TOWARD the close of the month, Sir Francis Bendibow, having seriously turned the matter over in his mind, wrote a note to his solicitor, Merton Fillmore, asking him whether he could spare time to come over to the bank that afternoon, and have a chat with him. This note he dispatched to Mr. Fillmore by a private messenger, who was instructed to wait for an answer. In half an hour, the messenger returned, and Sir Francis read the following:

“Well, perhaps that will answer better, after all,” murmured the baronet, folding the paper up again with sombre thoughtfulness. “He gives a decent dinner, too.” So, punctually at seven o’clock, Sir Francis’ carriage drove up to Mr. Fillmore’s door; the footman gave a loud double knock, and the baronet, in black tights and ruffled shirt, was ushered into his host’s presence.

Though a solicitor, Merton Fillmore was an English gentleman, of Scotch descent on his mother’s side, and more Scotch than English in personal appearance; being of good height and build, lean, bony and high-featured, with well-formed and powerful hands, carefully-groomed finger nails, short reddish whiskers, and bushy eyebrows. His eyes were dark blue, sometimes appearing black; clear and unflinching in their gaze. The head above was well balanced, the forehead very white, and hollowed at the temples. His movements were quiet and undemonstrative; when speaking at any length, he habitually pressed his clenched right hand into the palm of his left, and kept it there. At the end of a sentence he would make his handsome lips meet together with a grave decisiveness of expression. His voice had unexpected volume and depth; it could be resonant and ear-filling without any apparent effort on the speaker’s part; it could also sink until it was just above a whisper, yet always with a keen distinctness of enunciation that rendered it more audible than mere vociferousness. Soft or melodious it never was; but its masculine fibre and vibration were far from unpleasing to most ears, certainly to most feminine ones. Fillmore, however, was a bachelor; and though still a little on the hither side of forty, he did not seem likely to change his condition. He threw himself with unweariable energy into his profession; it almost monopolized his time and his thoughts. He saw a good deal of society; but he had never, so far as was known, seen any woman who, to his thinking, comprised in herself all the attractions and benefits that society had to offer. He might, indeed, have been considered cold, but that was probably not so much the case as it superficially appeared to be.

That he should have chosen the solicitor’s branch of the legal profession was a puzzle to most people. His social position (his father had been a gentleman, living upon his own income, and there was no economical reason why Merton should not have done the same) would naturally have called him to the Bar. It can only be said that the work of a solicitor, bringing him as it did into immediate contact with the humors, the ambitions, the disputes and the weaknesses of mankind, suited his peculiar genius better than the mere logical partisanship of the barrister. He cared more to investigate and arrange a case than to plead it before a jury. He liked to have people come to him and consult him; to question them, to weigh their statements against his own insight, to advise them, to take their measure; to disconcert them or to assist them. He by no means cared to bring all the suits on which he was consulted before the court; on the contrary, he uniformly advised his clients to arrange their disputes privately, furnishing them at the same time with such sound reasons for so doing, and with such equitable advice as to a basis of agreement, as to gain for himself the reputation of an arbitrator rather than of an advocate. Nevertheless, whenever it became necessary to push matters to an extremity, the side which Merton Fillmore was known to have espoused was considered to be already half victorious. No other solicitor in London, in fact, had anything like the reputation of Merton Fillmore; he was among his fellows what Mr. Adolphus or Mr. Serjeant Runnington were among barristers. But his acquaintance with the domestic secrets of London fashionable society was affirmed, doubtless with reason, to be more extensive than that of any physician, confidential clergyman or private detective in the metropolis. He held in his hand the reputation and prosperity of many a man and woman whom the world delighted to honor. Such a position is not attained by mere intellectual ability or natural ingenuity; it demands that rare combination of qualities which may be termed social statesmanship, prominent among which is the power of inspiring others with the conviction that their revelations will be at least as safe in the hearer’s possession as in their own; and that he is broadly and disinterestedly tolerant of human frailities. Most men, in order to achieve success and eminence, require the spur of necessity or of ambition; but it is doubtful whether Fillmore would have been so eminent as he was, had either ambition or necessity been his prompter. He loved what he did for its own sake, and not any ulterior object. From the social standpoint he had nothing to desire, and pecuniarily he was independent. What he made with one hand in his profession he frequently gave away with the other; but no one knew the details of his liberality except those who were its object. He seldom spoke cordially of any one; but few were more often guilty of kindly acts. He was a man with whom nobody ventured to take a liberty, yet who spoke his mind without ceremony to every one. No one could presume to call Merton Fillmore his friend, yet no honest man ever found him unfriendly. He was no conventional moralist, but he distinguished sharply between a bad heart and a good one. These antitheses might be produced indefinitely, but enough has been said.

