He stopped in astonishment. Acting under some uncontrollable impulse, Mr. Bashwood had started to his feet. He stood, with his withered face lit up by a sudden irradiation from within, which made him look younger than his age by a good twenty years--he stood, gasping for breath enough to speak, and gesticulated entreatingly at the lawyer with both hands.
"Say it again, sir!" he burst out, eagerly, recovering his breath before Pedgift Senior had recovered his surprise. "The question about Mr. Armadale, sir!--only once more!--only once more, Mr. Pedgift, please!"
With his practiced observation closely and distrustfully at work on Mr. Bashwood' s face, Pedgift Senior motioned to him to sit down again, and put the question for the second time.
"Do I think," said Mr. Bashwood, repeating the sense, but not the words of the question, "that Mr. Armadale might be parted from Miss Gwilt, if she could be shown to him as she really is? Yes, sir! And do I wish to be the man who does it? Yes, sir! yes, sir!! yes, sir!!!"
"It's rather strange," remarked the lawyer, looking at him more and more distrustfully, "that you should be so violently agitated, simply because my question happens to have hit the mark."
The question happened to have hit a mark which Pedgift little dreamed of. It had released Mr. Bashwood's mind in an instant from the dead pressure of his one dominant idea of revenge, and had shown him a purpose to be achieved by the discovery of Miss Gwilt's secrets which had never occurred to him till that moment. The marriage which he had blindly regarded as inevitable was a marriage that might be stopped--not in Allan's interests, but in his own--and the woman whom he believed that he had lost might yet, in spite of circumstances, be a woman won! His brain whirled as he thought of it. His own roused resolution almost daunted him, by its terrible incongruity with all the familiar habits of his mind, and all the customary proceedings of his life.
Finding his last remark unanswered, Pedgift Senior considered a little before he said anything more.
"One thing is clear," reasoned the lawyer with himself. "His true motive in this matter is a motive which he is afraid to avow. My question evidently offered him a chance of misleading me, and he has accepted it on the spot. That's enough for me. If I was Mr. Armadale's lawyer, the mystery might be worth investigating. As things are, it's no interest of mine to hunt Mr. Bashwood from one lie to another till I run him to earth at last. I have nothing whatever to do with it; and I shall leave him free to follow his own roundabout courses, in his own roundabout way." Having arrived at that conclusion, Pedgift Senior pushed back his chair, and rose briskly to terminate the interview.