I can imagine how the fellow said it, with what a devilish concentration of malice. He had the most irritating manner of any man in England; I never heard him speak without wanting to dash my fist in his sneering face.
“That is what I tell you. I repeat that the subject is not a matter for discussion between us.”
Craven might have read a warning in the studied gentleness of Volney’s cold manner, but he was by this time far beyond reck. By common consent the eyes of every man in the room were turned on these two, and Craven’s vanity sunned itself at holding once more the centre of the stage.
“And after the trull has gadded about the country with young Montagu in all manner of disguises?” he continued.
“You lie, you hound!”
Sir James sputtered in a speechless paroxysm of passion, found words at last and poured them out in a turbid torrent of invective. He let fall the word baggage again, and presently, growing more plain, a word that is not to be spoken of an honest woman. Volney, eyeing him disdainfully, the man’s coarse bulk, his purple cheeks and fishy eyes, played with his wine goblet, white fingers twisting at the stem; then, when the measure of the fellow’s offense was full, put a period to his foul eloquence.
Full in the mouth the goblet struck him. Blood spurted from his lips, and a shower of broken glass shivered to the ground. Craven leaped across the table at his enemy in a blind fury; restrained by the united efforts of half a dozen club members, the struggling madman still foamed to get at his rival’s throat—that rival whose disdainful eyes seemed to count him but a mad dog impotent to bite.
“You would not drink with me; you would not play with me; but, by God, you will have to fight with me,” he cried at last.
“When you please.”
“Always I have hated you, wanted always to kill you, now I shall do it,” he screamed.