Mr. Moy did his duty by his client. “You are not bound to answer,” he said, “unless you wish it yourself.”
Geoffrey slowly lifted his heavy head, and confronted the man whom he had betrayed.
“I deny every word of it,” he answered—with a stolid defiance of tone and manner.
“Have we had enough of assertion and counter-assertion, Sir Patrick, by this time?” asked Mr. Moy, with undiminished politeness.
After first forcing Arnold—with some little difficulty—to control himself, Sir Patrick raised Mr. Moy’s astonishment to the culminating point. For reasons of his own, he determined to strengthen the favorable impression which Arnold’s statement had plainly produced on his wife before the inquiry proceeded a step farther.
“I must throw myself on your indulgence, Mr. Moy,” he said. “I have not had enough of assertion and counter-assertion, even yet.”
Mr. Moy leaned back in his chair, with a mixed expression of bewilderment and resignation. Either his colleague’s intellect was in a failing state—or his colleague had some purpose in view which had not openly asserted itself yet. He began to suspect that the right reading of the riddle was involved in the latter of those two alternatives. Instead of entering any fresh protest, he wisely waited and watched.
Sir Patrick went on unblushingly from one irregularity to another.
“I request Mr. Moy’s permission to revert to the alleged marriage, on the fourteenth of August, at Craig Fernie,” he said. “Arnold Brinkworth! answer for yourself, in the presence of the persons here assembled. In all that you said, and all that you did, while you were at the inn, were you not solely influenced by the wish to make Miss Silvester’s position as little painful to her as possible, and by anxiety to carry out the instructions given to you by Mr. Geoffrey Delamayn? Is that the whole truth?”
“That is the whole truth, Sir Patrick.”