The dislike of that personage towards the man he had injured in the past years, and openly insulted now, was at this time as great as though the injury and the insult had been received by himself. He was one of whom it might be said that 'he never went out of his way in wrath, but, all the same, he never missed his way to revenge. He had a good deal of ice in his nature; but it was, perhaps, the most dangerous of ice—that which smiles in the sun, and breaks to drop you into the grave.'
Disquietude of any kind, or mental tumult, were usually all unknown to Sir Carnaby, and were, he thought, as unbeseeming as any exhibition of temper; hence he was intensely provoked by the manner in which, through his own fault, the adventures of the day had wound up, as by means of their servants or others—perhaps Trevor Chute himself—the affair might be noised abroad till it assumed the absurd form of some genuine fiasco.
'Could the old man have been inflamed by the bad wine of the railway buffets,' thought Chute. It almost seemed so; and he began to hope that when the morrow came, and with it temper and reflection, some approach to a reconciliation might—especially if Lady Evelyn acted the part of peacemaker—be made by her husband; and if anything like an apology came, Chute felt that he would with joy take the hand of his cold-hearted insulter.
But in the artificial life she had led since girlhood Lady Evelyn had never found much use for a heart, and was not disposed to take upon herself the task of pouring oil upon troubled waters. At first she had been inclined, in her own insipid way, to like Chute very much, as who did not? But afterwards she conceived a pique to him, as the lover of Clare, for she remembered how the latter had called her marriage 'an affaire de fantasie;' and there had been other passages of arms between them, in which such as women, especially well-bred ones, with a singular subtlety of the tongue, can gibe and goad each other to the core; so, perhaps, she was not ill-pleased, after all, that an affront had been put upon Trevor Chute as the known lover of Clare.
Feeling himself galled, insulted, and outraged by the whole affair, he resolved to quit Lubeck—or the hotel, certainly—the next day, if no apology came, but it so happened that he had reason to change his mind.
The treatment he had received at the hands of her father was, to a man of Chute's sensitive nature, a source of intense pain.
This sudden and insulting hostility to himself made the love of him and of Clare seem more than ever hopeless, unless—unless what? in revenge he eloped with her, but that Clare would never consent to; and now, despite all that had passed between them at their last interview, the old dull ache of the heart had come back to him again.
From what did the old baronet's indignation spring?
'What were we saying when he came so suddenly upon us?' thought Chute; 'we were speaking of love, but it was mine for Clare. Could he have dreamed for a moment that I meant for Lady—oh, absurd! absurd!'
Yet perhaps it was not so much so as Chute deemed it.