“No fanlt of mine if it has, Sir,” broke in O’Rorke, hastily, for he saw the displeasure in the other’s look. “I was twice at the office at Westport, and there wasn’t a line there for Mr. Luttrell. Did you read the other letter, Sir?” added he, eagerly, after a moment’s silence. “I know what’s in it,” muttered Ladarelle, in confusion, for he was not quite inured to the baseness he had sunk to. “And what is it, Sir?”
“Just what I expected; that besotted old fool wants to marry her. He tells Mr. Luttrell, and tells it fairly enough, how the estate is settled, and he offers the largest settlement the entail will permit of; but he forgets to add that the same day he takes out his license to marry, we’ll move for a commission of lunacy. I have been eight weeks there lately, and not idle, I promise you. I have got plenty of evidence against him. How he goes into the room she occupied at the Castle, and has all her rings and bracelets laid out on the toilet-table, and candles lighted, as if she was coming to dress for dinner, and makes her maid wait there, telling her Madame is out on horseback, or she is in the garden, she’ll be in presently. One day, too, he made us wait dinner for her till eight o’clock; and when at last the real state of the case broke on him, he had to get up and go to his room, and Holmes, his man, told me that he sobbed the whole night through, like a child.”
“And do you think that all them will prove him mad?” asked O’Rorke, with a jeering laugh.
“Why not? If a man cannot understand that a person who has not been under his roof for six or eight months, and is some hundred miles away, may want candles in her dressing-room, and may come down any minute to dinner in that very house——”
“Oddity—eccentricity—want of memory—nothing more! There’s never a jury in England would call a man mad for all that.”
“You are a great lawyer, Mr. O’Rorke, but it is right to say you differ here from the Attorney-General.”
“No great harm in that same—when he’s in the wrong!”
“I might possibly be rash enough to question your knowledge of law, but certainly I’ll never dispute your modesty.”
“My modesty is like any other part of me, and I didn’t make myself; but I’ll stick to this—that ould man is not mad, and nobody could make him out mad.”
“Mr. Grenfell will not agree with you in that. He was over at the Castle the night I came away, and he saw the gardener carrying up three immense nosegays of flowers, for it was her birthday it seemed, however any one knew it, and Sir Within had ordered the band from Wrexham to play under her window at nightfall; and as Mr. Grenfell said, ‘That old gent’s brain seems about as soft as his heart!’ Not bad, was it?—his brain as soft as his heart!”