“And I,” rejoined Mrs. Macallan, “have reason to think that your whole project is a mad one, and that in asking Dexter’s advice on it you appropriately consult a madman. You needn’t start, child! There is no harm in the creature. I don’t mean that he will attack you, or be rude to you. I only say that the last person whom a young woman, placed in your painful and delicate position, ought to associate herself with is Miserrimus Dexter.”
Strange! Here was the Major’s warning repeated by Mrs. Macallan, almost in the Major’s own words. Well! It shared the fate of most warnings. It only made me more and more eager to have my own way.
“You surprise me very much,” I said. “Mr. Dexter’s evidence, given at the Trial, seems as clear and reasonable as evidence can be.”
“Of course it is!” answered Mrs. Macallan. “The shorthand writers and reporters put his evidence into presentable language before they printed it. If you had heard what he really said, as I did, you would have been either very much disgusted with him or very much amused by him, according to your way of looking at things. He began, fairly enough, with a modest explanation of his absurd Christian name, which at once checked the merriment of the audience. But as he went on the mad side of him showed itself. He mixed up sense and nonsense in the strangest confusion; he was called to order over and over again; he was even threatened with fine and imprisonment for contempt of Court. In short, he was just like himself—a mixture of the strangest and the most opposite qualities; at one time perfectly clear and reasonable, as you said just now; at another breaking out into rhapsodies of the most outrageous kind, like a man in a state of delirium. A more entirely unfit person to advise anybody, I tell you again, never lived. You don’t expect Me to introduce you to him, I hope?”
“I did think of such a thing,” I answered. “But after what you have said, dear Mrs. Macallan, I give up the idea, of course. It is not a great sacrifice—it only obliges me to wait a week for Major Fitz-David’s dinner-party. He has promised to ask Miserrimus Dexter to meet me.”
“There is the Major all over!” cried the old lady. “If you pin your faith on that man, I pity you. He is as slippery as an eel. I suppose you asked him to introduce you to Dexter?”
“Yes.”
“Exactly! Dexter despises him, my dear. He knows as well as I do that Dexter won’t go to his dinner. And he takes that roundabout way of keeping you apart, instead of saying No to you plainly, like an honest man.”
This was bad news. But I was, as usual, too obstinate to own myself defeated.
“If the worst comes to the worst,” I said, “I can but write to Mr. Dexter, and beg him to grant me an interview.”