"Well, what I see or what I don't see don't matter much just now. Perhaps I see more than some people think I do; more than I give tongue about, that's certain. However, I don't care about being chaffed on that subject, and so please drop it."
"Poor old boy!" said Lloyd, with an elaborate affectation of compassion; "of course he's very sore, that's natural enough; and of course it comes much harder to a fellow in his position, who thinks that he has only to lie under the wall and the ripe cherries will tumble into his mouth, to find that they sometimes hang on the stalk and won't tumble. It puts me in mind of the little stories in one syllable that we used to learn at school. 'There was once a small boy, and he cried for the moon, and when--'"
"D--n it, sir, will you stop?" cried Lord Ticehurst, angered beyond all patience. "Look here, Lloyd, you and I have been friends for a long time; but if you go on in this way I shall--"
"What?" interrupted Gilbert, turning quickly on him.
"Cut the whole concern, stock, lock, and barrel," said his lordship, "and part from you for ever."
The two men stood confronting each other; Lord Ticehurst flushed and heated, Lloyd wonderfully pale and calm, and only betraying agitation in the twitchings of the muscles of his mouth. He was the first to speak.
"Part from me for ever, eh?" he said in slow deliberate tones, each word clipping out from between his thin tight lips. "O no, you wouldn't do that! You are not very wise, Lord Ticehurst, but you would not be such a fool as to quarrel with or part from the man who has made you what you are. Ah, you may stare and pretend to be astonished, but I repeat, who has made you what you are. And you need not come down upon me, as you are going to--I see it!--with the whole long story of your birth and position and status, and all the rest of it. I know all that from Debrett; and still I stick to my text,--that I made you what you are! The time has come--you have brought it about, not I; I could have gone on for ever as we were--but the time has come for plain speaking; and I say that whatever you are, and whatever you may be thought of in the world, you owe to me, to me; without whom you would have remained the unformed cub you were when I found you in the hands of that old duffer, Plater Dobbs!"
The prospect of a row with his pupil--not a separation, of course, but a brisk breeze to freshen up the tamely-flowing current of their ordinary life--had often occurred to Gilbert Lloyd. He had thought over calmly what should be his conduct under such circumstances, and he had determined upon using the strongest possible "bounce," and acting in the most offensive and most truculent manner. His remembrance of Lord Ticehurst's behaviour in the quarrel with the Frenchman, M. de Prailles, at Baden, prompted him to this line of action, and he found it was the correct one. Lord Ticehurst did not knock him down, or fling a chair at him, or take any other prompt and decisive step. His cheek flushed angrily, certainly, but he only said:
"Major Dobbs might have been a duffer, as you say he was, but at all events he aid not pitch into people who were kind to him, didn't blackguard them before their faces, as some people do, or what's worse, make game of them behind their backs."
He laid such stress on this last sentence that Gilbert Lloyd looked hard at him, and said, "Make game of you behind your back! What do you mean by that?"