Fillmore lived in a handsome house in the then fashionable district of London. It was one of the best furnished and appointed houses in the town; for Fillmore was a man whose naturally fine taste had been improved by cultivation. During his annual travels on the Continent he had collected a number of good pictures and other works of art, which were so disposed about his rooms as to show that their owner knew what they were. The machinery by which his domestic economy moved was so well ordered as to be invisible; you never remarked how good his servants were, because you never remarked them at all. Once a week he gave dinners, never inviting more than five guests at a time; and once a month this dinner was followed by a reception. People renowned in all walks of life were to be met with there. Lord Byron made his appearance there several times—a young man of splendid eyes and an appalling reputation, which his affable and rather reticent bearing scarcely seemed to justify; Lady Caroline Lamb, who was supposed to be very much in love with him, and to whom his lordship was occasionally rather impolite; William Godwin, a dark little creature, too ugly not to be clever, but rather troublesome to converse with; a tall black-haired man, superbly handsome, in clerical garb; a man whose great black eyes had seen more trouble than was wholesome for their owner—who, indeed, as Hazlitt once remarked to Fillmore, would probably have been a great deal better if he hadn’t been so damned good; an agreeable little Irish lady, the author of an irretrievably moral work for the young, entitled “Frank”; a small-chinned, lustrous-eyed, smiling, fervent gentleman, who had written a number of graceful essays and poems, and who also, oddly enough, was editor of a terrific Radical journal with a motto from Defoe; a short, rather stout, Italian-looking fellow, with flashing face and forcible gesticulation, the best actor of his day, and a great toper; another stoutish man of a very different complexion, with a countenance like a humanized codfish, thick parched lips that always hung open, pale blue prominent eyes, and an astonishing volubility of philosophical speculative dogmatism; a fastidious, elderly, elegant, womanish, sentimental poetaster named Samuel Rogers, who looked not unlike a diminished Sir Francis Bendibow with the spine taken out; and, in short, a number of persons who were of considerable importance in their own day, and have become more or less so since then. He would be hard to please who could not find some one to his mind in Merton Fillmore’s drawing-room.

Sir Francis Bendibow, on the evening with which we are at present concerned, had a good deal on his mind; but that did not prevent him from enjoying an excellent dinner. He was happy in the possession of a strong and well-balanced physical organization, upon which age and a certain amount of free living in youth had made small inroads. If he had become a trifle stiff or so in his joints, he was still robust and active, and bade fair to outlive many who were his juniors. That injurious chemistry whereby the mind and emotions act upon the animal tissues was but faintly operative with Sir Francis; though it is not to be inferred that he was deficient in mental or in a certain kind of emotional vigor. He and Merton Fillmore were on familiar terms with each other—as familiar as the latter ever was a party to. Fillmore had been the legal adviser of the bank for ten years past, and knew more about it, and about Sir Francis himself, than the baronet was perhaps aware of. But the baronet was thoroughly aware of the solicitor’s abilities and force of character, and paid deference thereto, by laying aside, when in his company, the air of courteous superiority which he maintained toward the generality of men. Fillmore’s tendency in discussion was toward terseness and directness; he expressed himself in few words, though ordinarily pausing a few moments on the threshold of a sentence. Sir Francis, on the contrary, inclined to be ornamental, intricate, and wavy; not because he was ignorant that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, but because there was an arabesque bias in him, so to speak, that prompted him to shun straightforwardness as if it were a sort of vulgarity. Sometimes, no doubt, and with some men, this method was effective; as the simple person on foot is outdone by the skater, who, at the moment of seeming to accost him face to face, all at once recedes sideways in a wheeling curve that brings him wonderfully behind the other’s shoulder. But it was time thrown away to indulge in such caprioles with a man like Merton Fillmore; and as Sir Francis had the good sense to comprehend this, the two commonly got on together very comfortably.

