Archibald Malmaison: Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Meanwhile the lawyers were keeping at work with commendable diligence, and
Mr. Pennroyal was counting his chickens as hatched, and was as far as
possible from suspecting the underplot which was going on around him. On
the contrary, it seemed to him that he was becoming at last the assured
favorite of fortune. For this gentleman's life had not been, in all
respects, so prosperous as it appeared. To begin with, he had had a
deplorable weakness for dicing and card-playing, which had frequently
brought him in large sums, but which had ended by costing twenty times as
much as they had won for him. He gave up these forms of diversion,
therefore, and resolved to amass a fortune in a more regular manner. He
studied the stock-market profoundly, until he felt himself sufficiently
master of the situation, and when he entered the lists as a financier. He
bought and sold, and did his very best to buy cheap and to sell dear. He
made several lucky hits; but in the long run he found that the balance was
setting steadily against him. All his ready money was gone, and mortgages
began to settle down like birds of ill-omen upon his house and lands. It
was at this period that he married Kate Battledown; and with the money
that she brought him he began to retrieve his losses, and again the
horizon brightened. Alas! the improvement was only temporary. Ill-luck set
in once more, and more inveterately than ever. Kate's good money went
after his bad money, and neither returned. A good deal of it is said to
have found its way into the pockets of Major Bolingbroke, his second in
the duel. The ill-omened birds settled down once more, until they covered
the roof and disfigured all the landscape.

To add to his troubles, he did not find that comfort and consolation in his
matrimonial relations which he would fain have had. It is true that he
married his wife first of all for her money; but he was far from
insensible to her other attractions, and, so far from wearying of them,
they took a stronger and stronger hold upon him, until this cold,
sarcastic, and unsocial man grew to be nothing less than uxorious. But his
wife recompensed his devotion but shabbily; her position had not fulfilled
her anticipations, she was angry at the loss of her money, and upon the
whole she repented having taken an irrevocable step too hastily. She felt
herself to be the intellectual equal of her husband, and she was not long
in improving the advantage she possessed of not caring anything about him.
In a word, she bullied the unfortunate gentleman unmercifully, and he
kissed the rod with infatuation.

This state of things was in force up to the time of Mrs. Pennroyal's
meeting with Archibald, as above described. After that there was a marked
and most enchanting alteration in Mrs. Pennroyal's demeanor toward her
husband. She became all at once affectionate and sympathetic. She
flattered him, she deferred to him, she consulted him, and drew him on
with delicate encouragements to consult her, to confide in her all the
private details of his affairs, which he had never done before, and to
intrust to her safekeeping every inmost fear and aspiration of his mind.
At every point she met him with soothing agreement and ingenuous
suggestion; and in particular did she echo and foster his enmity against
Sir Archibald Malmaison, and urged him forward in his suit, bidding him
spare no expense, since success was assured, and affirming her readiness
to mortgage her very jewels, if need were, to pay the eminent legal
gentlemen who were to conduct the case.

This behavior of hers afforded her husband especial gratification, for he
had always been a little jealous of Sir Archibald, and indeed one of the
impelling motives to the present action had been a desire to pay his
grudge in this respect. But the discovery that Mrs. Pennroyal hated the
young baronet quite as much as he did, filled his soul with balm; so that
it only needed the successful termination of the lawsuit to render his
bliss complete and overflowing.

Well, the great case came on; and all the nobility and gentry of the three
counties, and others besides, were there to see and hear. There were bets
that the trial would not be over in seven days, and odds were taken
against its lasting seven weeks. Society forgot its ennui and settled
itself complacently to listen to a piquant story of scandal, intrigue,
imposition, and robbery in high life.

The reader knows the sequel. Never was there such a disappointment. The
learned brethren of the law opened their mouths only to shut them again.

For after the famous Mr. Adolphus, counsel for the plaintiff, had
eloquently and ingeniously stated his case and given a picturesque and
appetizing outline of the evidence that he was going to call, and the
facts that he was going to prove; after this preliminary flourish was
over, behold, up got Mr. Sergeant Runnington, who appeared on behalf of
the defendant, and let fall some remarks which, though given in a
sufficiently matter-of-fact and every-day tone, fell like a thunder-clap
upon the ears of all present, save two persons; and produced upon the
Honorable Richard Pennroyal an effect as if a hand-grenade had been let
off within his head, and his spine drawn neatly out through the back of
his neck.

I cannot give the learned Sergeant's speech here, but the upshot of it was
that the plaintiff had no case; inasmuch as he relied, to make good his
claim, on the absence of any direct evidence establishing the identity of
the late Sir Clarence Butt Malmaison, and the decease of that illegitimate
personage whom the plaintiffs sought to confound with him.

What could have induced the plaintiff to imagine that such direct evidence
was not forthcoming, Sergeant Runnington confessed himself at a loss to
understand. He had cherished hopes, for the sake of common decency, for
the sake of the respect due to the Bench, for the sake of human nature,
that his learned brother on the other side would have been able to hold
forth a challenge which it would be, in some degree, worth his while to
answer; he regretted sincerely to say that those hopes had not been by any
means fulfilled.

Had he been previously made aware of the course of attack which the
plaintiff had had the audacity to adopt, he could have saved him and other
persons much trouble, and the Court some hours of its valuable time, by
the utterance of a single word, or, indeed, without the necessity for any
words at all. Really, this affair, about which so much noise had been
made, was so ridiculously simple and empty that he almost felt inclined to
apologize to the Court and to the gentlemen of the jury for showing them
how empty and simple it was. But, indeed, he feared that the apology, if
there was to be one, was not due from his side.

It was not for him to decide upon the motives which had prompted the
plaintiff to bring this action. He should be sorry to charge any one with
malice, with unconscionable greed, with treacherous and impudent rapacity.
It belonged to the plaintiff to explain why he had carried this case into
court, and what were his grounds for supposing that it could be made to
issue to his credit and advantage.

For his own part, he should content himself with producing the documents
which the learned counsel on the other side had professed himself so
anxious to get a sight of, and to humbly request that the plaintiff be
nonsuited with costs.

Thus ended the great trial. People could hardly, at first, believe their
own ears and eyes; but when the documents were acknowledged to be
perfectly genuine and correct, when the learned Mr. Adolphus relinquished
the case, not without disgust, and when the Court, after some very severe
remarks upon the conduct of the plaintiff, had concluded a short address
by adopting the learned Sergeant Runnington's suggestion as to the
costs--when all was settled, in short, in the utterly absurd space of two
hours and three quarters, then at last did society awake to a perception
of the fact that it had been most egregiously and outrageously swindled,
and that the Honorable Richard Pennroyal was the swindler.

Nobody was at the pains to conceal these sentiments from the honorable
gentleman, and he left the court with as little sympathy as ever
disappointed suitor had.

Poor man! he suffered enough, in more ways than one, on that disastrous
day, yet one shame and agony, the sharpest of all, was spared him--he did
not see the look and the smile that were exchanged between his wife and
Sir Archibald Malmaison, when the decision of the Court was made known.

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