“Ah, you have not yet been presented to Mr. Liversedge!” said Gideon, with a wave of his hand. “Allow me to make him known to you! He kidnapped Gilly, and has been so very obliging as to offer to sell his life to me.” He paused, perceiving that this speech had had a strange effect upon Matthew, who was staring at Mr. Liversedge in mingled wrath and bewilderment. “ Now what is the matter?” he asked.
“So it was you!” said Matthew, his eyes still fixed on Mr. Liversedge’s face. “You—you damned scoundrel! You did it for revenge! By God, I have a mind to kill you, you—”
“Nothing of the sort!” said Mr. Liversedge earnestly. “No such paltry notion has ever crossed my brain, sir! I bore your cousin no ill-will—not the least in the world!”
“Sit down!” commanded Gideon. “Matt, what do you know of this fellow, and what’s your part in thiscoil?”
“Ay,” nodded Nettlebed, grimly surveying Matthew. “That’s what I’d like to know, sir, and tell me he will not!”
“I ought to have told you, Gideon!” Matthew said, sinking into a chair by the table.
“You are going to tell me.”
“Yes, but I mean I should have told you before, and never breathed a word to Gilly! Only I thought very likely you would say something cutting, or—But I should have told you! It was a breach of promise, Gideon!”
His cousin was not unnaturally mystified by this abrupt statement. Mr. Liversedge seized the opportunity to interpolate an expostulation. Such ugly words, he said, had never soiled his pen. Wragby then commanded him to shut his bone-box, and Captain Ware, in the voice of one who has reached the limits of his patience, requested Matthew to be a little more explicit. Matthew then favoured him with a somewhat disjointed account of the affair, to which Captain Ware listened with knit brows, and an air of deepening exasperation. He said at last: “You young fool! You’re not of age!”
Matthew blinked at him. “What has that to say to anything? I tell you—”