Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/159

 Flickers was that very red-haired wretch who had declaimed so powerfully against my Lady Barbara Gossiter and all her works, beneath the window of her ladyship at three o'clock that morning. A deadly feud was thus between us. At the same time, however, there was a sort of fascination about a man who was so terrible in opinion. There was defiance of all the things that were, crapulously shining in his beery orbs. In his nose, short and thick, and magnificently drunken, was writ the pugilist, and worse, alas! the pummeller of the classes. A mighty hatred of the aristocracy was indicated on his honest brow. His mien was so determinedly aggressive, and so purple in its tint, that it might have been washed in the bluest blood of dukes and earls. Thus at sight of him, I could scarce refrain from shivering, as we are said to do when someone walks across our graves.

To him the searching of my chamber was a pleasing duty. It involved iconoclasm and a tearing down of gilded luxury. And there was a sufficient unction in the rude methods he employed. He half tore the window curtain from the pole in shaking out its folds; he committed dreadful carnage with the bed, tearing sheets, and flinging counterpane and bolster to the ground. He wrenched one of the doors off my wardrobe, such was the vigour with which he opened it, and so ruthlessly mishandled one of my costliest robes that it was damaged beyond amendment. He was able to knock a china model of Apollo off the mantelpiece and