It was a peculiarity of Jack that when angry he kept brooding over the fancied injury and nursing his wrath, which was augmented by every trifle. The fact that no one recognized him added fuel to the fire within him. The clear brandy he had taken was doing its work, and when Paul came upon him his temper had reached the boiling point of unreasonableness and lack of sense. To Paul’s “How are you?” he answered growlingly, “Much you care how I am, and I don’t know that it’s any of your business either.”
“Why, Jack, what’s the matter? Can’t you speak civilly to me?” Paul said in much surprise.
“No, I can’t, and I don’t wish to speak to you at all,” Jack replied.
Paul saw the condition he was in and wanted to get him away.
“Come, come,” he said soothingly. “Come home with me,” and he laid his hand on Jack’s shoulder.
“Let me alone,” Jack said fiercely, shaking the hand off and launching into a tirade of abuse, taunting Paul with having pirates and smugglers for his ancestors and still feeling so big that he didn’t want him,—Jack Percy,—a Virginian gentleman, to be present at his wedding.
The crowd around them had increased to quite a ring,—some standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of the angry man. The sight of them made Jack worse, and, after finishing Paul, he took up his stepmother and Clarice, saying things of them which no sane man would ever say of women allied to him by ties of consanguinity. Paul had listened quietly while his father and grandfather and great-grandfather and himself were called thieves and cut-throats and robbers, but when Clarice became the subject of Jack’s vituperation he could bear it no longer. Usually the mildest, most forbearing of men, he had a temper when roused, and it was roused now.
“Silence! You wretch, to speak so of your sister,” he said, raising his arm as if to strike, and taking a step forward.
In an instant Jack was upon him, and, with a heavy blow, laid him flat upon the piazza. Some men deserve knocking down and are made better for it, but Paul was not one of them, and his face was livid with rage at the indignity offered him. He had sought Jack with the kindest intentions and been grossly insulted. Springing to his feet, he raised his hand again threateningly, then dropped it, and, controlling himself with a great effort, he said, “This is not the place to settle with you, Jack Percy, but I’ll make you pay for this some time, see if I don’t.”
Just what he meant he did not know. He was too much excited and mortified to reason clearly. He had been knocked down and called a coward and a snob and a pirate. His promised wife had been called a liar and a flirt and a cheat. Many of his friends had witnessed his humiliation, and amid the Babel of voices around him he heard the words, “Fight him; thrash him; he deserves it. We’ll stand by you and help lick him if necessary.”