“That will do,” said Bashwood the younger. “I know what the soldier did, and who sent him to do it. She has given us the slip again. You are the greatest ass living. Consider yourself dismissed.” With those words, and with an oath to emphasize them, he left the coffee-shop and returned to the cab.
“She’s gone!” cried his father. “Oh, Jemmy, Jemmy, I see it in your face!” He fell back into his own corner of the cab, with a faint, wailing cry. “They’re married,” he moaned to himself; his hands falling helplessly on his knees; his hat falling unregarded from his head. “Stop them!” he exclaimed, suddenly rousing himself, and seizing his son in a frenzy by the collar of the coat.
“Go back to the hotel,” shouted Bashwood the younger to the cabman. “Hold your noise!” he added, turning fiercely on his father. “I want to think.”
The varnish of smoothness was all off him by this time. His temper was roused. His pride—even such a man has his pride!—was wounded to the quick. Twice had he matched his wits against a woman’s; and twice the woman had baffled him.
He got out, on reaching the hotel for the second time, and privately tried the servants with the offer of money. The result of the experiment satisfied him that they had, in this instance, really and truly no information to sell. After a moment’s reflection, he stopped, before leaving the hotel, to ask the way to the parish church. “The chance may be worth trying,” he thought to himself, as he gave the address to the driver. “Faster!” he called out, looking first at his watch, and then at his father. “The minutes are precious this morning; and the old one is beginning to give in.”
It was true. Still capable of hearing and of understanding, Mr. Bashwood was past speaking by this time. He clung with both hands to his son’s grudging arm, and let his head fall helplessly on his son’s averted shoulder.
The parish church stood back from the street, protected by gates and railings, and surrounded by a space of open ground. Shaking off his father’s hold, Bashwood the younger made straight for the vestry. The clerk, putting away the books, and the clerk’s assistant, hanging up a surplice, were the only persons in the room when he entered it and asked leave to look at the marriage register for the day.
The clerk gravely opened the book, and stood aside from the desk on which it lay.
The day’s register comprised three marriages solemnized that morning; and the first two signatures on the page were “Allan Armadale” and “Lydia Gwilt!”
Even the spy—ignorant as he was of the truth, unsuspicious as he was of the terrible future consequences to which the act of that morning might lead—even the spy started, when his eye first fell on the page. It was done! Come what might of it, it was done now. There, in black and white, was the registered evidence of the marriage, which was at once a truth in itself, and a lie in the conclusion to which it led! There—through the fatal similarity in the names—there, in Midwinter’s own signature, was the proof to persuade everybody that, not Midwinter, but Allan, was the husband of Miss Gwilt!