'By name, doubtless,' sneered Sir Carnaby.
'Sir,' said Chute, 'you are offensive—unnecessarily so; and, after my past relations with your family, your manner is unjustifiable. Were you not the father of Clare Collingwood, whom I love better than my own life,' he added, with a tremulous voice, 'I would here, in Lubeck, teach you—even at your years—Sir Carnaby, the peril of insulting me thus!'
'My years! my years! impertinence!' muttered the other, who, we have said, had conceived an unwarrantable and unjust dislike of Trevor Chute, and now was disposed to give full swing to the emotion. Chute's faith to Clare, like that of Vane to Ida, was a sentiment utterly beyond Sir Carnaby's comprehension; and, indeed, was perhaps beyond 'the present unheroic, unadventurous, unmoved, and unadmiring age,' as it has, perhaps justly, been described.
Like all persons of her order, Lady Evelyn had a horror of everything that bordered on a scene. For a moment her calm insouciance left her, and she darted an angry glance at her husband, but was silent. She had lived amidst luxury, splendour, and pleasure, power and, at times, triumph, but now 'the perfume and effervescence of the wine were much evaporated, and there was bitterness in the cup and a canker in the roses that crowned its brim.' At that moment she felt, perhaps, ashamed of herself, and of him to whom she was bound, for thus insulting an unoffending man.
'Yes, Sir Carnaby,' continued Chute, 'your age and relationship to Clare, together with the presence of Lady Evelyn, alone protect you in daring to sneer at me.'
Feeling intuitively, with all his anger, that there was something grotesque in the situation, and that in it he was forgetting the rules he prescribed for himself, and was in 'bad form,' he looked at Chute for a moment with a languid but impertinent stare, and after ringing the hand-bell, said to the head waiter:
'Desire my valet to select rooms for us on the first étage, if unoccupied. Lady Evelyn, your maid will attend you at once.'
They left the salle together, she alone bowing to Chute, who, though swelling with passion, returned it, but with frigid politeness.
'Thank Heaven,' thought he, as he tossed over a bumper of moselle, 'poor Clare knows nothing of a scene like this, and never shall from me!'
He then thought with mad bitterness of the glory that had departed amid the monetary misfortunes of the old general, his father; of all that would have been, and once was, his by right to lay at the feet of the beautiful girl that returned his love so tenderly; and his heart seemed to shrink up within him at the tone assumed by Sir Carnaby.