would not have trusted you with a good one,—to run for a hack stakes in an obscure county, a lounger about stables and the steps of club-houses, picking up scraps of news from the jocks and selling them to the gentlemen? Does it become you to turn out Kit Davis and run full cry after him?”
It was but rarely that Beecher's indignation could warm up to the temperature of downright passion; but when it did so, it gave the man a sort of power that few would have recognized in his weak and yielding nature; at all events, Spicer was not the man to stem such a torrent, and so he stared at him with mingled terror and anger.
“I tell you, Mr. Spicer,” added Beecher, more passionately still, “if you hadn't known Davis was a thousand miles away, you 'd never have trusted yourself to speak of him in this fashion; but, for your comfort I say it, he 'll be here in a day or two.”
“I never said a word of him you 'd not find in the newspapers,” said Spicer, doggedly.
“When you come to settle accounts together, it will surprise me very much if there won't be matter for another paragraph in them,” said Beecher, with a sneer.
Spicer winced; he tried to arrange his neckcloth, and then to button his glove, but all his efforts could not conceal a tremor that shook him from head to foot. Now, when Beecher got his “man down,” he never thought he could trample enough upon him; and as he walked the room in hasty strides to and fro, he jeeringly pictured to Spicer the pleasures of his next meeting with Davis: not, indeed, but that all his eloquence was superfluous; it needed no descriptive powers to convince any who enjoyed Grog's friendship what his enmity might imply.
“I know him as well as you do, my Lord,” said Spicer, as his patience at last gave way; “and I know, besides, there's more than half the Continent where he can't set a foot.”
“Perhaps you mentioned that, also, to my sister-in-law,” said Beecher, derisively.