Leaving the matter of the estate, I thought it high time to cut to the marrow of the bigger bone. So I said: "Let us be frank with each other in this, Mr. Stair. How much has your daughter told you of the matter between us?"
"She's a jade!" he rasped, lapsing for a moment into his real self. But he recovered his self-control instantly. "Ye'd no expect a romantic bit lassie wi' French blood in her veins to be confidencing wi' her old dried-up wisp of a father, now, would ye? She's no tell't me everything, I daresay."
"Then I will tell you the plain truth of it," I said. "This marriage was never anything more than the form we all agreed it should be at the time; a makeshift to serve a purpose. If you think I would hold your daughter to it—"
"Hut, tut, man! what will ye be havering about! Ye'll never cast the poor bit lassie off that way! Ye canna, if ye would; her Church will have a word to say to that."
For all his aping the manner of the ignored father, I shrewdly suspected that he knew more about the ins and outs of our affair than he owned to. Nevertheless, I was forced to meet him on his own ground.
"There is no 'casting off' about it, Mr. Stair; and as to the Church, there is good ground for an appeal to Rome. The marriage as it stands is little more than a formal betrothal, as you well know, sound enough legally to make Mistress Margery my heir-at-law, mayhap, but still lacking everything of—"
He could not wait to let me finish.
"Lacking, d'ye say?" he rapped out, wrathfully. "And whose fault is that, ye cold-blooded stick? Tell me this; did I no bundle ye neck and heels into your own wife's bed-room? And how do you thank me? I'm to suppose ye quarrel wi' her like the dour-faced imp o' Sawtan that ye are, and presently ye come raging out, swearing most shamefully at a man old enough to be your father!"
'Twas far enough in the retrospect now so that I could smile at it. Yet I would not suffer him to bluster me aside.
"It was an ill thing for you to do, none the less, Mr. Stair; the more as you must have known that Mistress Margery's faith was plighted to Richard Jennifer long before all this came to pass."