M’Kinlay nodded; he was not quite clear how the conversation had turned upon porcelain, but the wine was exquisite, and he was content. “These opinions of mine meet little mercy down here, Mr. M’Kinlay; my neighbours call them Frenchified immoralities, and fifty other hard names; and as for myself, they do not scruple to aver that I am an old rake, come back to live on the recollection of his vices. I except, of course, our friends the Vyners—they judge, and they treat me differently; they are a charming family.”
“Charming!” echoed the lawyer, and seeming by his action to drink their health to himself.
“You know the old line, ‘He jests at wounds that never felt a scar;’ and so have I ever found that it is only amongst those who have suffered one meets true sympathy. What is this curious story”—here he dropped into a low, confidential voice—“about Miss C.? It is a by-gone now-a-days; but how was it? She was to have married a man who had a wife living; or, she did marry him, and discovered it as they were leaving the church? I forget exactly how it went—I mean the story—for I know nothing as to the fact.”
M’Kinlay listened, and through the dull fog of his besotted faculties a faint nickering of light seemed struggling to pierce. The misanthrope at Arran—the once friend, now banished for ever—the name that never was to be uttered—the mystery to be kept from all—and then Georgina’s own sudden outburst of passion on the evening they parted, when he blundered out something about a reparation to Luttrell.
All this, at first confusedly, but by degrees more clearly, passed in review before him, and he thought he had dropped upon a very black page of family history. Though the wine of which he had drank freely had addled, it had not overcome him, and, with the old instincts of his calling, he remembered how all important it is, when extracting evidence, to appear in fall possession of all the facts.
“How, in the name of wonder, Sir Within,” said he, after a long pause—“how did it ever chance that this story reached you?”
“Mr. M’Kinlay, my profession, like your own, has its secret sources of information, and, like you, we hear a great deal, and we believe very little of it.”
“In the present case,” said M’Kinlay, growing clearer every minute, “I take it you believe nothing.”
“How old is Miss O’Hara!” asked Sir William, quietly.
“Oh, Sir Within, you surely don’t mean to——”