CHAPTER XX. ON THE DOOR-STEPS AT NIGHT
It was late at night when Sewell arrived at the Priory. He had had another disastrous night of play, and had scattered his “acknowledgments” for various sums on every side. Indeed, he had not the vaguest idea of how much he had lost. Disputes and hot discussions, too, almost verging on personal quarrels, dashed with all their irritating influences the gloom of his bad luck; and he felt, as he arose to go home, that he had not even that sorry consolation of the unfortunate gambler, – the pitying sympathy of the looker-on.
Over and over, as he went, he asked himself what Fate could possibly intend by this persistent persecution of him? Other fellows had their “innings” now and then. Their fortune came checkered with its bright and dark days. He never emerged, not even passingly, from his ill-luck. “I suppose,” muttered he, “the whole is meant to tempt me – but to what? I need very little temptation if the bait be only money. Let me but see gold enough, and my resistance will not be very formidable. I ‘ll not risk my neck; short of that I ‘m ready for anything.” Thus thinking, he plodded onward through the dark night, vaguely wishing at times that no morning was ever to break, and that existence might prolong itself out to one long dark autumn night, silent and starless.
As he reached the hall-door, he found his wife seated on the steps as on a former night. It had become a favorite spot with her to taste the cool refreshing night-air, and rally her from the feverish closeness of the sick-room.
“How is he? Is it over yet?” cried he, as he came up.
“He is better; he slept calmly for some hours, and woke much refreshed.”
“I could have sworn it!” burst he in, vehemently. “It is the one way Fate could have rescued me, and it is denied me. I believe there is a curse on me! Eh – what?”
“I did n’t speak,” said she, meekly.
“You muttered, though. I heard you mumble something below your breath, as if you agreed with what I said. Say it out, Madam, if you think it.”
She heaved a weary sigh, but said nothing.
“Has Beattie been here?” asked he, hastily.
“Yes; he stayed for above an hour, but was obliged to go at last to visit another patient. He brought Dr. Lendrick out with him; he arrived this evening.”
“Lendrick! Do you mean the man from the Cape?”
“Yes.”
“That completes it!” burst he, as he flung his arms wildly up. “I was just wondering what other malignant piece of spite Fortune could play me, and there it is! Had you any talk with this man?”
“Yes; he remained with me all the time Dr. Beattie was upstairs.”
“And what was his tone? Has he come back to turn us out? – that of course he has – but does he avow it?”
“He shows no such intentions. He asked whether you held much to the Nest, if it was a place that you liked, or if you could relinquish it without any regret?”
“Why so?”
“Because Sir Brook Fossbrooke has just purchased it.”
“What nonsense! you know as well as I do that he could n’t purchase a dog-kennel. That property was valued at sixteen thousand pounds four years ago, – it is worth twenty now; and you talk to me of this beggar buying it!”
“I tell you what he told me, and it was this: Some mine that Sir Brook owned in Sardinia has turned out to be all silver, and in consequence he has suddenly become immensely rich, – so rich, indeed, that he has already determined to settle this estate on Lucy Lendrick; and intends, if he can induce Lord Drumcarran to part with ‘The Forest,’ to add it to the grounds.”
Sewell grasped his hair with both hands, and ground his teeth together with passion as he listened.
“You believe this story, I suppose?” said he at last.
“Yes; why should I not believe it?”
“I don’t believe a word of it. I see the drift – I saw the drift of it before you had told me ten words. This tale is got up to lull us into security, and to quiet our suspicions. Lendrick knows well the alarm his unexpected return is likely to give us, and to allay our anxieties they have coined this narrative, as though to imply they will be rich enough not to care to molest us, nor stand between us and this old man’s money. Don’t you see that?”
“I do not. It did not occur to me before, and I do not admit it now.”
“I ought not to have asked you. I ought to have remembered what old Fossbrooke once called ‘the beautiful trustfulness of your nature.’”
“If had it once, it has left me many a long day ago!”
“But I deny that you ever had it. You had the woman’s trick of affecting to believe, and thus making out what you assumed to think, to be a pledge given by another, – a bit of female craft that you all trade on so long as you are young and good-looking?”
“And what supplies the place of this ingenious device when we are neither young nor good-looking?”
“I don’t know, for the simple reason that I never much interested myself in the sex after that period.”
