THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY

C >> Charlotte M. Yonge >> THE CLEVER WOMAN OF THE FAMILY

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"The young lady may be precocious, no doubt, sir," here said the
accused, "but I hardly see why she has been brought here. You can
attach no weight to the confused recollections of so young a child,
of matters that took place so long ago."

"The question will be what weight the jury will attach to them at the
assizes," said Mr. Grey.

"You will permit me to make one inquiry of the young lady, sir. Who
told her whom she might expect to see here?"

Mr. Grey repeated the query, and Rose answered, "Nobody; I knew my
aunt and the Colonel and Lady Temple were gone in to Avoncester, and
Aunt Ermine got a note from the Colonel to say that I was to come in
to him with Tibbie in a fly."

"Did you know what you were wanted for?"

"No, I could not think. I only knew they came to get the woman
punished for being so cruel to the poor little girls."

"Do you know who that person was?"

"Mrs. Rawlins," was the ready answer.

"I think," said Mr. Grey to the accused, "that you must perceive
that, with such coincidence of testimony as I have here, I have no
alternative but to commit you for the summer assizes."

Mauleverer murmured something about an action for false imprisonment,
but he did not make it clear, and he was evidently greatly
crestfallen. He had no doubt hoped to brazen out his assumed
character sufficiently to disconcert Mr. Beauchamp's faith in his own
memory, and though he had carried on the same game after being
confronted with Maria, it was already becoming desperate. He had not
reckoned upon her deserting his cause even for her own sake, and the
last chance of employing her antecedents to discredit her testimony,
had been overthrown by Rose's innocent witness to their mutual
relations, a remembrance which had been burnt in on her childish
memory by the very means taken to secure her silence. When the
depositions were read over, their remarkable and independent
accordance was most striking; Mrs. Dench had already been led away by
the minister, in time to catch her train, just when her sobs of
indignation at the deception were growing too demonstrative, and the
policeman resumed the charge of Maria Hatherton.

Little Rose looked up to her, saying, "Please, Aunt Ailie, may I
speak to her?"

Alison had been sitting restless and perplexed between impulses of
pity and repulsion, and doubts about the etiquette of the justice
room; but her heart yearned over the girl she had cherished, and she
signed permission to Rose, whose timidity had given way amid
excitement and encouragement.

"Please, Maria," she said, "don't be angry with me for telling;
I never did till Colonel Keith asked me, and I could not help it.
Will you kiss me and forgive me as you used?"

The hard fierce eyes, that had not wept over the child's coffin,
filled with tears.

"Oh, Miss Rose, Miss Rose, do not come near me. Oh, if I had minded
you--and your aunts--" And the pent-up misery of the life that had
fallen lower and lower since the first step in evil, found its course
in a convulsive sob and shriek, so grievous that Alison was thankful
for Colin's promptitude in laying hold of Rose, and leading her out
of the room before him. Alison felt obliged to follow, yet could not
bear to leave Maria to policemen and prison warders.

"Maria, poor Maria, I am so sorry for you, I will try to come and see
you--"

But her hand was seized with an imperative, "Ailie, you must come,
they are all waiting for you."

How little had she thought her arm would ever be drawn into that arm,
so unheeded by both.

"So that is Edward's little girl! Why, she is the sweetest little
clear-headed thing I have seen a long time. She was the saving of
us."

"It was well thought of by Colin."

"Colin is a lawyer spoilt--that's a fact. A first-rate get-up of a
case!"

"And you think it safe now?"

"Nothing safer, so Edward turns up. How he can keep away from such a
child as that, I can't imagine. Where is she? Oh, here--" as they
came into the porch in fuller light, where the Colonel and Rose
waited for them. "Ha, my little Ailie, I must make better friends
with you."

"My name is Rose, not Ailie," replied the little girl.

"Oh, aye! Well, it ought to have been, what d'ye call her--that was
a Daniel come to judgment?"

"Portia," returned Rose; "but I don't think that is pretty at all."

"And where is Lady Temple?" anxiously asked Alison. "She must be
grieved to be detained so long."

"Oh! Lady Temple is well provided for," said the Colonel, "all the
magistrates and half the bar are at her feet. They say the grace and
simplicity of her manner of giving her evidence were the greatest
contrast to poor Rachel's."

