“But ye’ll not take ye’r leave, sir, till I choose, and ye shall stay,” yelled the old Squire, placing himself between the Captain and the steps. “And I’d like to know why ye shouldn’t hear her called what she is—a — and a —.”
“Because she’s my wife, sir,” retorted Charles Fairfield, whitening with fury.
“She is, is she?” said the old man, after a long gaping pause. “Then ye’r a worse scoundrel, ye black-hearted swindler, than I took you for—and ye’ll take that—”
And trembling with fury, he whirled his heavy cane in the air. But before it could descend, Charles Fairfield caught the hand that held it.
“None o’ that—none o’ that, sir,” he said with grim menace, as the old man with both hands and furious purpose sought to wrest the cane free.
“Do you want me to do it?”
The gripe of old Squire Harry was still powerful, and it required an exertion of the younger man’s entire strength to wring the walking-stick from his grasp.
Over the terrace balustrade it flew whirling, and old Squire Harry in the struggle lost his feet, and fell heavily on the flags.
There was blood already on his temple and white furrowed cheek, and he looked stunned. The young man’s blood was up—the wicked blood of the Fairfields—but he hesitated, stopped, and turned.
The old Squire had got to his feet again, and was holding giddily by the balustrade. His hat still lay on the ground, his cane was gone. The proud old Squire was a tower dismantled. To be met and foiled so easily in a feat of strength—to have gone down at the first tussle with the “youngster,” whom he despised as a “milksop” and a “Miss Molly,” was to the old Hercules, who still bragged of his early prowess, and was once the lord of the wrestling ring for five and twenty miles round, perhaps for the moment the maddest drop in the cup of his humiliation.