"Do you know where De Tintiniac is, Staumgaurn? In the roulette room? All right. I am going there now."
He did go there, and I've a notion that the croupier of Pipesandbeersbad made something that night out of the Major's preoccupation.
Violet, meanwhile, was waltzing with Staumgaurn and a dozen others, but looked rather white—not using any rouge but what nature had given her—and by the end of the evening her bouquet had utterly come to grief. Days went on till a fortnight of our last month had gone, and Telfer, to my sorrow (not surprise, for I always thought the Tressillian was a dangerous foe, and that, like Ringwood, he'd find himself unhorsed by a woman), grew grave and stern, haunted with ten times more recklessness than usual, and threw away his guineas at the Redoute in a wild way, quite new with him, for though he liked play pour s'amuser, he had too much control over his passions ever to let play get ascendancy over him. I used to think he had the strongest passions and the strongest will over them of any man I knew; but now a passion least undesired and most hopeless of any that ever entered his soul, seemed to have mastered him. Not that he showed it; with the Tressillian he was simply distantly courteous; but I, who was on the qui vive for his first sign of being conquered, saw his eyebrows contract when somebody was paying her desperate court, and his glance lighten and flash when she passed near him. They had never been alone since the night of the ball, and Violet was too proud to try for a reconciliation, even if she'd cared for one.
One night we were at a ball at the Prince Humbugandschwerinn's. The Tressillian had been waltzing with all her might, and had all the men in the room, Humbugandschwerinn himself included, round her. Telfer leaned against a console ten minutes, watching her, and then abruptly left the ball-room, and did not return again. He came instead into the card-room, and sat down to écarté with De Tintiniac, and lost two games at ten Napoleons a side. Generally, he played very steadily, never giving his attention to anything but the game; but now he was listening to what a knot of men were saying, who were laughing, chatting, and sipping coffee, while they talked about—the Tressillian.
"I mark the king and play," said Telfer, his eyes fixed fiercely on a young fellow who was discussing Violet much as he'd have discussed his new Danish dog or English hunter. He was Jack Snobley, Lord Featherweight's son, who was doing the grand, a confounded young parvenu, vulgar as his cotton-spinning ancestry could make him, who could appreciate the Tressillian about as much as he could Dannecker's Ariadne, which work of art he pronounced, in my hearing, "a pretty girl, but the dawg very badly done—too much like a cat." "I take your three to two," continued Telfer, his brow lowering as he heard the young fool praising and criticising Violet with small ceremony. The Major had the haughtiest patrician principles, and to hear a snob like this sandy-haired honorable, speaking of the woman he chose to champion as he might have done of some ballerina or Chaumière belle, was rather too much for Telfer's self-control.
When the game was done, he rose, and walked quietly over to where Snobley stood. He looked him down with that cold, haughty glance that has cowed men bolder than Lord Featherweight's hopeful offspring, and said a word or two to him in a low tone, which caused that gentleman to flush up red and look fierce with all his might.
"What's the girl to you, that I mayn't speak as I choose of her?" he retorted; the Sillery, of which he'd taken a good deal too much, working up in his weak brain. "I've heard that she jilted you, and that was why you've been setting them all against her, and saying she wanted to hook your old governor."
The Sillery must have indeed obscured Jack's reason with a vengeance to make him venture this very elegant and refined speech with the Major, most fastidious in his ideas of good breeding, and most direful in his wrath, of any man I ever knew. Telfer's cheek turned as white with passion as the bronze would let it; his gray eyes grew almost black as they stared at the young snob. He was so supremely astonished that this ill-bred boy had actually dared thus to address him!
"Mr. Snobley," he said, with his chilled and most ironical smile, and his quietest, most courteous voice, "you must learn good manners before you venture to parley with gentlemen. Allow me to give you your first lesson." And stooping, as if to a very little boy—young Snobley was a good foot shorter than he—the Major struck him on the lips with his left-hand French kid glove. It was a very gentle blow—it would scarcely have reddened the Tressillian's delicate skin—but on the Hon. Jack it had electric effect. He was beginning to swear, to look big, to talk of satisfaction, insult, and all the rest of it; but Telfer laughed, bent his head, told him he was quite ready to satisfy him to any extent he required; and, turning away, sat down to écarté calm and impassive as ever, and pleased greatly with himself for having silenced this silly youth. The affair was much less exciting to him than it was to any other man in the room. "It's too great an honor for him, the young brute, for me to be called out by him, as if he were one of us. I hate snobs; Lord Featherweight's grandfather was butler to mine, and he himself was a cotton-spinner in Lancashire, and then this little contemptible puppy dares to——"
Telfer finished his sentence with a puff of smoke from his meerschaum, as he sat in his bedroom after the ball, into which sanctuary I had followed him to talk a little before turning in.