“Hush! hush! I don’t want to listen to you. I’m tired. I want to go to sleep. Good night to you, Maurice.”
With a curious half smile on his face Lord Dun-severic shook his son’s hand. It appeared that he had the same kind of confidence in Maurice that Maurice had in him. Like father, like son. When these St. Clairs of Dunseveric wanted anything they generally got it in the end. And none of the race of them had ever been over-scrupulous in dealing with such obstacles as stood in their way, or particularly careful about what those glorified conventions that men call law might have to say about the methods by which they achieved their ends.
CHAPTER XIV
Men who have eaten sufficiently and drunk heavily are not anxious to admit into their company any one who has not dined, and whose last glass of wine was drunk the day before. The gentlemen in the public room of the Massereene Arms were not, most of them, drunk when Maurice St. Clair came among them, but they were gay. Their hearts, to use a Scripture phrase, were made glad with wine. They were in the mood in which men crack jokes and laugh loud at jokes which would not pass muster before dinner. They were ready to sing out of time and tune or to applaud the songs of others without criticising them. But they were, with the exception of one or two, men of feeble capacity, sober enough to be conscious of the fact that they were liable to make fools of themselves, and to resent the intrusion of a cool-headed stranger.
They stared angrily at Maurice St. Clair. They said in audible tones things which showed him plainly that his presence was most unwelcome, but Maurice remained unabashed. He crossed the room and sat down on the window seat—the same seat from which Neal had watched the piper and the dancers a week or two before. He beckoned to the harassed and wearied girl who waited on the party.
“Get me,” he said, “something to eat—anything. I do not mind what it is, and bring a cup of milk. Then send my groom to me.”
“The gentleman,” said a young squire, who had certainly crossed the undefined line which separates sobriety from drunkenness, “is going to drink milk. Now, what I want to know is this—has any gentleman a right to drink milk on an evening like this, after the glorious victory which we have won?”
“It’s damned little you had to do with winning it,” said an officer who sat beside him. “You can drink, but——”
“The man that says I can’t drink lies,” said the other. “No offence to you, Captain; no offence meant or taken. I give you a toast, and I propose that the milky gentleman in the window—the milk-and-water gentleman—drinks it along with us. Here’s success to the loyalists and a long rope and short shrift to the rebelly croppies. Now, Mr. Milk-and-Water——”