They lapse into silence, during which Jack’s cigar glimmers from the twilight corner where Clive’s bed is; whilst Clive wafts his fragrance out of the window where he sits, and whence he has a view of Lady Anne Newcome’s windows to the right, over the bridge across the little rushing river, at the Hotel de Hollande hard by. The lights twinkle in the booths under the pretty lime avenues. The hum of distant voices is heard; the gambling-palace is all in a blaze; it is an assembly night, and from the doors of the conversation rooms, as they open and close, escape gusts of harmony. Behind on the little hill the darkling woods lie calm, the edges of the fir-trees cut sharp against the sky, which is clear with a crescent moon and the lambent lights of the starry hosts of heaven. Clive does not see pine-robed hills and shining stars, nor think of pleasure in its palace yonder, nor of pain writhing on his own bed within a few feet of him, where poor Belsize was groaning. His eyes are fixed upon a window whence comes the red light of a lamp, across which shadows float now and again. So every light in every booth yonder has a scheme of its own: every star above shines by itself; and each individual heart of ours goes on brightening with its own hopes, burning with its own desires, and quivering with its own pain.
The reverie is interrupted by the waiter, who announces M. le Vicomte de Florac, and a third cigar is added to the other two smoky lights. Belsize is glad to see Florac, whom he has known in a thousand haunts. “He will do my business for me. He has been out half a dozen times,” thinks Jack. It would relieve the poor fellow’s boiling blood that some one would let a little out. He lays his affair before Florac; he expects a message from Lord Dorking.
“Comment donc?” cries Florac; “il y avait donc quelque chose! Cette pauvre petite Miss! Vous voulez tuer le père, après avoir délaissé la fille? Cherchez d’autres témoins, Monsieur. Le Vicomte de Florac ne se fait pas complice de telles lâchetés.”
“By Heaven,” says Jack, sitting up on the bed, with his eyes glaring, “I have a great mind, Florac, to wring your infernal little neck, and to fling you out of the window. Is all the world going to turn against me? I am half mad as it is. If any man dares to think anything wrong regarding that little angel, or to fancy that she is not as pure, and as good, and as gentle, and as innocent, by Heaven, as any angel there,—if any man thinks I’d be the villain to hurt her, I should just like to see him,” says Jack. “By the Lord, sir, just bring him to me. Just tell the waiter to send him upstairs. Hurt her! I hurt her! Oh! I’m a fool! a fool! a d——d fool! Who’s that?”
“It’s Kew,” says a voice out of the darkness from behind cigar No. 4, and Clive now, having a party assembled, scrapes a match and lights his candles.
“I heard your last words, Jack,” Lord Kew says bluntly, “and you never spoke more truth in your life. Why did you come here? What right had you to stab that poor little heart over again, and frighten Lady Clara with your confounded hairy face? You promised me you would never see her. You gave your word of honour you wouldn’t, when I gave you the money to go abroad. Hang the money, I don’t mind that; it was on your promise that you would prowl about her no more. The Dorkings left London before you came there; they gave you your innings. They have behaved kindly and fairly enough to that poor girl. How was she to marry such a bankrupt beggar as you are? What you have done is a shame, Charley Belsize. I tell you it is unmanly and cowardly.”
“Pst,” says Florac, “numero deux, voilà le mot lâche.”
“Don’t bite your thumb at me,” Kew went on. “I know you could thrash me, if that’s what you mean by shaking your fists; so could most men. I tell you again—you have done a bad deed; you have broken your word of honour, and you knocked down Clara Pulleyn to-day as cruelly as if you had done it with your hand.”
With this rush upon him, and fiery assault of Kew, Belsize was quite bewildered. The huge man flung up his great arms, and let them drop at his side as a gladiator that surrenders, and asks for pity. He sank down once more on the iron bed.
“I don’t know,” says he, rolling and rolling round, in one of his great hands, one of the brass knobs of the bed by which he was seated. “I don’t know, Frank,” says he, “what the world is coming to, or me either; here is twice in one night I have been called a coward by you, and by that little what-d’-you-call-’m. I beg your pardon, Florac. I don’t know whether it is very brave in you to hit a chap when he is down: hit again, I have no friends. I have acted like a blackguard, I own that; I did break my promise; you had that safe enough, Frank, my boy; but I did not think it would hurt her to see me,” says he, with a dreadful sob in his voice. “By—I would have given ten years of my life to look at her. I was going mad without her. I tried every place, everything; went to Ems, to Wiesbaden, to Hombourg, and played like hell. It used to excite me once, and now I don’t care for it. I won no end of money,—no end for a poor beggar like me, that is; but I couldn’t keep away. I couldn’t, and if she had been at the North Pole, by Heavens I would have followed her.”