Ingolby’s knitted bulk heaved with desire to injure. “Your wife—you melodious sinner! Do you think such tomfoolery has any effect in this civilized country? She is about as much your wife as I am your brother. Don’t talk your heathenish rot here. I said I’d help you to get your own, because you played the fiddle as few men can play it, and I owe you a lot for that hour’s music; but there’s nothing belonging to Gabriel Druse that belongs to you, and his daughter least of all. Look out—don’t sit on the fiddle, damn you!”
The Romany had made a motion as if to sit down on the chair where the fiddle was, but stopped short at Ingolby’s warning. For an instant Jethro had an inclination to seize the fiddle and break it across his knees. It would be an exquisite thing to destroy five thousand dollars’ worth of this man’s property at a single wrench and blow. But the spirit of the musician asserted itself before the vengeful lover could carry out his purpose; as Ingolby felt sure it would. Ingolby had purposely given the warning about the fiddle, in the belief that it might break the unwelcome intensity of the scene. He detested melodrama, and the scene came precious near to it. Men had been killed before his eyes more than once, but there had been no rodomontade even when there had been a woman in the case.
This Romany lover, however, seemed anxious to make a Sicilian drama out of his preposterous claim, and it sickened him. Who was the fellow that he should appear in the guise of a rival to himself! It was humiliating and offensive. Ingolby had his own kind of pride and vanity, and they were both hurt now. He would have been less irritable if this rival had been as good a man as himself or better. He was so much a gamester that he would have said, “Let the best man win,” and have taken his chances.
His involuntary strategy triumphed for the moment. The Romany looked at the fiddle for an instant with murderous eyes, but the cool, quiet voice of Ingolby again speaking sprayed his hot virulence.
“You can make a good musician quite often, but a good fiddle is a prize-packet from the skies,” Ingolby said. “When you get a good musician and a good fiddle together it’s a day for a salute of a hundred guns.”
Half-dazed with unregulated emotion, Jethro acted with indecision for a moment, and the fiddle was safe. But he had suffered the indignity of being flung like a bag of bones across the room, and the microbe of insane revenge was in him. It was not to be killed by the cold humour of the man who had worsted him. He returned to the attack.
“She is mine, and her father knows it is so. I have waited all these years, and the hour has come. I will—”
Ingolby’s eyes became hard and merciless again. “Don’t talk your Gipsy rhetoric. I’ve had enough. No hour has come that makes a woman do what she doesn’t want to do in a free country. The lady is free to do what she pleases here within British law, and British law takes no heed of Romany law or any other law. You’ll do well to go back to your Roumelian country or whatever it is. The lady will marry whom she likes.”
“She will never marry you,” the Romany said huskily and menacingly.
“I have never asked her, but if I do, and she said yes, no one could prevent it.”