After the silence that fell, all eyes seeking the twinkling eyes of the sailor-marquis, our Pompey received his wound.
“Likely enough!” roared the admiral, wringing the fat fingers of the exultant Pompey in his treacherous grip—“likely enough!” And his lordship, being mellow with wine, and in a fine rollicking humour, had slapped him a rousing buffet upon the shoulder so that our Pompey coughed, and with a big jolly laugh the nobleman blandly accepted the likelihood.
“Ah, yes—likely enough!” he cried. “The old lord was a damned rogue amongst the women!”
The Malahides were all hail-fellow thus.
The jesting answer, whilst it had tickled, had not a little shocked some that stood near, and, perhaps not the least, the sense of delicacy of the claimant.
A chill aloofness might have made the wounded man adore the idol more. What tyrannies will we not suffer from the gods! But to be overwhelmed in city humour had smitten our Pompey in his most sensitive parts.
All that night Pompey Malahide knew no sleep. And he arose in the early morning ashamed and sorely wounded. It had been a shabby enough blow, but he had put himself in the way of a drunken fellow’s fisticuff....
Up he got as soon as it was daylight, kicked his heels out of bed, and, having dressed, ranged restlessly about the house; and it thus chanced that one of his daughters, Judith, early risen, came upon him, and twitted him with looking distressed.
In a fit of confidence, he showed the girl the wound. And she, seeing her opportunity, petted him, and as soon as she in decency could turn him from his distress, told him of her discovery of the Modeyne skeleton—opened the ugly cupboard and let it tumble out.
And into the ears of the brooding man the hot red lips dropped a poisonous suggestion of the girl’s seeking marriage with Horace.