XIII. AN OLD MAN"S HEART.
Punctual to the moment, when the half hour"s interval had expired, Mr.
Bashwood was announced at the office as waiting to see Mr. Pedgift by special appointment.
The lawyer looked up from his papers with an air of annoyance: he had totally forgotten the meeting by the roadside. "See what he wants," said Pedgift Senior to Pedgift Junior, working in the same room with him.
"And if it"s nothing of importance, put it off to some other time."
Pedgift Junior swiftly disappeared and swiftly returned.
"Well?" asked the father.
"Well," answered the son, "he is rather more shaky and unintelligible than usual. I can make nothing out of him, except that he persists in wanting to see you. My own idea," pursued Pedgift Junior, with his usual, sardonic gravity, "is that he is going to have a fit, and that he wishes to acknowledge your uniform kindness to him by obliging you with a private view of the whole proceeding."
Pedgift Senior habitually matched everybody--his son included--with their own weapons. "Be good enough to remember, Augustus," he rejoined, "that my Room is not a Court of Law. A bad joke is not invariably followed by "roars of laughter" _here_. Let Mr. Bashwood come in."
Mr. Bashwood was introduced, and Pedgift Junior withdrew. "You mustn"t bleed him, sir," whispered the incorrigible joker, as he pa.s.sed the back of his father"s chair. "Hot-water bottles to the soles of his feet, and a mustard plaster on the pit of his stomach--that"s the modern treatment."
"Sit down, Bashwood," said Pedgift Senior when they were alone. "And don"t forget that time"s money. Out with it, whatever it is, at the quickest possible rate, and in the fewest possible words."
These preliminary directions, bluntly but not at all unkindly spoken, rather increased than diminished the painful agitation under which Mr.
Bashwood was suffering. He stammered more helplessly, he trembled more continuously than usual, as he made his little speech of thanks, and added his apologies at the end for intruding on his patron in business hours.
"Everybody in the place, Mr. Pedgift, sir, knows your time is valuable.
Oh, dear, yes! oh, dear, yes! most valuable, most valuable! Excuse me, sir, I"m coming out with it. Your goodness--or rather your business--no, your goodness gave me half an hour to wait--and I have thought of what I had to say, and prepared it, and put it short." Having got as far as that, he stopped with a pained, bewildered look. He had put it away in his memory, and now, when the time came, he was too confused to find it.
And there was Mr. Pedgift mutely waiting; his face and manner expressive alike of that silent sense of the value of his own time which every patient who has visited a great doctor, every client who has consulted a lawyer in large practice, knows so well. "Have you heard the news, sir?"
stammered Mr. Bashwood, shifting his ground in despair, and letting the uppermost idea in his mind escape him, simply because it was the one idea in him that was ready to come out.
"Does it concern _me_?" asked Pedgift Senior, mercilessly brief, and mercilessly straight in coming to the point.
"It concerns a lady, sir--no, not a lady--a young man, I ought to say, in whom you used to feel some interest. Oh, Mr. Pedgift, sir, what do you think! Mr. Armadale and Miss Gwilt have gone up to London together to-day--alone, sir--alone in a carriage reserved for their two selves.
Do you think he"s going to marry her? Do you really think, like the rest of them, he"s going to marry her?"
He put the question with a sudden flush in his face and a sudden energy in his manner. His sense of the value of the lawyer"s time, his conviction of the greatness of the lawyer"s condescension, his const.i.tutional shyness and timidity--all yielded together to his one overwhelming interest in hearing Mr. Pedgift"s answer. He was loud for the first time in his life in putting the question.
"After my experience of Mr. Armadale," said the lawyer, instantly hardening in look and manner, "I believe him to be infatuated enough to marry Miss Gwilt a dozen times over, if Miss Gwilt chose to ask him.
Your news doesn"t surprise me in the least, Bashwood. I"m sorry for him.
I can honestly say that, though he _has_ set my advice at defiance.
And I"m more sorry still," he continued, softening again as his mind reverted to his interview with Neelie under the trees of the park--"I"m more sorry still for another person who shall be nameless. But what have I to do with all this? And what on earth is the matter with you?" he resumed, noticing for the first time the abject misery in Mr. Bashwood"s manner, the blank despair in Mr. Bashwood"s face, which his answer had produced. "Are you ill? Is there something behind the curtain that you"re afraid to bring out? I don"t understand it. Have you come here--here in my private room, in business hours--with nothing to tell me but that young Armadale has been fool enough to ruin his prospects for life? Why, I foresaw it all weeks since, and what is more, I as good as told him so at the last conversation I had with him in the great house."
At those last words, Mr. Bashwood suddenly rallied. The lawyer"s pa.s.sing reference to the great house had led him back in a moment to the purpose that he had in view.
"That"s it, sir!" he said, eagerly; "that"s what I wanted to speak to you about; that"s what I"ve been preparing in my mind. Mr. Pedgift, sir, the last time you were at the great house, when you came away in your gig, you--you overtook me on the drive."
"I dare say I did," remarked Pedgift, resignedly. "My mare happens to be a trifle quicker on her legs than you are on yours, Bashwood. Go on, go on. We shall come in time, I suppose, to what you are driving at."
"You stopped, and spoke to me, sir," proceeded Mr. Bashwood, advancing more and more eagerly to his end. "You said you suspected me of feeling some curiosity about Miss Gwilt, and you told me (I remember the exact words, sir)--you told me to gratify my curiosity by all means, for you didn"t object to it."
Pedgift Senior began for the first time to look interested in hearing more.
