CHAPTER XVII.

Mr. Grey dines at home.

Mr. Grey returned home in a cab on the day of Mr. Tyrrwhit’s visit, not in the happiest humor.  Though he had got the best of Mr. Tyrrwhit in the conversation, still, the meeting, which had been protracted, had annoyed him.  Mr. Tyrrwhit had made accusations against himself personally which he knew to be false, but which, having been covered up, and not expressed exactly, he had been unable to refute.  A man shall tell you you are a thief and a scoundrel in such a manner as to make it impossible for you to take him by the throat.  “You, of course, are not a thief and a scoundrel,” he shall say to you, but shall say it in such a tone of voice as to make you understand that he conceives you to be both.  We all know the parliamentary mode of giving an opponent the lie so as to make it impossible that the Speaker shall interfere.

Mr. Tyrrwhit had treated Mr. Grey in the same fashion; and as Mr. Grey was irritable, thin-skinned, and irascible, and as he would brood over things of which it was quite unnecessary that a lawyer should take any cognizance, he went back home an unhappy man.  Indeed, the whole Scarborough affair had been from first to last a great trouble to him.  The work which he was now performing could not, he imagined, be put into his bill.  To that he was supremely indifferent; but his younger partner thought it a little hard that all the other work of the firm should be thrown on his shoulders during the period which naturally would have been his holidays, and he did make his feelings intelligible to Mr. Grey.  Mr. Grey, who was essentially a just man, saw that his partner was right, and made offers, but he would not accede to the only proposition which his partner made.  “Let him go and look for a lawyer elsewhere,” said his partner.  They both of them knew that Mr. Scarborough had been thoroughly dishonest, but he had been an old client.  His father before him had been a client of Mr. Grey’s father.  It was not in accordance with Mr. Grey’s theory to treat the old man after this fashion.  And he had taken intense interest in the matter.  He had, first of all, been quite sure that Mountjoy Scarborough was the heir; and though Mountjoy Scarborough was not at all to his taste, he had been prepared to fight for him.  He had now assured himself, after most laborious inquiry, that Augustus Scarborough was the heir; and although, in the course of the business, he had come to hate the cautious, money-loving Augustus twice worse than the gambling spendthrift Mountjoy, still, in the cause of honesty and truth and justice, he fought for Augustus against the world at large, and against the band of creditors, till the world at large and the band of creditors began to think that he was leagued with Augustus,—­so as to be one of those who would make large sums of money out of the irregularity of the affair.  This made him cross, and put him into a very bad humor as he went back to Fulham.