For I had long discovered in my dreams that he had been my father's bitterest enemy and the main cause of his financial ruin, by selfish, heartless, and dishonest deeds too complicated to explain here—a regular Shylock.
I had found this out by listening (in my dreams) to long conversations between my father and mother in the old drawing-room at Passy, while Gogo was absorbed in his book; and every word that had passed through Gogo's inattentive ears into his otherwise preoccupied little brain had been recorded there as in a phonograph, and was now repeated over and over again for Peter Ibbetson, as he sat unnoticed among them.
I asked her, jokingly, if she had discovered that I was the rightful heir to Ibbetson Hall by any chance.
She replied that nothing would give her greater pleasure, but there was no such good fortune in store for either her or me; that she had discovered long ago that Colonel Ibbetson was the greatest blackguard unhung, and nothing new she might discover could make him worse.
I then remembered how he would often speak of her, even to me, and hint and insinuate things which were no doubt untrue, and which I disbelieved. Not that the question of their truth or untruth made him any the less despicable and vile for telling.
She asked me if he had ever spoken of her to me, and after much persuasion and cunning cross-examination I told her as much of the truth as I dared, and she became a tigress. She assured me that he had managed so to injure and compromise her in Hopshire that she and her mother had to leave, and she swore to me most solemnly (and I thoroughly believe she spoke the truth) that there had never been any relation between them that she could not have owned to before the whole world.
She had wished to marry him, it is true, for his wealth and position; for both she and her mother were very poor, and often hard put to it to make both ends meet and keep up a decent appearance before the world; and he had singled her out and paid her marked attention from the first, and given her every reason to believe that his attentions were serious and honorable.
At this juncture her mother came in, Mrs. Glyn, and we renewed our old acquaintance. She had quite forgiven me my school-boy admiration for her daughter; all her power of hating, like her daughter's, had concentrated itself on Ibbetson; and as I listened to the long story of their wrongs and his infamy, I grew to hate him worse than ever, and was ready to be their champion on the spot, and to take up their quarrel there and then.
But this would not do, it appeared, for their name must nevermore be in any way mixed up with his.
Then suddenly Mrs. Glyn asked me if I knew when he went to India.