’To the deuce, your infancy!  I know too much about your age.  Just hark, you Richmond! none of your “I was a child” to provoke compassion from women.  I mean to knock you down and make you incapable of hurting these poor foreign people you trapped.  They defy you, and I’ll do my best to draw your teeth.  Now for the annuity.  You want one to believe ’you thought you frightened “Government,” eh?’

‘Annual proof was afforded me, sir.’

‘Oh! annual! through Mr. Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge, deceased!’

Janet stepped up to my aunt Dorothy to persuade her to leave the room, but she declined, and hung by me, to keep me out of danger, as she hoped, and she prompted me with a guarding nervous squeeze of her hand on my arm to answer temperately when I was questioned: 

‘Harry, do you suspect Government paid that annuity?’

‘Not now, certainly.’

’Tell the man who ‘tis you suspect.’

My aunt Dorothy said:  ‘Harry is not bound to mention his suspicions.’

‘Tell him yourself, then.’

‘Does it matter—?’

’Yes, it matters.  I’ll break every plank he walks on, and strip him stark till he flops down shivering into his slough—­a convicted common swindler, with his dinners and Balls and his private bands!  Richmond, you killed one of my daughters; t’ other fed you, through her agent, this Mr. Charles Adolphus Bannerbridge, from about the date of your snaring my poor girl and carrying her off behind your postillions—­your trotting undertakers! and the hours of her life reckoned in milestones.  She’s here to contradict me, if she can.  Dorothy Beltham was your “Government” that paid the annuity.’

I took Dorothy Beltham into my arms.  She was trembling excessively, yet found time to say, ‘Bear up, dearest; keep still.’  All I thought and felt foundered in tears.

For a while I heard little distinctly of the tremendous tirade which the vindictive old man, rendered thrice venomous by the immobility of the petrified large figure opposed to him, poured forth.  My poor father did not speak because he could not; his arms dropped; and such was the torrent of attack, with its free play of thunder and lightning in the form of oaths, epithets, short and sharp comparisons, bitter home thrusts and most vehement imprecatory denunciations, that our protesting voices quailed.  Janet plucked at my aunt Dorothy’s dress to bear her away.

‘I can’t leave my father,’ I said.

‘Nor I you, dear,’ said the tender woman; and so we remained to be scourged by this tongue of incarnate rage.

‘You pensioner of a silly country spinster!’ sounded like a return to mildness.  My father’s chest heaved up.

I took advantage of the lull to make myself heard:  I did but heap fuel on fire, though the old man’s splenetic impetus had partly abated.