Armadale (65 page)

I hope it is quite unnecessary for me to say that I don't attach the smallest particle of credit to these infamous reports. But they are too widely spread and too widely believed to be treated with contempt. I strongly urge you to return at once to this place, and to take the necessary measures for defending your character, in concert with me, as your legal adviser. I have formed, since my interview with Miss Gwilt, a very strong opinion of my own on
the subject of that lady, which it is not necessary to commit to paper. Suffice it to say here, that I shall have a means to propose to you for silencing the slanderous tongues of your neighbours, on the success of which I stake my professional reputation, if you will only back me by your presence and authority.

It may, perhaps, help to show you the necessity there is for your return, if I mention one other assertion respecting yourself, which is in everybody's mouth. Your absence is, I blush to tell you, attributed to the meanest of all motives. It is said that you are remaining in London because you are afraid to show your face at Thorpe-Ambrose.

Believe me, dear sir, your faithful servant,

A. PEDGIFT Sen
^r
.

Allan was of an age to feel the sting contained in the last sentence of his lawyer's letter. He started to his feet in a paroxysm of indignation, which revealed his character to Pedgift Junior in an entirely new light.

‘Where's the time-table?' cried Allan. ‘I must go back to Thorpe-Ambrose by the next train! If it doesn't start directly, I'll have a special engine. I must and will go back instantly, and I don't care two straws for the expense!'

‘Suppose we telegraph to my father, sir?' suggested the judicious Pedgift. ‘It's the quickest way of expressing your feelings, and the cheapest.'

‘So it is,' said Allan. ‘Thank you for reminding me of it. Telegraph to them! Tell your father to give every man in Thorpe-Ambrose the lie direct, in my name. Put it in capital letters, Pedgift – put it in capital letters!'

Pedgift smiled and shook his head. If he was acquainted with no other variety of human nature, he thoroughly knew the variety that exists in country towns.

‘It won't have the least effect on them, Mr Armadale,' he remarked quietly. ‘They'll only go on lying harder than ever. If you want to upset the whole town, one line will do it. With five shillingsworth of human labour and electric fluid,
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sir (I dabble a little in science after business hours), we'll explode a bombshell in Thorpe-Ambrose!' He produced the bombshell on a slip of paper as he spoke: ‘A. Pedgift Junior, to A. Pedgift Senior. – Spread it all over the place that Mr Armadale is coming down by the next train.'

‘More words,' suggested Allan, looking over his shoulder. ‘Make it stronger.'

‘Leave my father to make it stronger, sir,' returned the judicious Pedgift. ‘My father is on the spot – and his command of language is something quite extraordinary.' He rang the bell, and despatched the telegram.

Now that something had been done, Allan subsided gradually into a state of composure. He looked back again at Mr Pedgift's letter, and then handed it to Mr Pedgift's son.

‘Can you guess your father's plan for setting me right in the neighbourhood?' he asked.

Pedgift the younger shook his wise head. ‘His plan appears to be connected in some way, sir, with his opinion of Miss Gwilt.'

‘I wonder what he thinks of her?' said Allan.

‘I shouldn't be surprised, Mr Armadale,' returned Pedgift Junior, ‘if his opinion staggers you a little, when you come to hear it. My father has had a large legal experience of the shady side of the sex – and he learnt his profession at the Old Bailey.'
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Allan made no further inquiries. He seemed to shrink from pursuing the subject, after having started it himself. ‘Let's be doing something to kill the time,' he said. ‘Let's pack up, and pay the bill.'

They packed up, and paid the bill. The hour came, and the train left for Norfolk at last.

While the travellers were on their way back, a somewhat longer telegraphic message than Allan's was flashing its way past them along the wires, in the reverse direction – from Thorpe-Ambrose to London. The message was in cypher, and signs being interpreted, it ran thus:

‘From Lydia Gwilt to Maria Oldershaw – Good news! He is coming back. I mean to have an interview with him. Everything looks well. Now I have left the cottage, I have no women's prying eyes to dread, and I can come and go as I please. Mr Midwinter is luckily out of the way. I don't despair of becoming Mrs Armadale yet. Whatever happens, depend on my keeping away from London, until I am certain of not taking any spies after me to your place. I am in no hurry to leave Thorpe-Ambrose. I mean to be even with Miss Milroy first.'

