“Then you’ll have to listen to my ravings just as long as you force me to stay under your roof,” answered Ralston, almost trembling with rage. “If you keep me here, I shall tell you just what I think of you—”
“By the Eternal—this is too much—you young—puppy! You graceless, ungrateful—”
“I should really like to know what I’m to be grateful to you for,” said Ralston, feeling that his hands were growing icy cold. “You’ve never done anything for me or mine in your life—as you know. You’d much better let me go. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
“And you dare to threaten me, too—I tell you—I’ll make you—” His words choked him, and again he shook Ralston’s arm violently.
“You won’t make me forget that you’re three times my age, at all events,” answered the young man. “But unless you’re very careful during the next ten minutes you’ll have a fit of apoplexy. You’d much better let me go away. This sort of thing isn’t good for a man of your age—and it’s not particularly dignified either. You’d realize it if you could see yourself and hear yourself—oh! take care, please! That’s my hat.”
Robert Lauderdale’s fury had boiled over at last and expressed itself in a very violent gesture, not intended for a blow, but very like one, and utterly destructive to Ralston’s hat, which rolled shapeless upon the polished wooden floor. The young man stooped as he spoke the last words, and picked it up.
“Oh, I say, Jack! I didn’t mean to do that, my boy!” said the old gentleman, with that absurdly foolish change of tone which generally comes into the voice when one in anger has accidentally broken something.
“No—I daresay not,” answered Ralston, coldly.
Without so much as a glance at old Lauderdale, he quickly opened the door and left the room, as he would have done some minutes earlier if his uncle had not held him by the arm. The library was downstairs, and he was out of the house before Lauderdale had sufficiently recovered from his surprise to call him back.
That, indeed, would have been quite useless, for Ralston would not have turned his head. He had never been able to understand how a man could be in a passion at one moment and brimming with good nature at the next, for his own moods were enduring, passionate and brooding.