"You are another Solon, Gregg. Your wisdom is only to be equalled by your disinterestedness. Come, gentlemen, fill your glasses again! Harry, is your glass filled?"
As he spoke, the Major drew near, and fixed a keen eye on Bergan's glass, in a way which led the latter to suspect that his late manoeuvre had not been so successful as he had imagined. At any rate, it would not be easy to repeat it. Well, what matter? He had submitted to his uncle's tyranny long enough; he might as well free himself first as last. He would try to do so in the way least likely to give offence.
"Uncle," he pleaded, with a graceful frankness and courtesy that could scarcely have failed to reach the Major's better self, if it had been less under the vitiating influence of strong drink,—"uncle, I really must beg your kind indulgence. I am not accustomed to potations so many nor so strong; and whatever I may be able to do, in time, under your skilful guidance, I must now use a little discretion. Pray excuse me from taking any more at present."
"I'll be hanged if I do!" said the Major, bluntly. "If you don't know how to drink like a gentleman and a Bergan, it is high time you should learn. Fill up his glass, Gregg; he shall drink!"
Scarcely were the insulting words spoken ere Bergan felt, with a thrill of dismay, a hot tingling sensation in all his veins, as if the blood in them had suddenly been turned to fire. Too well he knew what it meant. The "black Bergan temper," which had been the one, great sorrow and struggle of his life, thus far, and which he had believed to be completely tamed, was stirring within him in a way to show that, if it were not instantly controlled, it would carry him, in its headlong fury, he knew not whither. Every other feeling, every other thought, were, for the moment, swallowed up in the instinct of self-preservation. He would submit to his uncle's imperious dictation, not that he either prized his love or feared his anger, but because that treacherous demon within must at once feel a firm foot upon its neck, and be shown that it could expect no indulgence, and no quarter.
At this moment, there was a slight bustle at the door, occasioned by an arrival; under cover of which he again turned to the friendly water pitcher, to make sure that, while fleeing from one fatal influence he was not running blindly into the leashes of another.
"Dimidium plus toto, I see," observed a well-remembered voice at his elbow, in a tone of good-natured sarcasm. "But you make a slight mistake in your practical translation; it is a 'half,' not a quarter (or I might say, an eighth) which is 'better than the whole.' And anyway, I doubt if old Hesiod meant his maxim to apply to punch."
Glad of anything that promised to create a diversion, Bergan turned and gave the hand of Richard Causton a much more cordial grasp than he would have been likely to do, under other circumstances. The old man, better accustomed to the cold shoulder from all reputable acquaintance, returned it with tears in his blear eyes, and for once, had no proverb at command wherein to do justice to his feelings. Before he could find one, Major Bergan came up, with a sly gleam of humor or of mischief, on his face. "What! you know Harry!" he exclaimed. "Oh! yes, I remember,—you helped him on his way to Bergan Hall. So much the better. You will be glad to know that it was my nephew to whom you showed that courtesy, and to drink to your better acquaintance. All ready?"
Bergan turned round for his glass, which he had left standing on the window-sill, and, the sooner to be done with the distasteful business, swallowed at a gulp what, it seemed to him, the next moment, must have been liquid fire. A loud laugh from his uncle told him to whom he was indebted for the substitution of raw spirit for weak punch. The passion which he had so promptly smothered, doubly inflamed by the consciousness of being betrayed and the instantaneous action of the potent draught, blazed up with sudden, ungovernable fury. Feeling that he was losing control of temper and reason together, he rushed toward the door. At a sign from the Major, two or three of the bystanders threw themselves in his way. They were instantly sent reeling right and left by two powerful blows. Dick Causton, catching hold of him with the friendly design of preventing him from doing more mischief and provoking more enmity, was shaken off with a violence that threw him in a disordered heap on the floor; over which Bergan strode wrathfully towards his uncle, who had planted himself in the doorway. The spectators held their breath to witness the expected encounter between uncle and nephew,—Bergan against Bergan, the blood of both up, the hereditary frenzy blazing in each pair of dark eyes.
But Bergan was not quite so mad as that. Seeing who it was that impeded his way, he turned and darted through a window close at hand, jumped over the piazza railing, sprang upon his horse, and was off before the bystanders had well recovered their breath, or Dick had picked himself up, with the caustic observation,—