Part 4 (2/2)
”You shall not leave England until you marry my sister.”
”Suppose I refuse to do so?”
”Then you will have to take your chances of life or death. You will give me satisfaction first; and if you escape the fate you well deserve, Brune may have better fortune.”
”Duelling is now murder, sir, unless we pa.s.s over to France.”
”I will not go to France. Wrestling is not murder, and we both know there is a 'throw' to kill; and I will 'throw' until I do kill,--or am killed. There's Brune after me.”
”I have ceased to love your sister. I dare say she has forgotten me.
Why do you insist on our marriage? Is it that she may be Lady Fenwick?”
”Look you, sir! I care nothing for lords.h.i.+ps or ladys.h.i.+ps; such things are matterless to me. But your desertion has set wicked suspicions loose about Miss Anneys; and the woman they dare to think her, you shall make your wife. By G.o.d in heaven, I swear it!”
”They have said wrong of Miss Anneys! Impossible!”
”No, sir! they have not said wrong. If any man in Allerdale had dared to say wrong, I had torn his tongue from his mouth before I came here; and as for the women, they know well I would hold their husbands or brothers or sons responsible for every ill word they spoke. But they think wrong, and they make me feel it everywhere. They look it, they shy off from Aspatria,--oh, you know well enough the kind of thing going on.”
”A wrong thought of Miss Anneys is atrocious. The angels are not more pure.” He said the words softly, as if to himself; and William Anneys stood watching him with an impatience that in a moment or two found vent in an emphatic stamp with his foot.
”I have no time to waste, sir. Are you afraid to sup the ill broth you have brewed?”
”Afraid!”
”I see you have no mind to marry. Well, then, we will fight! I like that better.”
”I will fight both you and your brother, make any engagement you wish; but if the fair name of Miss Anneys is in danger, I have a prior engagement to marry her. I will keep it first. Afterward I am at your service, Squire, yours and your brother's; for I tell you plainly that I shall leave my wife at the church door and never see her again.”
”I care not how soon you leave her; the sooner the better. Will the eleventh of this month suit you?”
”Make it the fifteenth. To what church will you bring my fair bride?”
”Keep your scoffing for a fitter time. If you look in that way again, I will strike the smile off your lips with a hand that will leave you little smiling in the future.” And he pa.s.sed his walking-stick to his left, and doubled his large right hand with an ominous readiness.
”We may even quarrel like gentlemen, Mr. Anneys.”
”Then don't you laugh like a blackguard, that's all.”
”Answer me civilly. At what church shall I meet Miss Anneys, and at what hour on the fifteenth?”
”At Aspatria Church, at eleven o'clock.”
”Aspatria?”
”Ay, to be sure! There will be witnesses there, I can tell you,--generations of them, centuries of generations. They will see that you do the right thing, or they will dog your steps till you have paid the uttermost farthing of the wrong. Mind what you do, then!”
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