He rose, steady now and straight as an arrow, shaking his long gray hair fiercely off his forehead, and glaring with angry eyes at Trevor Gillingham. 'Come, come,' he said; 'you've had your fun out, boys; you've seen the humiliation of a ruined old man. You've gloated over the end of somebody better to begin with than any one of you is or ever will be, if you live to be twice as old as Methuselah; and now you may go to your own rooms, and sleep your own silly debauch off at your leisure. I will go, too. I have learned something to-night. I have learned that Edmund Plantagenet's spirit isn't as wholly dead or as broken as you thought it, and as he thought it, and I'm glad for my own sake, Mr. Gillingham, to have learned it. Good-night, and good-bye to you all, young gentlemen. You won't have the chance to mock an old man's shame again, if I can help it. But go on as you've begun--go on as you've begun, my fine fellows, and your end will be ten thousand times worse than mine is. Why,' with a burst of withering indignation, 'when I was your age, you soulless, senseless, tipsy young reprobates, I'd have had too much sense of shame, to get my passing amusement out of the pitiable degradation of a man who might fairly have been my grandfather!'
He walked to the door, upright, without flinching, and turned the handle, as sober for the minute as if he hadn't tasted a single glass of sherry. Gillingham, thoroughly frightened now, tried his best to stop him.
'I'm sorry I've hurt your feelings, Mr. Plan-tagenet,' he stammered out, conscious even as he spoke how weak and thin were his own excuses by the side of the old man's newly-quickened indignation. 'I--I didn't mean to offend you. I wanted to see--to see what effect a few of your own powerful words and periods would produce upon you, falling so unexpectedly on your ear in a society where you probably imagined you had never been heard of. I--I intended it merely as a delicate compliment.'
Edmund Plantagenet answered him never a word, but with a profound bow that had nothing of the dancing-master in it, but a great deal of the angry courtesy of fifty years since, shut the door sternly in his face, and turned to descend the winding stone staircase.