CHAPTER XVIII
THE SHADOW FALLS
It would appear that Sir Robert went direct from the prison to the club room at White’s. He was observed to be gloomy, preoccupied, his manner not a little perturbed. The usual light smile was completely clouded under a gravity foreign to his nature. One may guess that he was in no humour to carry coals. In a distant corner of the room he seated himself and fell to frowning at the table on which his elbow rested. At no time was he a man upon whom one would be likely to foist his company undesired, for he had at command on occasion a hauteur and an aloofness that challenged respect even from the most inconsiderate.
We must suppose that he was moved out of his usual indifference, that some long-dormant spring of nobility was quickened to a renewed life, that a girl’s truth and purity, refining his selfish passion, had bitten deep into the man’s callous worldliness. For long he sat in a sombre silence with his head leaning on his hand, his keen mind busy with the problem—so I shall always believe—as to how he might even yet save me from the gallows.
By some strange hap it chanced that Sir James Craven, excited with drink, the bile of his saturnine temper stirred to malignity by heavy losses at cards, alighted from his four in hand at White’s shortly after Volney. Craven’s affairs had gone from bad to worse very rapidly of late. He had been playing the races heavily and ruin stared the man in the face. More than suspected of dubious play at cards, it had been scarce a week since the stewards of a leading racetrack had expelled him for running crosses. Any day a debtor’s prison might close on him. Within the hour, as was afterward learned, his former companion Frederick Prince of Wales had given him the cut direct on the Mall. Plainly his star was on the decline, and he raged in a futile passion of hatred against the world. Need it be said that of all men he most hated his supplanter in the Prince of Wales’ good-will, Sir Robert Volney.
To Volney then, sitting gloomily in his distant solitude, came Craven with murder in his heart and a bitter jest on his lips. At the other side of the table he found a seat and glared across at his rival out of a passion-contorted face. Sir Robert looked past him coldly, negligently, as if he had not been there, and rising from his seat moved to the other side of the room. In the manner of his doing it there was something indescribably insulting; so it seemed to Topham Beauclerc, who retailed to me the story later.
Craven’s evil glance followed Volney, rage in his bloodshot eyes. If a look could kill, the elegant macaroni had been a dead man then. It is to be guessed that Craven struggled with his temper and found himself not strong enough to put a curb upon it; that his heady stress of passion swept away his fear of Volney’s sword. At all events there he sat glowering blackly on the man at whose charge he chose to lay all his misfortunes, what time he gulped down like water glass after glass of brandy. Presently he got to his feet and followed Sir Robert, still dallying no doubt with the fascinating temptation of fixing a quarrel upon his rival and killing him. To do him justice Volney endeavoured to avoid an open rupture with the man. He appeared buried in the paper he was reading.
“What news?” asked Craven abruptly.