“Even if by keeping it you blight and ruin an innocent man’s life?”
“I cannot imagine any such consequence of our silence.”
“You cannot? No! Fact is stranger than any man’s imagination. Do you happen to know the name of my second wife?”
“I did not even know that you had married again. You were known to our firm as Mr. Ransome. We lost sight of you when you changed your name to Greswold.”
“I have been married—happily married—for fourteen years; and the name of my wife was Fausset, Mildred Fausset, daughter of John Fausset, your client.”
Mr. Pergament had taken up a penknife in a casual manner, and was trifling with a well-kept thumb-nail, a fine specimen of the filbert tribe, with his eyelids lowered in an imperturbable thoughtfulness, as of a man who was rock. But, cool as he was, George Greswold noticed that at the name of Fausset the penknife gave a little jerk, and the outskirts of the filbert were in momentary danger. Mr. Pergament was too wary to look up, however. He sat placid, attentive, with flabby eyelids lowered over washed-out gray eyes. Mr. Pergament at five-and-forty was still in the chrysalis or money-making stage, and worked hard nearly all the year round. His father, at sixty-seven, was on the Yorkshire moors, pretending to shoot grouse, and just beginning to enjoy the butterfly career of a man who had made enough to live upon.
“Vivien Faux. Does not that sound to your ear like an assumed name, Mr. Pergament?” pursued Greswold. “Faux: the first three letters are the same as in Fausset.”
And then George Greswold told the solicitor how his second wife had recognised his first wife’s photograph, as the likeness of a girl whom she believed to have been her half-sister, and how this act threatened to divide husband and wife for ever.
“Surely Mrs. Greswold cannot be one of those bigoted persons who pin their faith upon a prohibition of the Canon Law as if it were the teaching of Christ—a prohibition which the Roman Church was always ready to cancel in favour of its elect?” said the lawyer.
“Unhappily my wife was taught in a very rigid school. She would perish rather than violate a principle.”