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A moment later Mrs Rendell had turned the conversation into another channel, unwilling to prolong the present discussion in the presence of a stranger, and Nan seized the opportunity to escape to the far end of the garden. Gervase Vanburgh stood in her path, and spied the glimmer of tears on the dark eyelashes as she passed by.
Glancing round, I saw a hundred small flames spurt up, and a hundred men hold them to a hundred glowing cigar-tips. "After you with the match." Gervase took it from me with a steady hand. He, too, glanced about him while he puffed. "Ugh!" He blew a long cloud, and shivered within his furred overcoat. "What a gang!"
"I am bound to acknowledge it," returned the Doctor; "inasmuch as I know it exists." Gervase glanced at him with a smile, in which there was something of contempt. "You are very much behind the age, Doctor," he remarked lightly. "Very much behind indeed," agreed Dr. Dean composedly. "The age rushes on too rapidly for me, and gives no time to the consideration of things by the way.
And he laughed a trifle stridently, and looked about him for applause, but found none. "You are overrash," Lord Gervase disapproved him harshly. "Not the first coward I've seen grow valiant at a table," put in Trenchard by way of explanation, and might have come to words with Blake on that same score, but that in that moment Wilding spoke again.
Dean with a curious air, as if he were propounding a remarkable conundrum. "God!" Gervase laughed loudly. "Pardon! Are you a clergyman?" "By no means!" and the Doctor gave a little bow and deprecating smile. "I am not in any way connected with the Church. I am a doctor of laws and literature, a humble student of philosophy and science generally..." "Philosophy! Science!" interrupted Gervase.
And women veiled their faces in youth, lest they should be deemed too prodigal of their charms; and in age they covered themselves still more closely, in order not to affront the Sun-God's fairness by their wrinkles." She smiled, a dazzling smile that drew Gervase yet a few steps closer unconsciously, as though he were being magnetized.
The document was more explicit. It described the relative as being a nephew of Sir Gervase, the son of his sister. The name followed. It was Sextus Cyril Sax. I have tried on three different sheets of paper to describe the effect which this discovery produced on me and I have torn them up one after another.
Lilias raised her head with a gesture of determination, and met Gervase Vanburgh's eyes fixed steadily upon her. His glance did not waver as it met hers, and she blushed beneath it with a new and strange feeling of discomfiture. It was as though that steady gaze had pierced beneath the surface, and read her poor, unworthy thoughts.
His reply, dated from a country house some twenty miles distant, announced that he would be at Carsham Hall in three days' time. On that third day the legal paper that I was to sign arrived by post. It was Sunday morning; I was alone in the schoolroom. In writing to me, the lawyer had only alluded to "a surviving relative of Sir Gervase, nearly akin to him by blood."
*Gervase Markham. Linschoten's Large Testimony in Hakluyt's Voyages. Poets of the time made ballads of this fight. Raleigh wrote of it as you have just read, and in our own day the great laureate Lord Tennyson made the story live again in his poem The Revenge.