"Perhaps I used the wrong word. Couldn't you manage a little Heathenism for once, and be jolly? At any rate, grandmamma, tell me what the accusation is. The worst criminals are allowed to hear the indictment." Challis was just a shade uncandid in this, because he believed he knew the worst of the indictment. But he excused his conscience on the score of his right to any means of finding out whether his character, sadly soiled by that unfortunate letter business, had not been well smudged over with soot by Mrs. Eldridge into the bargain.
This conversation will have shown that grandmamma, though she had achieved a narrow-mindedness of a very choice quality, while preserving a virgin ignorance of the meaning of the popular teaching, or perversion of teaching, by which vernacular bigotries are usually fostered and nourished, was by no means a stupid person when she had an end to gain. Whether her end in the present case was the final separation of Marianne from her husband may be questioned. A working hypothesis of her motives might be that she merely wished to pay her son-in-law out for the slights he was always heaping—as she knew, while she could not understand or answer them—on her cherished booth in Vanity Fair. Whatever her ultimate object, she was unable to resist the opportunity of hitting hard that the culprit's application to hear the indictment afforded her.
"What the accusation is!" she echoed derisively. "Ask your Miss Judith what the accusation is. Ask her, and then look me in the face, Mr. Alfred Challis!" The old lady seemed quite vain of this formula of denunciation, for she picked up the missile and reloaded her arbalest. "Ask your fashionable friends—oh yes!—they look the other way, no doubt, but they have eyes in their heads, and can see for all that. Ask them, and then look me in the face, Mr. Alfred Challis! Ask your neighbours...."
"Mrs. Charlotte Eldridge?" asked Challis sharply.
"No, Alfred Challis!—not Mrs. Charlotte Eldridge only, but all the neighbours—ask them all! Ask them to say what they've seen...." But the good lady lost the luxury of her climax this time, because Challis interrupted.
"Could you mention any responsible householder who would tell me what I am accused of? I could call on my way back." Being thoroughly angry himself, he naturally spoke in a way that he knew would exasperate. This dry kind of speech was like a red rag to a bull in this old lady's case. Nothing is more infuriating than one's adversary's apparent contentment with mere words, left alone with their syntax, to shift for themselves. It makes one so conscious of one's own war-whoops, and one's occasional faulty expression of meaning, during attacks of uncontrolled anger.
"I am prepared for any evasion and prevarication from you, Alfred Challis. But I was not prepared—no, I was not prepared—for such an unblushing statement that you are kept in ignorance. Have I not told you plainly—have I not told you repeatedly—that this Miss Judith Arkroyd is what is complained of? Have I disguised anything? What I have said is the shameful, disgraceful truth. The truth, Alfred Challis! Down on your knees and acknowledge it!" A bouquet of vital doctrines essential to salvation hung about this; the attitude of kneeling was especially telling. More of the same sort followed.
When a lull came, Challis spoke. "Am I to see Marianne, or am I not?" said he. "I am convinced she is here, and I have a right to see her." The old woman kept glum silence, and he repeated his words. Then she said: "You shall not see her. It is no use. You had better go." He then said, "I know she is here, because I saw her blue silk sunshade in the entry," and left the room, as though to verify his observation. At the stair-foot he paused, and called aloud to his wife: "Polly Anne, Polly Anne! Are you there?" No answer came, and then the old woman came running out, quite inarticulate with rage and coughing.
"Listen to me," said he, and his manner stopped her. "I am going. But you will do well to pay attention to what I am going to say to you. If you repeat any impudent falsehoods about Miss Arkroyd or any other lady—yes!—whether you make them yourself or get them from any other pigsty or gutter, you will place yourself within reach of the law. You had better talk to Tillingfleet about it. He seems a sensible chap. At any rate, he will be able to tell you that people have been ruined before now by the damages they have had to pay for circulating filthy slanders without foundation. So be careful, grandmamma! Good-night!"
He had been so self-restrained up to the moment when his anger broke out in speech that his worthy mother-in-law was taken completely aback by it. She remained so until the door closed behind him. It was then too late for any demonstration, and the disappointed guardian of family morals fell back into the house gobbling like a turkey-cock. Challis found Emma at the garden-gate, and gave her her half-crown of consolation. He received the impression that she had been sent out with orders to warn Martha and the children should they return, and head them off in time to prevent a meeting. He was afterwards sorry he had not entered into conversation with this girl, and made a friend of her. But the truth is it was impossible for his mind to receive the idea that his wife's resolution would be a lasting one; and he felt confident of a penitent letter in a day or two, and an amende honorable to himself, whether he deserved one or not, for suspicions which he persisted in looking at as false per se, although one or two circumstances, quite outside their radius, might be coaxed into court by a malicious prosecution to testify against him. Any other anticipation was mere nightmare.