“Thank you, sir,” she said, turning her head over her shoulder, and looking at me with her grey eyes. “Thank you, Richard Bedford! God bless you! I shall ever be thankful to you, wherever I am.” And the stately figure swept out of the room.
She had seen me behind that confounded statue, then, and I had not come to her! O torments and racks! O scorpions, fiends, and pitchforks! The face of Bedford, too (flashing with knightly gratitude anon as she spoke kind words to him and passed on), wore a look of scorn as he turned towards me, and then stood, his nostrils distended, and breathing somewhat hard, glaring at his enemies, and still grasping his mace of battle.
When Elizabeth was gone, there was a pause of a moment, and then Blacksheep, taking his bleeding cambric from his nose, shrieks out, “Kill him, I say! A fellow that dares to hit one in my condition, and when I’m down! Bulkeley, you great hulking jackass! kill him, I say!”
“Jest let him put that there poker down, that’s hall,” growls Bulkeley.
“You’re afraid, you great cowardly beast! You shall go, Mr. What-d’ye-call-’em—Mr. Bedford—you shall have the sack, sir, as sure as your name is what it is! I’ll tell my brother-in-law everything; and as for that woman——”
“If you say a word against her, I’ll cane you wherever I see you, Captain Baker!” I cry out.
“Who spoke to you?” says the captain, falling back and scowling at me.
“Who hever told you to put your foot in?” says the squire.
I was in such a rage, and so eager to find an object on which I might wreak my fury, that I confess I plunged at this Bulkeley. I gave him two most violent blows on the waistcoat, which caused him to double up with such frightful contortions, that Bedford burst out laughing; and even the captain with the damaged eye and nose began to laugh too. Then, taking a lesson from Dick, as there was a fine shining dagger on the table, used for the cutting open of reviews and magazines, I seized and brandished this weapon, and I daresay would have sheathed it in the giant’s bloated corpus, had he made any movement towards me. But he only called out, “hI’ll be the death on you, you cowards! hI’ll be the death of both on you!” And snatching up his cap from the carpet, walked out of the room.
“Glad you did that, though,” says Baker, nodding his head. “Think I’d best pack up.”