“Shall I read the epistle to you, gentlemen?” he asked, clearing his throat.
“Ay, fire away,” quoth Sir Peter; “it ought to be as good as swearing at the young devil in person.”
Dr. Jessel proceeded to the reading of the letter with full nasal unction, striving to crush its literary crudities beneath an episcopalic diction. Sir Peter twinkled and beamed, gurgling and patting his stomach suggestively when some very palatable sentence tickled his native sense of humor. Mr. Lot leaned his elbows on the back of his father’s chair, and joined heartily in the old gentleman’s enjoyment of the word-feast. At the conclusion of Dr. Jessel’s essay in declamation the baronet exploded with characteristic gusto.
“Deuce take it, sir, that ought to make the young devil shake in his shoes. He’ll feel a bit liverish after our brimstone, Jessel, eh? Seal it up, man. And may a good lifter on the rump go with it.”
The chaplain sealed up the letter gracefully, and delivered it with a bow to Mr. Lot.
“May you shine, sir,” he said, “as the noble Achilles shone before Troy.”
Mr. Lot swaggered to the sideboard, poured himself out a glass of wine, and tossed it down with an emphatic tilt of the elbow.
“You’ll do, Lot—you’ll do,” said the baronet.
Mr. Hardacre appeared troubled by no doubts as to the triumph of his cause.
“The lad will just crawl, sir,” he said; “he ain’t fit for anything but scribbling verses.”
Love and hate being thus romantically mingled, Bess’s woodland tenderness and Jilian’s sickly spite, Providence, that cup-bearer to kings and peasants, prepared to deliver the goblet into Jeffray’s hands. Nor was there a league between the two influences as they approached the man that day; Bess skipping brown-footed over the heather, the Hardacre coach rolling with its heroic burden over the rough and dusty road.
Richard Jeffray, abandoning Wilson to Butler’s “Hudibras” and a pipe of Virginia in the library, had turned out to wander in the park. He was to meet Bess at Holy Cross that evening, and the vexed riddle with him was the riddle of the future. The thunder-cloud that he knew must be gathering at Hardacre loomed to his imagination across the northern sky. He would see the lightnings of the Sussex Zeus flashing vengeance out of the heavens. Lot Hardacre was not the demigod to remain idle for lack of bluster. He would descend upon Rodenham, strut and swagger, ruffle it like any scoundrel modelled upon the manhood of old White Friars.