“You cad!” he cried, growing red in the face with horror and disgust. “You dare to speak so to me, and to urge such motives! But you’ve mistaken your man. I won’t be bullied. If what you want is to use this vile knowledge you’ve so vilely ferreted out, as a lever to compel me to marry my daughter to you against her will—I can only tell you, you sneak, you’re on the wrong tack. I will never consent to it. You may do your worst, but you will never bend me. I’m not a man to be bent or bullied—I won’t be put down. I’ll withstand you and defy you. You may ruin me, if you like, but you’ll never break me. I stand here firm. Expose me, and I’ll fight you to the bitter end: I’ll fight you, and I’ll conquer you.”
He spoke with a fiery earnestness that Nevitt was only just beginning to understand. There was something in this. Here was a clue indeed to follow up and investigate. Surely, a menace to Granville Kelmscott’s prospects could never have moved that heavy, phlegmatic, pachydermatous man to such an outburst of anger and suppressed fear.
“Expose YOU?” Nevitt repeated, in a dazed and startled voice. “Expose YOU, my dear sir! I assure you, in truth, I don’t understand you.”
The barrister gazed down upon him with immeasurable scorn. “You liar!” he broke forth, almost choking at the words. “How dare you so pretend and prevaricate to my face? I KNOW it’s not true. My own daughter told me. She told me what you said to her—every word of your vile threats. You had the incredible meanness to terrify a poor helpless and innocent girl by threatening to expose her mother’s disgrace publicly. Only YOU could have done it; but you did it, you abject thing, you did it. She told me with her own lips you threatened to come down to Mambury, to hunt up the records. And she told me the truth; for I’ve seen you doing it.”
A light broke slowly upon Montague Nevitt’s mind. He drew a deep breath. This was good luck incredible. What Gilbert Gildersleeve meant he hadn’t as yet, to be sure, the faintest conception. But it was clear they two were at cross-questions with one another. The secret Gilbert Gildersleeve thought he had come down to Mambury to discover was not the secret he had actually found out in the register that morning. It was nothing about the Kelmscotts or Guy and Cyril Waring; it was something about the great Q..C. and his wife themselves—presumably some unknown and disgraceful fact in Mrs. Gilbert Gildersleeve’s early history.
And here was the cleverest lawyer at the English criminal bar just giving himself away—giving himself away unawares and telling him the secret, bit by bit, unconsciously.
This chance was too valuable for Mr. Montague Nevitt to lose. At all risks he must worm it out. He paused and temporized. His cue was now not to let Gilbert Gildersleeve see he didn’t know his secret. He must draw on the Q.C. by obscure half hints till he was inextricably entangled in a complete confession.
“I had no intention of terrifying Miss Gildersleeve, I’m sure,” he said, in his blandest voice, with his best company smile, now recovering his equanimity exactly in proportion as the barrister grew angrier. “I merely desired to satisfy myself as to the salient facts, and to learn their true bearing upon the family history. If I spoke to her at all as to any knowledge I might possess with regard to any other lady’s early antecedents—”
Gilbert Gildersleeve’s brow was black as night. His great hands trembled and twitched convulsively. Was ever blackguard so cynically candid in his avowal of the basest crimes as this fine-spoken specimen of the culture of Pall Mall in his open confession of that disgusting insult to a young girl’s innocence? Gilbert Gildersleeve, who was at heart an honest man, loathed and despised and scorned and detested him.
“Do you dare to hint to me, then,” he cried, every muscle of his body quivering with just horror, “that you told my own daughter you thought you had reason to suspect her own mother’s early antecedents?”