"What's that to you?"
"You insult the man's sister," Asgill persisted coolly, "and because he treats you like the tipsy creature you are, you'd kill him like a dog."
Payton turned white. "And you, too," he said, "if you say another word! What in Heaven's name is amiss with you, man, this morning? Are you mad?"
"I'll not hear the word 'coward' used of the family—I'll soon be one of!" Asgill returned, speaking on the spur of the moment, and wondering at himself the moment he had made the statement. "That's what I'm meaning! Do you see? And if you are for repeating the word, more by token, it'll be all the breakfast you'll have, for I'll cram it down your ugly throat!"
Payton stared dumbfounded, divided between rage and astonishment. But the former was not slow to get the upper hand, and "Enough said," he replied, in a voice that trembled, but not with fear. "If you are willing to make it good, you'll be coming this way."
"Willingly!" Asgill answered.
"I'll have one of my men for witness. Ay, that I will! I don't trust you, Mr. Asgill, and that's flat. Get you whom you please! In five minutes, in the garden, then?"
Asgill nodded. The Englishman looked once more at him to make sure that he was sober; then he turned on his heel and went back through the courtyard. Asgill remained alone.
He had taken the step there was no retracing. He had cast the dice, and the next few minutes would decide whether it was for life or death. He had done it deliberately; yet at the last he had been so carried away by impulse that, as he stood there, looking after the man he had insulted, looking on the placid water glittering in the early sunshine, looking along the lake-side road, by which he had come, he could hardly credit what had happened, or that in a moment he had thrown for a stake so stupendous, that in a moment he had changed all. The sunshine lost its warmth and grew pale, the hills lost their colour and their beauty, as he reflected that he might never see the one or the other again, might never return by that lake-side road by which he had come; as he remembered that all his plans for his aggrandisement, and they were many and clever, might end this day, this morning, this hour! Life! It was that, it was all, it was the future, with its pleasures, hopes, ambitions, that he had staked. And the stake was down. He could not now take it up. It might well be, for the odds were great against him, that it was to this day that all his life had led up; that life by which men would by-and-by judge him, recalling this and that, this chicane and that extortion, thanking God that he was dead, or perhaps one here and there shrugging his shoulders in good-natured regret.
From the hedge-school in which he had first grasped the clue-line of his life, to the day when his father had encouraged him to "turn Protestant," that he might the better exploit his Papist neighbours, ay, and forward to this day on which, at the bidding of a woman, he had given the lie to his instincts, his training, and his education—from the one to the other he saw his life stretched out before him! And he could have cried upon his folly. Yet for that woman——"