This evening, however, when the cloth had been drawn, and the servants had disappeared, Fillmore, looking at his guest as he pushed toward him the decanter of claret, perceived that there was something more than usual on his mind. Therefore he said:

“Has that boy of yours been getting into more scrapes?”

“Not he,” answered the baronet, holding his glass up to the light for a moment, and then turning the contents down his throat. “Poor lad, he’s scarce recovered yet from the fall he got off that coach.”

They cracked filberts for a while in silence. At last Fillmore said:

“Is the bank doing well?”

“Oh, if it never does any worse, I ought to be satisfied.”

“You must look out for a partner,” observed Fillmore, after a pause. “Your son will never make a banker. And you won’t live forever.”

“The experience I have had with partners has not been encouraging,” said Sir Francis, with a melancholy smile. “The boy has plenty of brains, but he’s not strong; and, hang it! a spirited young fellow like him must have his fling. Time enough to talk to him about business when he’s seen a bit of the world.”

“He will see a bit of the next world before long, if you don’t keep him better in hand,” said Fillmore. “You ought to get a partner. All men are not Charles Grantleys, if you refer to him. You can do nothing else, unless you intend to marry again.”

“I marry again? Good God, Fillmore! If everybody else were as far from that as I am, the child born to-day would see the end of the world. No, no: I’d sooner give up business altogether. There are times, begad, when I wish I had given it up twenty years ago.”

The baronet said this with so much emphasis that Fillmore, after looking at him for a few moments, said:

“What times are those, Bendibow?”

“It’s rather a long story,” the other replied; and hesitated, wrinkling his forehead. As Fillmore kept silence, he presently resumed: “You know what confidence I have always reposed in you. To others I show myself only as the banker, or the man of the world; but to you, my dear Fillmore, I have always opened myself without disguise. You comprehend my character; and I suppose you would say that I’m a fair average specimen of the genus homo—eh?”

“If you require my opinion of you, I can give it,” replied Fillmore quietly.

“Well, ’tis not often one gets his portrait drawn by an artist like you,” said the baronet laughingly. “‘Extenuate naught, nor set down aught in malice,’ as Charley Kean has it. I expect to be edified, I assure you.”

“To begin with, your bank is the last place where I should think of putting my money,” said Fillmore, with deliberation.

“What the dooce...!”

“You may be as prosperous as report says you are,” continued Fillmore; “but you are a gambler to the marrow of your bones. You have put money in ventures which promised cent per cent: but they were carried on at imminent risk of ruin. If you have not been ruined, you have only your luck to thank for it. I like you well enough; and you have made a great success for a man of your beginnings; but you have no more morality than there is in that decanter of claret. Don’t take offense, Sir Francis. The day I find you, or any other man, committing a crime of which no alteration in my circumstances or temperament could have rendered me capable, that day I shall throw up my profession and become a journeyman evangelist. We have always been on friendly terms, and I shall never take advantage of facts about you that have come to my knowledge; but ... well, are you determined to be indignant?”

“Damme, sir, you have insulted me in your own house! I—”

“Don’t be a fool, Bendibow,” interrupted the other coldly. “You have come here to ask my advice, and perhaps my assistance. You can have both, within certain limits; but on condition that you don’t require me to shut my eyes to your character. Technically speaking, I have insulted you; and you may resent it if you like. But as a man of the world, you may remember that I have not spoken in the presence of witnesses; and that if you were blameless, the insult would recoil on myself. Take time to think it over, and then do as best pleases you.”

