"I should say not: from the conversations I have had with Sir Alfred, I should think that he was not at all aware that their evidence could be of the slightest service to him."
"You seem to have more reasons for thinking so, Mr. Arden," said Fips, "than you have been pleased to confide to me. Now 'tis well and wisely said, that a man, for his own sake, should have no secrets either from his doctor or his lawyer. That, however, is your look out; I can only serve you to the best of my ability, as far as my information goes."
"Which is quite as far as mine, I assure you Fips. It was merely my own surmise, that Sir Willoughby might not have been quite as well received latterly as his vanity had, at first, led him to believe he should be. Now, I naturally thought that such an idea being promulgated, might suggest the possibility of Sir Willoughby's having taken the poison himself; which idea, though not amounting to evidence on either side, might, as I said before, raise doubts in the minds of a jury, calculated to bias their judgments, and so defeat the ends of justice."
"I thought," observed Fips, sulkily, for he fancied he saw that Geoffery was playing an underhand game, "I understood you to have said, you had reasons for your opinion."
"Yes, so I have—those I have just stated."
He had others, however, which he had not stated, because, as we have said, he did not wish to put himself absolutely in Fips's power, unless there should be no other means of gaining his end.
"His sisters too," continued Geoffery, "and his aunt Mrs. Dorothea, can be produced to prove so far, that Sir Alfred, before the appearance of his brother on the stage, was an assiduous, and believed himself to be a favoured lover. I do not mean to say, that either this or Lady Arden's evidence would be any proof of Sir Alfred's guilt; but, by adding the incentives of jealousy and revenge to that of mere avarice, it makes his having committed the crime much less improbable, and must therefore influence, more or less, the minds of the jury."
When the various subjects under discussion were arranged and the bottle of port finished, Mr. Fips repaired to his office—for he was a labourer at his vocation, late, as well as early—while Geoffery, whom the strains of a female voice, accompanied by a pianoforte, had been long inviting to the drawing-room, repaired thither.
Miss Fips, as the only child of Mr. Fips, was destined to be the receiver of stolen goods to a large amount; or, in other words, to inherit all the money her father had scraped together. She had therefore been sent to a London boarding-school, to receive an education proportionate to her fortune. Her Italian singing-master, called her voice a made one. He had found it impossible to give her either ear or taste; while the unshrinking audacity with which she caricatured a bravura, gave to her performance the semblance of having been got up on purpose for a burlesque: a stranger would seriously have thought, that the most polite thing they could do was to stand by and laugh openly. Her shakes were shudders, and seemed to have been produced by a sort of second-sight view of some approaching horror, invisible to all beside. Her prolonged notes resembled the howls of a chained dog, on a moonlight night; while her abrupt changes, and impassioned passages, were the starts and yells of a maniac.
Without somewhat of the grace of natural timidity, the most splendid performance could scarcely please; with what feeling then, but that of unqualified disgust, could such a display as we have just described have been witnessed; while Geoffery, who had the part of a lover not only of music, but of the lady to maintain, was thereby called upon to enact raptures.