The two men were eying each other like dogs half inclined to fight.
“At present, sir,” quoth Jeffray, reddening and throwing back his head, “your sister’s honor is in my keeping.”
Lot Hardacre stared at him in silence for a moment. He was wondering how Jeffray had come by so much spirit as to stand up to a man who had always bustled him.
“Well, that’s spoken like a man,” he confessed.
“Jilian and I are betrothed, are we not?”
“By gad, you are.”
“Then, sir, I am not conscious of having given you any excuse as yet to question my honor.”
XXVII
The rebel spirit is quickly astir when a man’s in love, and so it was with Jeffray after his sparring with Mr. Lot. That gentleman’s red-visaged and swaggering hauteur had irritated Richard not a little, and he was in no temper to be driven at the sword’s-point to the altar. Already he was waxing world-wise enough to recognize the truth that Mr. Lot was ready to presume upon his supposed timidity. The suspicion awoke a sense of resistance in Jeffray, an instinctive feeling of antagonism that was only human. Left to his own sensitive and generous impulses, he would probably have found no great difficulty in bringing himself before Miss Jilian’s feet. Her brother’s threatening interference checked the free flow of pity, and made Richard Jeffray recoil and consider the future for himself.
He was still in a fever about Bess, and unable to bear with any calmness the thought of her sacrifice to the lewd cunning of her cousin. Jeffray felt that his word had been pledged to the girl, pledged for her honor’s sake, and that he had failed through circumstance to keep his pledge. The bond was as real to him as his betrothal to Miss Hardacre, and far more real in the matter of romance. On the one hand, he recognized a perfunctory and half-pitying sense of duty; on the other, all the passionate chivalry that had lain latent till now within his heart.