Gerard, having noticed these things, and hearing that the disturbance in the card-room was growing louder instead of calming down, slipped out of the room and across the next, and looked in at the third, where the unpleasant scene was taking place.
As he passed through the intermediate room, he noticed that Mrs. Van Santen, with her poor old face blanched with horror, was sitting alone bolt upright in a corner, clasping her hands and apparently too much alarmed to speak or to move.
In the card-room itself all was confusion. Sir William Gurdon, flushed, excited, scarcely intelligible was glaring across the card-table at Denver Van Santen, who had risen, like all the rest of the players, and who was standing with his arms folded and with a proud look of indignation on his handsome face, surrounded by men who were all speaking at once, some addressing one of the disputants, and some the other, and all failing in making themselves distinctly heard.
Harry Van Santen, who was the coolest man in the room, was the first person to make himself clearly heard. Standing on the outskirts of the crowd, he cried, in a thin, sharp, penetrating voice—
“Give him a chance. Make yourself understood, Sir William, if you’re sober enough.”
At these words, which raised a fresh issue, and were met with a torrent of incoherent words from the young baronet, and with murmurs from the rest of the men, the ladies in the room, who had most of them drawn away from the crowd of angry men, and gathered in a knot in a corner, whispered to each other and made towards the door.
Harry Van Santen, who perceived this movement, hastened to open the door, saying in a low voice to the most important lady of the group—
“Yes, that’s right. This is no scene for you ladies. The fellow’s drunk.”
He shut the door when they had all gone out, and returned to the card-table, where three or four of the men were now with difficulty holding Sir William back from a personal assault upon Denver whose calmly contemptuous attitude and tone were irritating him to madness.
The uproar continued, and indeed grew worse, as excited partisans on either side tried to outshout the rest.