“Mercy, Barnes!” cries Lady Anne.
“It was a mercy Barnes was not there,” says Ethel, gravely; “a fight between him and Captain Belsize would have been awful indeed.”
“I am afraid of no man, Ethel,” says Barnes fiercely, with another oath.
“Hit one of your own size, Barnes,” says Miss Ethel (who had a number of school-phrases from her little brothers, and used them on occasions skilfully). “Hit Captain Belsize, he has no friends.”
As Jack Belsize from his height and strength was fitted to be not only an officer but actually a private in his former gallant regiment, and brother Barnes was but a puny young gentleman, the idea of a personal conflict between them was rather ridiculous. Some notion of this sort may have passed through Sir Brian’s mind, for the Baronet said with his usual solemnity, “It is the cause, Ethel, it is the cause, my dear, which gives strength; in such a cause as Barnes’s, with a beautiful young creature to protect from a villain, any man would be strong, any man would be strong.” “Since his last attack,” Barnes used to say, “my poor old governor is exceedingly shaky, very groggy about the head;” which was the fact. Barnes was already master at Newcome and the bank, and awaiting with perfect composure the event which was to place the blood-red hand of the Newcome baronetcy on his own brougham.
Casting his eyes about the room, a heap of drawings, the work of a well-known hand which he hated, met his eye. There were a half-dozen sketches of Baden; Ethel on horseback again; the children and the dogs just in the old way. “D—— him, is he here?” screams out Barnes. “Is that young pothouse villain here? and hasn’t Kew knocked his head off? Is Clive Newcome here, sir,” he cries out to his father. “The Colonel’s son. I have no doubt they met by——”
“By what, Barnes?” says Ethel.
“Clive is here, is he?” says the Baronet; “making caricatures, hey? You did not mention him in your letters, Lady Anne.”
Sir Brian was evidently very much touched by his last attack.
Ethel blushed; it was a curious fact, but there had been no mention of Clive in the ladies’ letters to Sir Brian.