Sir Francis, however, whatever may have been his other failings, was not slow-witted; and he had already taken his attitude. “You have a damned disagreeable way of putting things, Fillmore,” he said; “you ought to know that something more than logic is necessary to make social intercourse agreeable. It is not so much what you say, as your manner of saying it, that got the better of my temper for a moment. I’m not going to quarrel with you for not believing me to be a saint; you may distrust my financial discretion if you like; but you can’t expect me to be interested in hearing your reasons. Let me try the other claret. I have made my mistakes, and I’ve repented of them, I hope. No man, unless he’s a fool, gossips about his mistakes—why should he? Do you mean to say that I can’t consult you on a matter that annoys me, without your raking up all my follies of the last five and twenty years?”

“My intention was not to alter our relations, but to define them,” Fillmore replied. “As we stand now, we are not likely to misconceive each other. What is this annoyance?”

“It comes from one of my follies that you’ve not been at the pains to remember. But I suppose you know that when Grantley absconded, he left a daughter behind him, whom I adopted; and that ten years ago she married and left England.”

Fillmore nodded.

“She came back a week or two ago,” continued the baronet: “and she acted a little scene at my expense in my office. It was at my expense in more ways than one. She is a devilish clever woman. She had a grudge against me for not having given her the dowry she wanted at the time of her marriage; and ... well, the upshot of it was that I compounded with her for ten thousand pounds. It was confoundedly inconvenient at the time, too; and after all, instead of banking with us, as she had given us to understand she would, the little rascal has gone to Childs’. Her husband left her a very pretty fortune. There’s not a widow in London better off or better looking than she is.”

“She means to settle here?”

“She does. And I would give a good deal if she had settled in New Zealand instead!”

“From what you have said,” observed Fillmore, after a pause, “I infer that the lady knows something to your discredit.”

“Thank you! It’s not what she knows, but what she may come to know—at least, something might happen which might be very annoying. Hang it, Fillmore, can’t you keep your inferences to yourself? I’m not in the dock—I’m at your table!”

“If I am to understand your story, either you must tell it, or I must guess it.”

“I am telling it, as fast as I can use my tongue,” returned Sir Francis, who was beginning to be demoralized by the lawyer’s imperturbable high-handedness. “To hear you, one would suppose that I was talking in riddles.”

“It may be my obtuseness; but I cannot see why the fact that a good-looking woman, who is your niece and adopted daughter, chooses to live in London, should in itself cause you annoyance.”

“If you will do me the favor to listen to me for a moment, I may be able to explain it. This niece and adopted daughter of mine is ... is not my own daughter, of course.”

“Does any one believe that she is? The lady herself, for example?”

“If she did, I should not be inconvenienced in the way I am. Had I foreseen all contingencies, I should have brought her up in the belief that she was my own daughter. As far as giving her every advantage and indulgence that was in my power is concerned, no daughter of my own could have been treated differently. But though I omitted to disguise from her the fact that she was not my own flesh and blood, I was careful never to enlarge upon the misfortunes of her actual parentage. I never spoke to her about Charles Grantley. Whatever she may have learnt about him did not come from me. I have always discouraged all allusion to him, in fact; but a girl’s curiosity will be gratified even to her own hurt; and Perdita has more than once given me to understand that she knew her father’s name, if not his history.” Here Sir Francis paused, to pour himself out a glass of claret.

“Since the man is dead,” said Fillmore, “and his reputation not of the brightest, her knowing about him can injure no one but herself.”

“Let us put a case,” said the baronet, narrowing his eyes and turning his face toward the ceiling. “Let us suppose she were to say to herself, ‘My father disappeared so many years ago, a fugitive from justice. Some time after, report came of his death. Now, there may be true reports and there may be false reports. Has this report had such confirmation as to put its truth beyond all possibility of question? It has not. It is therefore within the range of possibility that it may be false. Now, whose interest would it be that a false report of that kind should be circulated? Who, and who only, would benefit by it? Who would be relieved by it from an imminent and incessant peril? Whom would its belief enable to begin a new career, unhampered by the delinquencies of his past? And to do this, perhaps, in the very spot where those former delinquencies had been committed? What—’”

“You mean to imply,” interposed Fillmore, “that your adopted daughter believes her father to be living in London?”

