“Oh, Momma,” cut in Anthea, “for goodness gracious sake don’t talk such foolishness. It was a stupid, a wrong thing to do, after Mr Leigh had given explicit orders that—”
“It was, was it? Then you take that, and just mind your own business!” exclaimed a well-known quarrelsome voice behind us, and the next instant Master Julius, who had crept up noiselessly behind us in his rubber-soled deck shoes, smote his sister a resounding box on the ear.
As a rule I am a most placid-tempered person, but somehow that blow instantly aroused in me a fury that made me “see red” for a moment. Wheeling sharply, I seized the boy by the scruff of the neck and shook him until his teeth fairly rattled in his head.
“You young ruffian!” I exclaimed, “how dare you strike your sister? You deserve a downright good thrashing for such a deed, and—mark you this, boy!—if ever you so much as attempt to do such a thing again and I get to hear of it, I will rope’s-end you until you can neither stand, sit, nor lie down. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!” And I flung him from me with such violence that he went staggering along the deck for three or four yards before he recovered himself.
Of course there was at once a pretty to-do. Anthea was crying—more, I think, at the mortification of being struck than for any other reason; while Mrs Vansittart instantly went into violent hysterics, shrieking that her darling boy was being murdered. The young gentleman himself meanwhile slunk away down the companion stairs, eyeing me as he went, as though by no means certain that I would not yet fall upon him and inflict the punishment that he must have known he richly deserved. Then up rushed the two stewardesses, in response to Mrs Vansittart’s shrieks, and between them and Anthea she was piloted below, and, it is to be presumed, ministered to and restored, for the shrieks and outcries presently died away.
About half an hour afterward Lizette, the head stewardess, summoned me to breakfast, at the same time explaining that Mrs Vansittart was taking the meal in her own room, with Julius.
“She is dr–r–readfully angree with you, Monsieur Leigh,” the girl informed me; “but do not you care. It is time that somebody should take that boy in hand. He is everey day growing more execr–r–rable!”