There was a full minute’s silence, in which the two men faced each other. Albert was busy thinking how to put most effectively the things he was now moved to say. At last he spoke, coolly, incisively once more, while Seth, flushed and anxious, pretended to regulate the flame of the lamp.
“Yes, I have no illusions about the motive of your visits to the farm. I am not blind; even if I were, others about the house are not. I am not going to say what you are doubtless expecting. I might point out to you that a young man who comes to a brother’s house—I will say nothing of the debt of gratitude he owes him—and steals chances to make love to that brother’s wife, is a pitiful cur. Stop!”—for Seth had straightened himself angrily at this epithet, despite his consciousness of self-reproach.
“I repeat that I might say this—but I will not. I prefer to view it in another light. I don’t think you are a knave. To be that requires intelligence. You are a fool,—a conceited, presumptuous, offensive fool. You set yourself up to judge me; you arrogate to yourself airs of moral superiority, and assume to regulate affairs of State by the light of your virtue and wisdom—and you have not brains enough meanwhile to take care of yourself against the cheapest wiles of a silly woman, who amuses herself with young simpletons just to kill time. You take upon yourself to lay down the law to a great National party—and you don’t know enough to see through even so transparent a game as this. Get out of my sight! I have wasted too much time with you. It annoys me to think that such an idiot belongs to the family.”
Albert had rightly calculated that he could thus most deeply and surely wound Seth, but he was mistaken in his estimate of the nature of the response. If Seth’s vanity was scalded by his brother’s words, he at least didn’t show it. But he did advance upon Albert with clenched fists, and gleaming eyes, and shout fiercely at him:
“A man who will speak that way of his wife is a coward and a scoundrel! And if it is my cousin Isabel he means, he is a liar to boot! If you were not my brother——”
“If I were not, what then?”
Albert waited a moment for the answer, which the conflict between Seth’s rage and his half-guilty consciousness choked in the utterance, and then calmly turned on his heel and left the room, by the same outside door at which he had entered.
As Seth went upstairs, he heard Isabel’s door close softly. “I wonder how much of it she heard?” he said to himself.