“That’s a very sad thing for us. I declare I never had an idea how much we ‘re to be pitied before.”
“You would be to be pitied if you knew how we all think of you;” and he spoke with a spiteful malignity almost demoniac.
“It’s better, then, for each of us that we should not know this. The trustfulness that you sneer at does us good service, after all.”
“And it was this story of the mine that induced Lendrick to come home from the Cape, wasn’t it?”
“No; he only heard of the mine since he arrived here.”
“I thought,” rejoined he, with a sneer, “that he ought to have resigned his appointment on account of this sudden wealth, all the more because I have known that he intended to come back this many a day. And what is Fossbrooke going to do for you? Is there a diamond necklace ordered? or is it one of the brats he is going to adopt?”
“By the way, I have been robbed; some one has carried off my gold comb and some pins; they were on my dressing-table last night. Jane saw them when I went into my room.”
“Now ‘s your time to replace the loss! It’s the sort of tale old Fossbrooke always responded to.”
She made no answer; and for several minutes each sat in silence. “One thing is pretty evident,” said he at last, as he made figures with his cane on the ground, – “we ‘ll have to troop off, whether the Lendricks come here or not. The place will not be tenable once they are in the vicinity.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know! Do you mean that the doctor and his daughter will stand the French cook here, and the dinners, and let the old man make a blessed fool of himself, as he has been doing for the last eight or ten months past? or do you pretend that if we were to go back to the leg-of-mutton days, and old Haire for company, that it would be worth holding on to? I don’t; and I tell you frankly that I intend to demand my passports, as the Ministers say, and be off.”
“But I can’t ‘be off.’ I have no such alternative!”
“The worse luck yours, or rather the worse skill; for if you had played your hand better, it would not have been thus with you. By the way, what about Trafford? I take it he ‘ll marry this girl now.”
“I have not heard,” said she, pinching her lips, and speaking with a forced composure.
“If I were you, I ‘d make myself Lucy’s confidante, get up the match, and go and live with them. These are the really happy ménages. If there be such a thing as bliss, perfect bliss, in this world, it is where a wife has a dear friend in the house with her, who listens to all her sorrows, and helps her to manage the tyrant that inflicts them. It was a great mistake of ours not to have known this in early life. Marriage was meant to be a triangle.”
“If you go, as you speak of going, have you any objection to my addressing myself to Sir Brook for some assistance?”
“None whatever. I think it the most natural thing in life; he was your guardian, and you have a right to ask what has become of your fortune.”
“He might refer me to you for the information.”
“Very unmannerly if he should, and very ungallant, too, for an old admirer. I ‘m certain if I were to be – what is the phrase? – removed, yes, removed – he ‘d marry you. Talk of three-volume novels and virtue rewarded, after that.”
“You have been playing to-night,” said she, gravely.
“Yes.”
“And lost?”
“Lost heavily.”
“I thought so. Your courtesies to me have been the measure of your bad luck for many a day. I have often felt that ‘four by honors’ has saved me from a bad headache.”
“Then there has been more sympathy between us than I ever suspected,” said he, rising, and stretching himself; and after a moment or two added, “Must I call on this Dr. Lendrick? – will he expect me to visit him?”
“Perhaps so,” said she, carelessly; “he asked after you.”
“Indeed! – did he ask after Trafford too? Do you remember the day at the Governor’s dinner he mistook you for Trafford’s wife, and explained his mistake by the familiarity of his manner to you in the garden? It was the best bit of awkwardness I ever witnessed.”
“I suppose you felt it so?”
“I—I felt it so! I suspect not! I don’t believe there was a man at table enjoyed the blunder as heartily.”
“I wish – how I wish!” said she, clasping her hands together.
“Well – what?”
“I wish I could be a man for one brief half-hour!” cried she; and her voice rang with a mild but clear resonance, that made it seem louder than it really was.
“And then?” said he, mockingly.
“Oh, do not ask me more!” cried she, as she bent down and hid her face in her hands.
“I think I will call on Lendrick,” said he, after a moment. “It may not be exactly the sort of task a man would best like; but I opine, if he is about to give his daughter in marriage to this fellow, he ought to know more about him. Now I can tell him something, and my wife can tell him more. There’s no indiscretion in saying so much, is there?”
