"What a lie!" thought Nasmith.
"For a long time I have made myself miserable with half measures. That is finished, I tell you—finished, finished. To-night for the last time you have heard me speak my native tongue. I will never speak it again. I want you to drink to Timothy Herrick. He is dead, thank God! He has no successors. All that remains of him is that piece of paper you have folded into your pocket."
Higher went his glass. "To Timothy Herrick!" he cried.
"Surely he is mad," said the eyes of the men who were watching him.
"To Timothy Herrick. He was an unhappy man. The sooner he is forgotten, the better. God rest his spirit!"
He drained the glass and then with an emphatic gesture hurled it to the floor. Instantly the four sing-song girls followed his lead. Highly amused by this noisy whimsical end to the banquet, they "dried" their cups—as the expression went—and hurled them down with a crash, so that the splinters skipped like diamonds across the stone floor. Beresford, too, carried away by the tense feeling of the moment, drank the ominous toast and shivered his glass into fragments, making a crash which stirred the girls into much laughter, much cheering and clapping of hands. Only Ferris and Nasmith took no part in the riotous demonstration: the one pulled his moustache in embarrassment over such an unmanly display of emotion, the other looked at Herrick as though he had beheld his words literally fulfilled, as though he were gazing upon a corpse.
Not because of Herrick alone did his heart seem suffocated with pain. He was like a man staring into a crystal. Behind the vow of lips that never again should speak English he suffered a vision of Nancy shut off from sight and sound, shut off from the timeless beauty of love. In the shattered fragments of glass, sparkling even in the brilliance of this garish room, he saw all that she had been born to enjoy flung away, wantonly destroyed.
CHAPTER XIX
In a household where every trivial accident was snatched at by the jaded inmates as meat for hours of excited gossip, an event so unparalleled as the visit of three foreigners was bound to stir Herrick's cloistered family to throbbing ecstasies of curiosity.