Shortly after that message was received in London, Allan was back again in his own house. It was evening – Pedgift Junior had just left him – and Pedgift Senior was expected to call on business in half an hour's time.

After waiting to hold a preliminary consultation with his son, Mr Pedgift the elder set forth alone for his interview with Allan at the great house.

Allowing for the difference in their ages, the son was, in this instance, so accurately the reflection of the father, that an acquaintance with either of the two Pedgifts was almost equivalent to an acquaintance with both. Add some little height and size to the figure of Pedgift Junior; give some additional breadth and boldness to his humour, and some additional solidity and composure to his confidence in himself – and the presence and character of Pedgift Senior stood for all general purposes revealed before you.

The lawyer's conveyance to Thorpe-Ambrose was his own smart gig, drawn by his famous fast-trotting mare. It was his habit to drive himself; and it was one among the trifling external peculiarities in which he and his son differed a little, to affect something of a sporting character in his dress. The drab trousers of Pedgift the elder fitted close to his legs; his boots in dry weather and wet alike, were equally thick in the sole; his coat pockets overlapped his hips, and his favourite summer cravat was of light spotted muslin, tied in the neatest and smallest of bows. He used tobacco like his son, but in a different form. While the younger man smoked, the elder took snuff copiously; and it was noticed among his intimates that he always held his ‘pinch' in a state of suspense between his box and his nose, when he was going to clinch a good bargain, or to say a good thing. The art of diplomacy enters largely into the practice of all successful men in the lower branch of the law. Mr Pedgift's form of diplomatic practice had been the same throughout his life, on every occasion when he found his arts of persuasion required at an interview with another man. He invariably kept his strongest argument, or his boldest proposal, to the last, and invariably remembered it at the door (after previously taking his leave), as if it was a purely accidental consideration which had that instant occurred to him. Jocular friends, acquainted by previous experience with this form of proceeding, had given it the name of ‘Pedgift's postscript'. There were few people in Thorpe-Ambrose who did not know what it meant, when the lawyer suddenly checked his exit at the opened door; came
back softly to his chair, with his pinch of snuff suspended between his box and his nose; said, ‘By-the-by, there's a point occurs to me;' and settled the question off-hand, after having given it up in despair not a minute before.

This was the man whom the march of events at Thorpe-Ambrose had now thrust capriciously into a foremost place. This was the one friend at hand to whom Allan in his social isolation could turn for counsel in the hour of need.

‘Good evening, Mr Armadale. Many thanks for your prompt attention to my very disagreeable letter,' said Pedgift Senior, opening the conversation cheerfully the moment he entered his client's house. ‘I hope you understand, sir, that I had really no choice under the circumstances, but to write as I did?'

‘I have very few friends, Mr Pedgift,' returned Allan simply. ‘And I am sure you are one of the few.'

‘Much obliged, Mr Armadale. I have always tried to deserve your good opinion, and I mean, if I can, to deserve it now. You found yourself comfortable I hope, sir, at the hotel in London? We call it Our hotel. Some rare old wine in the cellar, which I should have introduced to your notice if I had had the honour of being with you. My son unfortunately knows nothing about wine.'

Allan felt his false position in the neighbourhood far too acutely to be capable of talking of anything but the main business of the evening. His lawyer's politely roundabout method of approaching the painful subject to be discussed between them, rather irritated than composed him. He came at once to the point, in his own bluntly straightforward way.

‘The hotel was very comfortable, Mr Pedgift, and your son was very kind to me. But we are not in London now; and I want to talk to you about how I am to meet the lies that are being told of me in this place. Only point me out any one man,' cried Allan with a rising voice and a mounting colour, – ‘any one man who says I am afraid to show my face in the neighbourhood; and I'll horsewhip him publicly before another day is over his head!'