She made no reply; and after a pause he went on: “If Trafford had n’t been a shabby dog, he ‘d not have higgled about buying up those letters. Cane & Kincaid offered them to him for a thousand pounds. I suspect he ‘d like to have the offer repeated now, but he shall not. He believes, or affects to believe, that, for my own sake, I ‘ll not make a public scandal; he doesn’t know his man when he thinks this. You, Madam, might have taught him better, eh?” Still no reply, and he continued: “There ‘s not a man living despises public opinion as I do. If you are rich you trample on it, if poor it tramples on you; but so long as a fellow braves the world, and declares that he shrinks from nothing, – evades nothing, – neither turns right nor left to avoid its judgments, – the coward world gives away and lets him pass. I ‘ll let them see that I don’t care a straw for my own life, when at the price of it I can blow up a magazine.”
“No, no, no!” muttered she, in a low but clear tone.
“What do you mean by No, no?” cried he, in a voice of passion.
“I mean that you care a great deal for your own life, and a great deal for your own personal safety; and that if your tyranny to a poor, crushed, weak woman has any bounds, it is from your fear, your abject fear, that in her desperation she might seek a protector, and find him.”
“I told you once before, Madam, men don’t like this sort of protectorate. The old bullying days are gone by. Modern decorum ‘takes it out’ in damages.” She sat still and silent; and after waiting some time, he said, in a calm, unmoved voice, “These little interchanges of courtesy do no good to either of us; they haven’t even the poor attraction of novelty; so, as my friend Mr. O’Reardon says, let us ‘be practical.’ I had hoped that the old gentleman upstairs was going to do the polite thing, and die; but it appears now he has changed his mind about it. This, to say the least of it, is very inconvenient to me. My embarrassments are such that I shall be obliged to leave the country; my only difficulty is, I have no money. Are you attending? Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, I hear you,” said she, in a faint whisper.
“You, I know, cannot help me; neither can my mother. Of course the old Judge is out of the question. As for the fellows at the Club, I am deeply in debt to many of them; and Kincaid only reminds me of his unsettled bill of costs when I ask for a loan. A blank look-out, on the whole; isn’t it?”
She muttered something like assent, and he went on. “I have gone through a good many such storms before, but none fully as bad as this; because there are certain things which in a few days must come out – ugly little disclosures – one or two there will be. I inadvertently sold that beech timber to two different fellows, and took the money too.”
She lifted up her face, and stared at him without speaking.
“Fact, I assure you! I have a confoundedly bad memory; it has got me into scores of scrapes all through life. Then, this very evening, thinking that the Chief could n’t rub through, I made a stupid wager with Balfour that the seat on the Bench would be vacant within a week; and finished my bad run of luck by losing – I can’t say how much, but very heavily, indeed – at the Club.”
A low faint sigh escaped her, but not a word.
“As to bills renewed, protested, and to be protested,” said he, in the same easy tone, “they are legion. These take their course, and are no worse than any other man’s bills; I don’t fret myself about them. As in the old days of chivalry one never cared how scurvily he treated the ‘villeins,’ so he behaved like a knight to his equals; so nowadays a man must book up at Tattersall’s though he cheat his tailor. I like the theory too; it keeps ‘the ball rolling,’ if it does nothing else.”
All this he rattled out as though his own fluency gave him a sort of Dutch courage; and who knows, too, – for there is a fund of vanity in these men, – if he was not vain of showing with what levity he could treat dangers that might have made the stoutest heart afraid?
“Taking the ‘tottle of the whole’ of these, – as old Joe Hume used to say, – it’s an ugly balance!”
“What do you mean to do?” said she, quietly.
“Bolt, I suppose. I see nothing else for it.”
“And will that meet the difficulty?”
“No, but it will secure me; secure me from arrest, and the other unpleasant consequences that might follow arrest. To do this, however, I need money, and I have not five pounds – no, nor, I verily believe, five shillings – in the world.”
“There are a few trinkets of mine upstairs. I never wear them – ”
“Not worth fifty pounds, the whole lot; nor would one get half fifty for them in a moment of pressure.”
“We have some plate – ”
“We had, but I sold it three weeks ago; and that reminds me there was a rum old tea-urn got somehow mixed up with our things, and I sold it too, though it has Lendrick’s crest upon it. You ‘ll have to get it back some of these days, – I told the fellow not to break it up till he heard from you.”
“Then what is to be done?” said she, eagerly.
“That’s the question; travelling is the one thing that can’t be done on tick.”