"I remember something of the sort," he replied; "and I also remember thinking it rather remarkable that you should _happen_--we won"t put it in any more offensive way--to be exactly under Mr. Armadale"s open window while I was talking to him. It might have been accident, of course; but it looked rather more like curiosity. I could only judge by appearances," concluded Pedgift, pointing his sarcasm with a pinch of snuff; "and appearances, Bashwood, were decidedly against you."
"I don"t deny it, sir. I only mentioned the circ.u.mstance because I wished to acknowledge that I _was_ curious, and _am_ curious about Miss Gwilt."
"Why?" asked Pedgift Senior, seeing something under the surface in Mr.
Bashwood"s face and manner, but utterly in the dark thus far as to what that something might be.
There was silence for a moment. The moment pa.s.sed, Mr. Bashwood took the refuge usually taken by nervous, unready men, placed in his circ.u.mstances, when they are at a loss for an answer. He simply reiterated the a.s.sertion that he had just made. "I feel some curiosity sir," he said, with a strange mixture of doggedness and timidity, "about Miss Gwilt."
There was another moment of silence. In spite of his practiced acuteness and knowledge of the world, the lawyer was more puzzled than ever. The case of Mr. Bashwood presented the one human riddle of all others which he was least qualified to solve. Though year after year witnesses in thousands and thousands of cases, the remorseless disinheriting of nearest and dearest relations, the unnatural breaking-up of sacred family ties, the deplorable severance of old and firm friendships, due entirely to the intense self-absorption which the s.e.xual pa.s.sion can produce when it enters the heart of an old man, the a.s.sociation of love with infirmity and gray hairs arouses, nevertheless, all the world over, no other idea than the idea of extravagant improbability or extravagant absurdity in the general mind. If the interview now taking place in Mr.
Pedgift"s consulting-room had taken place at his dinner-table instead, when wine had opened his mind to humorous influences, it is possible that he might, by this time, have suspected the truth. But, in his business hours, Pedgift Senior was in the habit of investigating men"s motives seriously from the business point of view; and he was on that very account simply incapable of conceiving any improbability so startling, any absurdity so enormous, as the absurdity and improbability of Mr. Bashwood"s being in love.
Some men in the lawyer"s position would have tried to force their way to enlightenment by obstinately repeating the unanswered question. Pedgift Senior wisely postponed the question until he had moved the conversation on another step. "Well," he resumed, "let us say you feel a curiosity about Miss Gwilt. What next?"
The palms of Mr. Bashwood"s hands began to moisten under the influence of his agitation, as they had moistened in the past days when he had told the story of his domestic sorrows to Midwinter at the great house.
Once more he rolled his handkerchief into a ball, and dabbed it softly to and fro from one hand to the other.
"May I ask if I am right, sir," he began, "in believing that you have a very unfavorable opinion of Miss Gwilt? You are quite convinced, I think--"
"My good fellow," interrupted Pedgift Senior, "why need you be in any doubt about it? You were under Mr. Armadale"s open window all the while I was talking to him; and your ears, I presume, were not absolutely shut."
Mr. Bashwood showed no sense of the interruption. The little sting of the lawyer"s sarcasm was lost in the n.o.bler pain that wrung him from the wound inflicted by Miss Gwilt.
"You are quite convinced, I think, sir," he resumed, "that there are circ.u.mstances in this lady"s past life which would be highly discreditable to her if they were discovered at the present time?"
"The window was open at the great house, Bashwood; and your ears, I presume, were not absolutely shut."
Still impenetrable to the sting, Mr. Bashwood persisted more obstinately than ever.
"Unless I am greatly mistaken," he said, "your long experience in such things has even suggested to you, sir, that Miss Gwilt might turn out to be known to the police?"
Pedgift Senior"s patience gave way. "You have been over ten minutes in this room," he broke out. "Can you, or can you not, tell me in plain English what you want?"
In plain English--with the pa.s.sion that had transformed him, the pa.s.sion which (in Miss Gwilt"s own words) had made a man of him, burning in his haggard cheeks--Mr. Bashwood met the challenge, and faced the lawyer (as, the worried sheep faces the dog) on his own ground.
"I wish to say, sir," he answered, "that your opinion in this matter is my opinion too. I believe there is something wrong in Miss Gwilt"s past life which she keeps concealed from everybody, and I want to be the man who knows it."
Pedgift Senior saw his chance, and instantly reverted to the question that he had postponed. "Why?" he asked for the second time.
For the second time Mr. Bashwood hesitated.
Could he acknowledge that he had been mad enough to love her, and mean enough to be a spy for her? Could he say, She has deceived me from the first, and she has deserted me, now her object is served. After robbing me of my happiness, robbing me of my honor, robbing me of my last hope left in life, she has gone from me forever, and left me nothing but my old man"s longing, slow and sly, and strong and changeless, for revenge.
Revenge that I may have, if I can poison her success by dragging her frailties into the public view. Revenge that I will buy (for what is gold or what is life to me?) with the last farthing of my h.o.a.rded money and the last drop of my stagnant blood. Could he say that to the man who sat waiting for his answer? No; he could only crush it down and be silent.
The lawyer"s expression began to harden once more.
"One of us must speak out," he said; "and as you evidently won"t, I will. I can only account for this extraordinary anxiety of yours to make yourself acquainted with Miss Gwilt"s secrets, in one of two ways. Your motive is either an excessively mean one (no offense, Bashwood, I am only putting the case), or an excessively generous one. After my experience of your honest character and your creditable conduct, it is only your due that I should absolve you at once of the mean motive. I believe you are as incapable as I am--I can say no more--of turning to mercenary account any discoveries you might make to Miss Gwilt"s prejudice in Miss Gwilt"s past life. Shall I go on any further? or would you prefer, on second thoughts, opening your mind frankly to me of your own accord?"