“Not so fast, not so fast, my friend! So far as I am aware, the idea has not entered into her mind. I am speaking of possibilities.”

Fillmore gazed at his guest several moments in silence. At length he said: “I will adopt the hypothetical vein, since you prefer it. We will suppose that Grantley is alive and in London, and that his daughter finds it out, and seeks or grants an interview with him. What would be the nature of the inconvenience that would cause you?”

“But surely, my dear Fillmore,” cried the baronet, “you cannot fail to see how awkwardly I should be placed! The man, of course, would have some plausible story or other to tell her. She would believe him and would plead his cause with me. What could I do? To deliver him up to justice would be as much of a hardship and more of a disgrace to me than to him, not to speak of the extremely painful position in which it would place her. Matters would be raked up which were far better left in merciful oblivion. Were I, on the other hand, to allow him to establish himself amongst us, under the assumed name which he would probably have adopted, he would presume upon my tolerance and become an impracticable nuisance. Having once accepted him I should never afterward be able to rid myself of him; he would make himself an actual incubus. The thing would be unendurable either way.”

“It will simplify this affair, Bendibow,” said the lawyer slowly, “if you inform me whether Charles Grantley is in London or not.”

Sir Francis, who looked a good deal flushed and overwrought, tossed off another glass of wine by way of tranquilizing his nerves, and said, “Of course, my dear fellow, I might confide in your discretion. You understand my dilemma ... my object is to prevent—”

“Come, Bendibow, answer my question, or let us change the subject.”

For a moment it seemed probable that the baronet would give vent to the spleen which was doubtless grilling within him; but the moment passed, and he answered rather sullenly, “’Tis not likely that I should have been at the pains to prolong this interview had I not good reason to believe that he is in this neighborhood. In fact, the fellow had the audacity to call on me at the bank the other day and introduce himself under the name of Grant.”

“Is he in needy circumstances?”

“No—not as far as I know,” said Sir Francis, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “In fact, now I think of it, the clerk gave me to understand that he had deposited a certain sum in the bank.”

“Did he express an intimation of visiting his daughter?”

“He inquired about her. Of course I did not inform him of her whereabouts; I was but an hour before made acquainted with them myself. The assurance of the man passes belief.”

“It is certainly remarkable, if there is nothing to be added to your account of the events that led to his disappearance. What do you wish me to do?” As the baronet hesitated to reply, the other continued, “Shall I speak with the man and threaten him with the severity of the law unless he departs?”

“No, no—that won’t do at all!” exclaimed Sir Francis with emphasis. “No use saying anything to him; he knows very well that I don’t choose to have any scandal; and if he would keep himself quiet and not attempt to renew any of his former ties or associations, he might go to the devil, for me. I forgave him twenty years ago, on condition that he would take himself off, and I would forgive him now for not keeping to the letter of his agreement, provided he would observe the spirit of it. No, no—it’s the Marquise—it’s Perdita whom we must approach. You can manage her better than I. She won’t suspect you. You must sound her carefully. She’s a doocid clever woman, but you can do it if any man can. If you can induce her to change her residence to some other country, so much the better. Find out what she knows and thinks about this father of hers. If the opportunity offers, paint the devil in all his ugliness. At any cost put all possible barriers in the way of their meeting. That’s the main thing. No use my giving you instructions; you’ll know what to do when you see her, and find out the sort of woman she is. Shall depend on you, my dear Fillmore—your sagacity and friendship and all that. You know what I mean. Use your own judgment. Damme, I can trust a friend!”

“I will think it over, and speak to you again on the subject in a day or two,” said Fillmore, who perceived that the claret had not improved the baronet’s perspicacity or discretion. Moreover, the subject appeared to him to demand more than ordinary reflection. Long after Sir Francis had been bundled into his carriage and sent home, the lawyer sat with folded arms and his chin in his hand, examining the topic of the evening in many lights and from various points of view.

“Never knew an honest man so shy of the malefactor who had swindled him,” he muttered to himself when he went to bed.