"Directly, my dear, directly," he said, and then turned to Cecil, to finish his quotation.
"Quos irrupta tenet copula, nec malis
Divulsus querimoniis
Suprema citius solvet amor die."
"Good-evening..... Now, my dear," offering his arm to his wife, "I am at your service."
"He talks of ill-assorted marriages!" said Cecil Chamberlayne to himself, as they left the room.
The ride home was performed in silence. Meredith Vyner was trying to recollect a passage in Horace, which would have enabled him to make a felicitous pun on something Professor Forbes had said to him, and his forgetfulness of which had teazed him all the evening. His wife was meditating on the words, looks, and manner of her jilted lover, astonished at his calmness, and alarmed at his threats. The calmness of vehement men is always more terrible than their rage; and the vagueness of Marmaduke's threat made it more formidable, because it suggested a thousand things, and intimated none. What would he do? What could he do?
Rose was thinking of Julius St. John, and her charming tête-à-tête. Blanche was weary and sleepy.
Marmaduke, as he jumped into his cab, and drove to the club, reproached himself for having been led away by his anger so far as to threaten. He had put her on her guard, and thereby rendered his vengeance more difficult. It was, indeed, a proof of the violence of his agitation, that he should have so far forgotten himself; and he determined, if possible, to recover that false step.
Marmaduke Ashley was one of those
"Children of the sun whose blood is fire;"
and looked upon the treachery of his mistress with very different feelings from those of a calmer-blooded northern. His transports of rage and anguish when he heard of her infidelity almost killed him, and they only settled down into a fierce lust for vengeance. His father dying bequeathed to him a small fortune, which, instead of endeavouring to increase, he brought with him to England, and there awaited, with all the patience of an Indian, the hour when he should be able to wreak full vengeance on her who had humbled his pride, shattered his illusions, and lacerated his heart.