Hugh had now, with his firmness and his strained smile, quite the look of having counted the cost of his step. “I’m afraid I must, you see.”
It pressed at once in his host the spring of a very grand manner. “And pray by what right here do you do anything of the sort?”
“By the right of a person from whom you, on your side, are accepting a service.”
Hugh had clearly determined in his opponent a rise of what is called spirit. “A service that you half an hour ago thrust on me, sir—and with which you may take it from me that I’m already quite prepared to dispense.”
“I’m sorry to appear indiscreet,” our young man returned; “I’m sorry to have upset you in any way. But I can’t overcome my anxiety—”
Lord Theign took the words from his lips. “And you therefore invite me—at the end of half an hour in this house!—to account to you for my personal intentions and my private affairs and make over my freedom to your hands?”
Hugh stood there with his eyes on the black and white pavement that stretched about him—the great loz-enged marble floor that might have figured that ground of his own vision which he had made up his mind to “stand.” “I can only see the matter as I see it, and I should be ashamed not to have seized any chance to appeal to you.” Whatever difficulty he had had shyly to face didn’t exist for him now. “I entreat you to think again, to think well, before you deprive us of such a source of just envy.”
“And you regard your entreaty as helped,” Lord Theign asked, “by the beautiful threat you are so good as to attach to it?” Then as his monitor, arrested, exchanged a searching look with Lady Grace, who, showing in her face all the pain of the business, stood off at the distance to which a woman instinctively retreats when a scene turns to violence as precipitately as this one appeared to strike her as having turned: “I ask you that not less than I should like to know whom you speak of as ‘deprived’ of property that happens—for reasons that I don’t suppose you also quarrel with!—to be mine.”
“Well, I know nothing about threats, Lord Theign,” Hugh said, “but I speak of all of us—of all the people of England; who would deeply deplore such an act of alienation, and whom, for the interest they bear you, I beseech you mercifully to consider.”
“The interest they bear me?”—the master of Dedborough fairly bristled with wonder. “Pray how the devil do they show it?”