“If you were to go down to the Nest – ”
“But our tenure expires on the seventeenth, just one fortnight hence, – not to say that I couldn’t call myself safe there one hour. No, no; I must manage to get abroad, and instantly, that I may escape from my present troubles; but I must strike out some way of life, – something that will keep me.”
She sat still and almost stupefied, trying to see an escape from these difficulties, but actually overwhelmed by the number and the nature of them.
“I told you awhile ago that I did not believe one word of this story of the mine, and the untold wealth that has fallen to old Fossbrooke: you, however, do believe it; you affirm the tale as if you had seen and touched the ingots; so that you need have no reluctance to ask him to help you.”
“You do not object to this course, then?” asked she, eagerly.
“How can I object? If I clutch at a plank when I’m drowning, I don’t let go because it may have nails in it. Tell him that you want to buy me off, to get rid of me; that by a couple of hundred pounds, – I wish he ‘d make it five, – you can insure my leaving the country, and that my debts here will prevent my coming back again. It’s the sort of compact he ‘ll fully concur in; and you can throw in, as if accidentally, how useless it is for him to go on persecuting me, that his confounded memory for old scores has kept my head under water all my life; and hint that those letters of Trafford’s he insists on having – ”
“He insists on having!”
“To be sure he does; I thought I had told you what brought him over here! The old meddling humbug, in his grand benevolence vein, wants to smooth down the difficulties between Lucy Lendrick and Trafford, one of which was thought to be the fellow’s attachment to you. Don’t blush; take it as coolly as I do. I ‘m not sure whether reading the correspondence aloud isn’t the best way to dispel this illusion. You can say that better than I can.”
“Trafford never wrote one line to me of which I should be afraid or ashamed to see in print.”
“These are matters of taste. There are scores of women like publicity, and would rather be notorieties for scandal than models of unnoticed virtue, so we ‘ll not discuss that. There, there; don’t look so supremely indignant and contemptuous. That expression became you well enough at three-and-twenty; but ten years, ten long years of not the very smoothest existence, leave their marks!”
She shook her head mournfully, but in silence.
“At all events,” resumed he, “declare that you object to the letters being in other hands than your own; and as to a certain paper of mine, – a perfectly worthless document, as he well knows, – let him give it to you or burn it in your presence.”
She pushed her hair back from her temples, and pressed her hands to either side of her head, as though endeavoring to collect her thoughts, and rally herself to an effort of calm determination’.
“How much of this is true?” said she, at last.
“What do you mean?” said he, sternly.
“I mean this,” said she, resolutely, – “that I want to know, if you should get this money, is it really your intention to go abroad?”
“You want a pledge from me on this?” said he, with a jeering laugh. “You are not willing to stoop to all this humiliation without having the price of it afterwards? Is not that your meaning?”
Her lips moved, but no sound was audible.
“All fair and reasonable,” said he, calmly. “It’s not every woman in the world would have the pluck to tell her husband how much meanness she would submit to simply to get rid of him; but you were always courageous, that I will say, – you have courage enough.”
“I had need of it.”
“Go on, Madam, finish your speech. I know what you would say. ‘You had need of courage for two;’ that was the courteous speech that trembled on your lip. The only thing that beats your courage is your candor! Well, I must content myself with humbler qualities. I cannot accompany you into these high flights of excellence, but I can go away; and that, after all, is something. Get me this money, and I will go, – I promise you faithfully, – go, and not come back.”
“The children,” said she, and stopped.
“Madam!” said he, with a mock-heroic air, “I am not a brute! I respect your maternal feelings, and would no more think of robbing you of your children – ”
“There, – there, that will do. Where is Sir Brook to be found, – where does he live?”
“I have his address written down, – here it is,” said he, – “the last cottage on the southern side of Howth. There is a porch to the door, which, it would seem, is distinctive, as well as three chimneys; my informant was as descriptive as Figaro. You had better keep this piece of paper as a reminder; and the trains deposit you at less than half a mile from the place.”
“I will go early to-morrow morning. Shall I find you here on my return?”
“Of that you may be certain. I can’t venture to leave the house all day; I ‘m not sure there will not be a writ out against me.”
She arose and seemed about to say something, – hesitated for a moment or two, and then slowly entered the house, and disappeared.
