“You forget,” said Master Godolphin, “that I, too, have interests in the neighbourhood of Smithick, and that you are hurting those.”
“Soho!” crowed Sir Oliver. “Now at last the sun of truth peeps forth from all this cloud of righteous indignation at my bad Tressilian blood and pirate’s ways! You, too, are but a trafficker. Now see what a fool I am to have believed you sincere, and to have stood here in talk with you as with an honest man.” His voice swelled and his lip curled in a contempt that struck the other like a blow. “I swear I had not wasted breath with you had I known you for so mean and pitiful a fellow.”
“These words....” began Master Godolphin, drawing himself up very stiffly.
“Are a deal less than your deserts,” cut in the other, and he raised his voice to call—“Nick.”
“You shall answer to them,” snapped his visitor.
“I am answering now,” was the stern answer. “To come here and prate to me of my dead father’s dissoluteness and of an ancient quarrel between him and yours, to bleat of my trumped-up course of piracy and my own ways of life as a just cause why I may not wed your sister whilst the real consideration in your mind, the real spur to your hostility is not more than the matter of some few paltry pounds a year that I hinder you from pocketing. A God’s name get you gone.”
“You shall hear from me again, Sir Oliver,” said the other, white with anger. “You shall account to me for these words.”
“I do not fight with... with hucksters,” flashed Sir Oliver.
“Indeed, ’tis to discredit an honourable class, I confess it. Nick, the door for Master Godolphin.”
Anon, after his visitor had departed, Sir Oliver grew calm again. Then being able in his calm to consider his position, he became angry anew at the very thought of the rage in which he had been, a rage which had so mastered him that he had erected additional obstacles to the already considerable ones that stood between Rosamund and himself. In full blast, his anger swung round and took Sir John Killigrew for its objective. He would settle with him at once. He would so, by Heaven’s light!
“Where is Master Lionel? he asked when the boots had been fetched.
Promptly, in answer to that summons, came Sir Oliver’s half-brother—a slender lad favouring his mother the dissolute Ralph Tressilian’s second wife. He was as unlike Sir Oliver in body as in soul. He was comely in a very gentle, almost womanish way; his complexion was fair and delicate, his hair golden, and his eyes of a deep blue. He had a very charming stripling grace—for he was but in his twenty-first year—and he dressed with all the care of a Court-gallant.