These words were gall and wormwood to Bennet.
The sight of Gilbert the previous afternoon had revived his dormant desire for revenge, and after much thought he had come to the conclusion to tell Francis Eversleigh that the price of his silence with regard to the fraudulent sale of Beauclerk Mansions was that the solicitor must use pressure to get the match broken off, and not only that, but also to induce the girl to marry him. It was rather a mad scheme, and if Bennet had really considered it fully he would probably have decided against suggesting it. It never struck him that he was conniving at fraud; if it had, he would not have been deterred. He was a headstrong, reckless man, determined to get his own way, rightly or wrongly, and to get it whatever happened.
"Wait," he said; "I have not finished yet. You must break off the match. How it is to be done I leave to you. You will find some means of doing it. The main point is that it be done. There must be no misunderstanding on that head. But there is more to be said: you must not only break off the match, but you must forward my suit with Miss Thornton."
"Your suit with Miss Thornton!" cried Eversleigh.
"Yes; perhaps you were not aware that I proposed to her, but I was too late. She had already accepted your son. You never heard that she rejected me?"
"I did not know it."
Eversleigh's thoughts went back to that day—the awful, fateful day in which Silwood had confessed his embezzlements—on which he had given Gilbert a hint of Bennet's advances to Kitty, and how, at the time he had given it, life stretched before him bright and fair. He shuddered as he recalled all that had happened since.
Bennet, watching him intently, saw the shudder that shook the frame of the solicitor, and, not knowing what was passing through the other's mind, misinterpreted it.
"The idea of my proposing to Miss Thornton makes you shudder, is that it?" he asked fiercely and angrily. "It becomes you well—you, the cheat, the embezzler, the swindler."
Eversleigh looked at Bennet helplessly.