CHAPTER XXI. GOING OUT
In a small dinner-room of the Viceregal Lodge, in the Phoenix Park, the Viceroy sat at dinner with Sir Brook Fossbrooke. He had arrived in great haste, and incognito, from England, to make preparations for his final departure from Ireland; for his party had been beaten in the House, and expected that, in the last debate on the measure before them, they would be driven to resign office. Lord Wilmington had no personal regrets on the subject. With high station and a large fortune, Ireland, to him, meant little else than estrangement from the habits and places that he liked, with the exposure to that species of comment and remark which the Press so unsparingly bestows on all public men in England. He had accepted office to please his party; and though naturally sorry for their defeat, there was a secret selfish satisfaction at being able to go back to a life more congenial to him that more than consoled him for the ministerial reverse.
It is difficult for the small world of place-hunters and office-seekers to understand this indifference; but I have little doubt that it exists largely amongst men of high position and great fortune, and imparts to their manner that seeming dignity in adversity which we humble folk are so prone to believe the especial gift of the “order.”
Cholmondely Balfour did not take matters so coolly; he had been summoned over by telegram to take his part in the “third reading,” and went away with the depressing feeling that his official sun was about to set, and all the delightful insolences of a “department” were about to be withdrawn from him.
Balfour had a brief interview with the Viceroy before he started, and hurriedly informed him how events stood in Ireland. Nor was it without a sense of indignation that he saw how little his Excellency cared for the defeat of his party, and how much more eager he seemed to see his old friend Fossbrooke, and thank him for his conduct, than listen to the details of the critical questions of the hour.
“And this is his address, you say?” said Lord Wilmington, as he held a card in his hand. “I must send off to him at once.”
“It’s all Bentley’s fault,” said Balfour, full of the House and the debate. “If that fellow were drowning, and had only breath for it, he ‘d move an amendment! And it’s so provoking, now we had got so splendidly through our prosecutions, and were winning the Catholics round to us besides; not to say that I have at last managed to induce Lendrick to resign, and we have a Judgeship to bestow.” In a few hurried words he recounted his negotiation with Sewell, placing in the Viceroy’s hand the document of the resignation.
Lord Wilmington’s thoughts were fully as much on his old friend Fossbrooke all this time as on questions of office, and not a little disconcerted the Secretary by muttering, “I hope the dear old fellow bears me no ill-will. I would not for worlds that he should think me unmindful of him.”
And now they sat over their wine together, talking pleasantly of bygone times and old friends, – many lost to them by death, and some by distance.
“I take it,” said Fossbrooke, after a pause, “that you are not sorry to get back to England.”
Lord Wilmington smiled, but said nothing.
“You never could have cared much for the pomp and state of this office, and I suppose beyond these there is little in it.”
“You have hit it exactly. There is nothing to be done here, – nothing. The shortness of the period that is given to any man to rule this country, and the insecurity of his tenure, even for that time, compel him to govern by a party; and the result is, we go on alternately pitting one faction against the other, till we end by marshalling the nation into two camps instead of massing them into one people. Then there is another difficulty. In Ireland the question is not so much what you do as by whom you do it. It is the men, not the measures, that are thought of. There is not an infringement on personal freedom I could not carry out, if you only let me employ for its enactment some popular demagogue. Give me a good patriot in Ireland, and I ‘ll engage to crush every liberty in the island.”
“I don’t envy you your office, then,” said Fossbrooke, gravely.
“Of course you don’t; and between ourselves, Fossbrooke, I ‘m not heartbroken by the thought of laying it down. I suspect, too, that after a spell of Irish official life every statesman ought to lie fallow for a while: he grows so shifty and so unscrupulous here, he is not fit for home work.”
“And how soon do you leave?”
“Let me see,” said he, pondering. “We shall be beaten to-night or to-morrow night at farthest. They ‘ll take a day to talk it over, and another to see the Queen; and allowing three days more for the negotiations back and forward, I think I may say we shall be out by this day week. A week of worry and annoyance it will be!”
“How so?”
“All the hungry come to be fed at the last hour. They know well that an outgoing administration is always bent on filling up everything in their gift. You make a clean sweep of the larder before you give up the key to the new housekeeper; and one is scarcely so inquisitive as to the capacity of the new office-holder as he would be if, remaining in power, he had to avail himself of his services. For instance, Pemberton may not be the best man for Chief Baron, but we mean to bequeath him in that condition to our successors.”
