Nellie, in great alarm, dispatched a servant in haste after him, to beseech him, in her name, to return and stay to dinner—or, if he would not honor her so far, at least to accept the use of a carriage, or a boat, to convey him whithersoever he wished to go.
But Major Helmstedt, with arrogant scorn, repulsed all these offers. Throwing a half guinea to the negro to take temporary charge of his trunks, he strode on his way, following the windings of the waterside road for many miles, until late in the afternoon he reached Belleview, whence he intended to take a boat to the island.
His cause of indignation was reasonable, and his rage increased with time and reflection. That Margaret had been foully wronged by the Houstons he from his deepest convictions believed. That the charges brought against her had the slightest foundation in fact, he could not for a moment credit. All his own intimate knowledge of his pure-hearted child, from her earliest infancy to the day when he left her in Mrs. Houston’s care, conclusively contradicted these calumnies. But that, for some reason or other, unconfessed, the Houstons wished to break off the contemplated alliance with his family he felt assured. And that his daughter’s betrothed was in correspondence with Mrs. Houston, and in connivance with her plans, he had been left to believe, by the incoherence, if not by the intentional misrepresentations, of Nellie’s statement. That they should wish, without just cause, to break the engagement with his daughter, was both dishonorable and dishonoring—that they should attempt this through such means, was scandalous and insulting to the last degree. That Ralph Houston should be either an active or a passive party to this plan, was an offense only to be satisfied by the blood of the offender. His pride in an old, untainted name, not less than his affection for his only daughter, was wounded to the very quick.
There seemed but one remedy—it was to be found only in “the bloody code,” miscalled “of honor”—the code which required a man to wash out any real or fancied offense in the life-stream of the offender; the code which often made an honorable man responsible, with his life, for careless words uttered by the women of his family; that code which now enjoined Philip Helmstedt to seek the life of his daughter’s betrothed, his intended son-in-law, his brother-in-arms. Nor was this all. The feeling that prompted Major Helmstedt was not only that of an affronted gentleman, who deems it necessary to defend in the duel his assailed manhood—it was much more—it was the blood-thirsty rage of a scornful and arrogant man, whose honor had been wounded in the most vulnerable place, through the only woman of his name, his one fair daughter, who had been by her betrothed and his family rejected, insulted, and expelled from their house, branded with indelible shame.
“Ralph Houston must die!”
He said it with remorseless resolution, with grim satisfaction, and in his heart devoted the souls of his purposed victim and all his family to the infernal deities.
In this evil mood, and in an evil hour, Major Helmstedt unhappily arrived at Belleview, and, still more unhappily, there met Ralph, who, in pursuance of his vow never to set foot upon Buzzard’s Bluff again, had that morning landed at the village, with the intention there to engage a boat to take him to Helmstedt’s Island, whither he was going to seek Margaret.
It was in the principal street of the village, and before the only hotel that they chanced to meet.
Ralph advanced with eager joy to greet his father-in-law.
But Major Helmstedt’s mad and blind rage forestalled and rendered impossible all friendly words or explanations.