The purport of Mr. Scarborough’s story will probably have been understood by our readers.  It was Mr. Scarborough’s present intention to make it understood that the scheme intended for the disinheritance of Mountjoy had been false from the beginning to the end, and had been arranged, not for the injury of Mountjoy, but for the salvation of the estate from the hands of the Jews.  Mountjoy would have lost nothing, as the property would have gone entirely to the Jews had Mr. Scarborough then died, and Mountjoy been taken as his legitimate heir.  He was not anxious, he had declared, to say anything on the present occasion in defence of his conduct in that respect.  He would soon be gone, and he would leave men to judge him who might do so the more honestly when they should have found that he had succeeded in paying even the Jews in full the moneys which they had actually advanced.  But now things were again changed, and he was bound to go back to the correct order of things.

“No!” shouted Mr. Grey.

“To the correct order of things,” he went on.  Mountjoy Scarborough was, he declared, undoubtedly legitimate.  And then he made Merton and the clerk bring forth all the papers, as though he had never brought forth any papers to prove the other statement to Mr. Grey.  And he did expect Mr. Grey to believe them.  Mr. Grey simply put them all back, metaphorically, with his hand.  There had been two marriages, absolutely prepared with the intent of enabling him at some future time to upset the law altogether, if it should seem good to him to do so.

“And your wife?” shouted Mr. Grey.

“Dear woman!  She would have done anything that I told her,—­unless I had told her to do what was absolutely wrong.”

“Not wrong!”

“Well, you know what I mean.  She was the purest and best of women.”  Then he went on with his tale.  There had been two marriages, and he now brought forth all the evidence of the former marriage.  It had taken place in a remote town, a village in the northern part of Prussia, whither she had been taken by her mother to join him.  The two ladies had both been since long dead.  He had been laid up at the little Prussian town under the plea of a bad leg.  He did not scruple to say now that the bad leg had been pretence, and a portion of his scheme.  The law, he thought, in endeavoring to make arrangements for his property,—­the property which should have been his own,—­had sinned so greatly as to drive a wise man to much scheming.  He had begun scheming early in the business.  But for his bad leg the old lady would not have brought her daughter to be married at so out-of-the-way a place as Rummelsburg, in Pomerania.  He had travelled about and found Rummelsburg peculiarly fitted for his enterprise.  There was a most civil old Lutheran clergyman there, to whom he had made himself peculiarly acceptable.  He had now certified copies of the registry at Rummelsburg, which left no loop-hole for doubt.  But he had felt that probably no inquiry would have been made about what had been done thirty years ago at Rummelsburg, had he himself desired to be silent on the subject.  “There will be no difficulty,” he said, “in making the Rummelsburg marriage known to all the world.”