Pedgift Senior helped himself to a pinch of snuff, and held it calmly in suspense midway between his box and his nose.

‘You can horsewhip a man, sir; but you can't horsewhip a neighbourhood,' said the lawyer in his politely epigrammatic manner. ‘We will fight our battle, if you please, without borrowing our weapons of the coachman yet awhile, at any rate.'

‘But how are we to begin?' asked Allan impatiently. ‘How am I to contradict the infamous things they say of me?'

‘There are two ways of stepping out of your present awkward position, sir – a short way, and a long way,' replied Pedgift Senior. ‘The short way (which is always the best) has occurred to me since I have heard of your proceedings in London from my son. I understand that you permitted him, after you received my letter, to take me into your confidence. I have drawn various conclusions from what he has told me, which I may find it necessary to trouble you with presently. In the meantime I should be glad to know under what circumstances you went to London to make these unfortunate inquiries about Miss Gwilt? Was it your own notion to pay that visit to Mrs Mandeville? or were you acting under the influence of some other person?'

Allan hesitated. ‘I can't honestly tell you it was my own notion,' he replied – and said no more.

‘I thought as much!' remarked Pedgift Senior in high triumph. ‘The short way out of our present difficulty, Mr Armadale, lies straight through that other person, under whose influence you acted. That other person must be presented forthwith to public notice, and must stand in that other person's proper place. The name if you please, sir, to begin with – we'll come to the circumstances directly.'

‘I am sorry to say, Mr Pedgift, that we must try the longest way, if you have no objection,' replied Allan quietly. ‘The short way happens to be a way I can't take on this occasion.'

The men who rise in the law are the men who decline to take No for an answer. Mr Pedgift the elder had risen in the law; and Mr Pedgift the elder now declined to take No for an answer. But all pertinacity – even professional pertinacity included – sooner or later finds its limits; and the lawyer, doubly fortified as he was by long experience and copious pinches of snuff, found his limits at the very outset of the interview. It was impossible that Allan could respect the confidence which Mrs Milroy had treacherously affected to place in him. But he had an honest man's regard for his own pledged word – the regard which looks straightforward at the fact, and which never glances sidelong at the circumstances – and the utmost persistency of Pedgift Senior failed to move him a hair's breadth from the position which he had taken up. ‘No' is the strongest word in the English language, in the mouth of any man who has the courage to repeat it often enough – and Allan had the courage to repeat it often enough on this occasion.

‘Very good, sir,' said the lawyer, accepting his defeat without the slightest loss of temper. ‘The choice rests with you, and you have
chosen. We will go the long way. It starts (allow me to inform you) from my office; and it leads (as I strongly suspect) through a very miry road to – Miss Gwilt.'

Allan looked at his legal adviser in speechless astonishment.

‘If you won't expose the person who is responsible, in the first instance, sir, for the inquiries to which you unfortunately lent yourself,' proceeded Mr Pedgift the elder, ‘the only other alternative, in your present position, is to justify the inquiries themselves.'

‘And how is that to be done?' inquired Allan.

‘By proving to the whole neighbourhood, Mr Armadale, what I firmly believe to be the truth – that the pet object of the public protection is an adventuress of the worst class; an undeniably worthless and dangerous woman. In plainer English still, sir, by employing time enough and money enough to discover the truth about Miss Gwilt.'

Before Allan could say a word in answer, there was an interruption at the door. After the usual preliminary knock, one of the servants came in.

‘I told you I was not to be interrupted,' said Allan irritably. ‘Good heavens! am I never to have done with them? another letter!'

‘Yes, sir,' said the man, holding it out. ‘And,' he added, speaking words of evil omen in his master's ears, ‘the person waits for an answer.'

Allan looked at the address of the letter with a natural expectation of encountering the handwriting of the major's wife. The anticipation was not realized. His correspondent was plainly a lady, but the lady was not Mrs Milroy.

‘Who can it be?' he said, looking mechanically at Pedgift Senior as he opened the envelope.