“And what becomes of Sir William Lendrick?”
“He resigns.”
“With his peerage?”
“Nothing of the kind; he gets nothing. I ‘m not quite clear how the matter was brought about. I heard a very garbled, confused story from Balfour. As well as I could gather, the old man intrusted his step-son, Sewell, with the resignation, probably to enable him to make some terms for himself; and Sewell – a shifty sort of fellow, it would seem – held it back – the Judge being ill, and unable to act – till he found that things looked ticklish. We might go out, – the Chief Baron might die, – Heaven knows what might occur. At all events he closed the negotiation, and placed the document in Balfour’s hands, only pledging him not to act upon it for eight-and-forty hours.”
“This interests me deeply. I know the man Sewell well, and I know that no transaction in which he is mixed up can be clean-handed.”
“I have heard of him as a man of doubtful character.”
“Quite the reverse; he is the most indubitable scoundrel alive. I need not tell you that I have seen a great deal of life, and not always of its best or most reputable side. Well, this fellow has more bad in him, and less good, than any one I have ever met. The world has scores, thousands, of unprincipled dogs, who, when their own interests are served, are tolerably indifferent about the rest of humanity. They have even, at times, their little moods of generosity, in which they will help a fellow blackguard, and actually do things that seem good-natured. Not so Sewell. Swimming for his life, he ‘d like to drown the fellow that swam alongside of him.”
“It is hard to believe in such a character,” said the other.
“So it is! I stood out long – ay, for years – against the conviction; but he has brought me round to it at last, and I don’t think I can forgive the fellow for destroying in me a long-treasured belief that no heart was so depraved as to be without its relieving trait.”
“I never heard you speak so hardly before of any one, Fossbrooke.”
“Nor shall you ever again, for I will never mention this man more. These fellows jar upon one’s nature, and set it out of tune towards all humanity.”
“It is strange how a shrewd old lawyer like the Chief Baron could have taken such a man into his confidence.”
“Not so strange as it seems at first blush. Your men of the world – and Sewell is eminently one of these – wield an immense influence over others immeasurably their superiors in intellect, just by force of that practical skill which intercourse with life confers. Think for a moment how often Sewell might refer some judgment or opinion of the old Chief to that tribunal they call ‘Society,’ of whose ways of thought, or whose prejudices, Lendrick knows as much as he knows of the domestic habits of the Tonga Islanders. Now Sewell was made to acquire this influence, and to employ it.”
“That would account for his being intrusted with this,” said the Viceroy, drawing from his breast-pocket the packet Balfour had given him. “This is Sir William’s long-waited-for resignation.”
“The address is in Sewell’s writing. I know the hand well.”
“Balfour assured me that he was well acquainted with the Chief Baron’s writing, and could vouch for the authenticity of the document. Here it is.” As he said this, he opened the envelope, and drew forth a half-sheet of post paper, and handed it to Fossbrooke.
“Ay, this is veritable. I know the hand, too, and the style confirms it.” He pondered for some seconds over the paper, turned it, looked at the back of it, examining it all closely and carefully, and then, holding it out at arm’s length, he said, “You know these things far better than I do, and you can say if this be the sort of document a man would send on such an occasion.”
“You don’t mean that it is a forgery”
“No, not that; nor is it because a forgery would be an act Sewell would hold back from, I merely ask if this looks like what it purports to be? Would Sir William Lendrick, in performing so solemn an act, take a half sheet of paper, – the first that offered, it would seem, – for see, here are some words scribbled on the back, – and send in his resignation blurred, blotted, and corrected like this?”
“I read it very hurriedly. Balfour gave it to me as I landed, and I only ran my eyes over it; let me see it again. Yes, yes,” muttered he, “there is much in what you say; all these smudges and alterations are suspicious. It looks like a draft of a despatch.”
“And so it is. I ‘ll wager my head on it, – just a draft.”
“I see what you mean. It was a draft abstracted by Sewell, and forwarded under this envelope.”
“Precisely. The Chief Baron, I am told, is a hot, hasty, passionate man, with moments of rash, impetuous action; in one of these he sat down and wrote this, as Italians say, ‘per sfogarsi.’ Warm-tempered men blow off their extra steam in this wise, and then go on their way like the rest of us. He wrote this, and, having written it, felt he had acquitted a debt he owed his own indignation.”