"I congratulate you—I congratulate you, Everard, my boy: you're in luck, and no mistake! I don't know when I heard a bit of news that gave me greater pleasure. You're an honest lad; I liked you from the first, and would have saved you if I could; but I saw it would have been of no use. And now the baronet has done the job for you! Long life to him—long life to him! Stay and dine with me, Jack, and we'll drink his health and her ladyship's in the best bumper in my cellar. More power to the pair of them—more power to them, I say!"
Everard frees his hand sullenly, and says, with an awkward impatience—
"All right, all right, Armstrong; you mean well, but—but—that will do. Stay and dine with you—eh? Don't mind if I do; we ought to be good company, by Jove, for we're both knocking about in much the same boat, you and I."
"In much the same boat," Armstrong interrupts, with another grating laugh—"in much the same boat, you call it—ha, ha! Not so, not so, my boy; for you have gallantly drifted into port, your keel just a trifle scratched, while I—I have been buffeted among the rocks and quicksands of holy matrimony, and had the waters pitching into my raked sides. In—in much the same boat, you call it! By Jove, that is a good one, you know!"
"Oh, Armstrong, Armstrong, shut up! You mean well, I know," cries the young man bitterly, his head dropping upon his breast; "but you can't understand what I feel, or how I loved that girl almost from the first day I saw her, how I would have crawled to the end of the world to give her an hour's pleasure. To think—to think she'd treat me so, cast me aside for that yellow-faced hound!"
"With his title and his twelve thousand a year. Come, Everard, come; do her at least the justice to admit that she never tried to deceive you as to her character, never tried to hide from you that she was vain, worldly, ambitious, and candidly selfish, that her aim in life was to marry as high up the tree as she could reach. You must admit that you saw through her almost from the start, that you walked with unbandaged eyes into the pitfall she prepared for you. Why, man alive, I've heard you scores of times railing against her heartlessness, her selfish—"
"Oh, what does all that signify? Nothing—nothing; I loved her—I loved her!" he reiterates irritably. "And, if you had ever loved any one when you were my age, Armstrong, you'd find such considerations afford precious little comfort to you in—in a crisis like this. I loved her, her selfishness, her ambition, her worldliness, the queenly calm with which she requited my slavish worship, her indifference—everything about her I loved! Oh, Pauline, Pauline!"
Armstrong smiles and does not again try to pour oil on the troubled waters, foreseeing, with a sense of relief, that the worldly violence of his friend's woe will soon wear itself out, the scratch be healed with the gracious aid of time.
Everard stays to dinner. During that trying repast and for many hours afterward, far into the dismal night, he treats his patient host to the full flavor of his bereavement in its many hysterical phases. He is by turns morose, wrathful, fiendishly sarcastic, buoyant, bloodthirsty, and maudlin; but, when he rises at last to depart, Armstrong has successfully dissuaded him from his purpose of seeking death at once, and has almost induced him to stick to his colors at Broom Hill, and not show the white feather when the Saundersons return to Nutshire from the honeymoon.
"Be a man, be a man, Everard!" he urges vehemently. "Show her and him of what stuff you are made. Why in the world should you go and leave your place in the middle of the hunting-season and wander over the world, bellowing your woes and labeling yourself a jilted man, an object of pity and derision to the whole county? Stay and face them—stay and face them, my boy."