And he felt quite obliged to Colonel Bardell for affording this hypothesis.
"Yes, Bardell was coming to England—possibly at Marlowe now. He knows Sir Jekyl. Egad, that's the very thing. He's been talking; and this officious old French bourgeois thinks he's doing a devilish polite thing in telling me what a suspected dog I am."
The General laughed, and breathed a great sigh of relief, and recalled all the cases he could bring up in which fellows had got into scrapes unwittingly about horse-flesh, and how savagely fellows sometimes spoke when they did not like their bargains.
CHAPTER XXXV.
The Bishop at Marlowe.
So he laboured in favour of his hypothesis with an uneasy sort of success; but, for a few seconds, on one sore point of his heart had there been a pressure, new, utterly agonising, and there remained the sense of contusion.
The General took his hat, and came and walked off briskly into the city a long way, thinking he had business; but when he reached the office, preferring another day—wishing to be back at Marlowe—wishing to see Varbarriere—longing to know the worst.
At last he turned into a city coffee-house, and wrote a reply on a quarto sheet of letter-paper to Monsieur Varbarriere. He was minded first to treat the whole thing with a well-bred contempt, and simply to mention that as he expected soon to be at Marlowe, he would not give Monsieur Varbarriere the trouble of making an appointment elsewhere.
But, seated in his box, he read Monsieur Varbarriere's short letter over again before committing himself, and it struck him that it was not an intimation to be trifled with—it had a certain gravity which did not lose its force by frequent reading. The gentleman himself, too—reserved, shrewd, with an odd mixture of the unctuous and the sardonic—his recollection of this person, the writer, came unpleasantly in aid of the serious impression which his letter was calculated to make; and he read again—