The man stared at her again.
“Yes,” he replied, “I’m told to shoot him, but steer clear, my girl, people don’t always hit the mark,” and he grinned.
“I shall tell Lord Spencer!” she hissed at him.
“Do! ’tis your business,” retorted the man, “and ’twill hang you sometime, my lady-bird!”
CHAPTER XXV
MR. SECRETARY VERNON
AT the door of Leicester House Lady Clancarty’s coach stood waiting to take her to the ball at my Lord Bridgewater’s, and she had quite forgotten both the ball—which was a grand affair—and the coach. So it was that Lord Spencer found it waiting his convenience for a very different purpose. He entered it at once and directed the coachman to go to Westminster to the house of the Under Secretary of State, and away the great, rumbling, emblazoned coach rolled on its deadly errand, not freighted with the charming and vivacious countess but with a young nobleman, whose heart swelled with passion and another emotion, which his lordship mistook for virtue—the virtue of the Roman who slew his daughter.
As he rode through the dark streets of London that night, a link-boy running at the horses’ heads, a tumult of strange feelings struggled in his bosom. Passion ran high then, and party hatreds led men to the dagger and the sword. The very fact that his father’s political roguery was a byword made the young man more zealous for his own reputation. He burned to be a Whig of the Whigs, a shining example as a party leader, a distinguished patriot, and now he found sedition in his own household, a viper in his bosom. His hatred of his Jacobite brother-in-law ran so entirely in accord with his political creed and his ideas of patriotism, that he mistook it for a virtuous indignation. He moved, therefore, with an air of righteous displeasure, of calm dignity, when he descended from the coach at the secretary’s door.