"But where is she?" still persisted Alison.

"At the hotel; Maria's was the last case of the day, and she went
away directly after it, with such a choice of escorts that I only
just spoke to her."

And at the hotel they found the waggonette at the gateway, and Lady
Temple in the parlour with Sir Edward Morden, who, late as it was,
would not leave her till he had seen her with the rest of the party.
She sprang up to meet them, and was much relieved to hear that
Mauleverer was again secured. "Otherwise," she said, "it would have
been all my fault for having acted without asking advice. I hope I
shall never do so again."

She insisted that all should go home together in the waggonette, and
Rose found herself upon Mr. Beauchamp's knee, serving as usual as a
safety valve for the feelings of her aunt's admirers. There was no
inconstancy on her part, she would much have preferred falling to the
lot of her own Colonel, but the open carriage drive was rather a risk
for him in the night air, and though he had undertaken it in the
excitement, he soon found it requisite to muffle himself up, and
speak as little as possible. Harry Beauchamp talked enough for both.
He was in high spirits, partly, as Colin suspected, with the escape
from a dull formal home, and partly with the undoing of a wrong that
had rankled in his conscience more than he had allowed to himself.
Lady Temple, her heart light at the convalescence of her sons, was
pleased with everything, liked him extremely, and answered gaily; and
Alison enjoyed the resumption of pleasant habits of days gone by.
Yet, delightful as it all was, there was a sense of disenchantment:
she was marvelling all the time how she could have suffered so much
on Harry Beauchamp's account. The rejection of him had weighed like
a stone upon her heart, but now it seemed like freedom to have
escaped his companionship for a lifetime.

Presently a horse's feet were heard on the road before them; there
was a meeting and a halt, and Alick Keith's voice called out--"How
has it gone?"

"Why, were you not in court?"

"What! I go to hear my friends baited!"

"Where were you then?"

"At Avonmouth."

"Oh, then you have seen the boys," cried Lady Temple. "How is
Conrade?"

"Quite himself. Up to a prodigious amount of indoor croquet. But
how has it gone?"

"Such a shame!" returned Lady Temple. "They acquitted the dreadful
man, and the poor woman, whom he drove to it, has a year's
imprisonment and hard labour!"

"Acquitted! What, is he off?"

"Oh, no, no! he is safe, and waiting for the Assizes, all owing to
the Colonel and little Rose."

"He is committed for the former offence," said Colonel Keith; "the
important one."

"That's right! Good night! And how," he added, reining back his
horse, "did your cousin get through it?"

"Oh, they were so hard on her!" cried Lady Temple. "I could hardly
bring myself to speak to Sir Edward after it! It was as if he
thought it all her fault!"

"Her evidence broke down completely," said Colonel Keith. "Sir
Edward spared her as much as he could; but the absurdity of her whole
conduct was palpable. I hope she has had a lesson."

Alick's impatient horse flew on with him, and Colin muttered to
Alison under his mufflers,--"I never could make out whether that is
the coolest or the most sensitive fellow living!"

CHAPTER XXII.

THE AFTER CLAP

"I have read in the marvellous heart of man,
That strange and mystic scroll,
That an army of phantoms vast and wan
Beleaguer the human soul.

"Encamped beside life's rushing stream,
In Fancy's misty light,
Gigantic shapes and shadows gleam
Portentous through the night."
The Beleaguered City, LONGFELLOW.

A dinner party at the Deanery in the sessions week was an
institution, but Rachel, lying on the sofa in a cool room, had
thought herself exempt from it, and was conscious for the time of but
one wish, namely, to be let alone, and to be able to shut her eyes,
without finding the lids, as it were, lined with tiers of gazing
faces, and curious looks turned on her, and her ears from the echo of
the roar of fury that had dreadfully terrified both her and her
mother, and she felt herself to have merited! The crush of public
censure was not at the moment so overwhelming as the strange morbid
effect of having been the focus of those many, many glances, and if
she reflected at all, it was with a weary speculating wonder whether
one pair of dark grey eyes had been among those levelled at her. She
thought that if they had, she could not have missed either their
ironical sting, or perchance some kindly gleam of sympathy, such as
had sometimes surprised her from under the flaxen lashes.

There she had lain, unmolested and conscious of a certain relief in
the exceeding calm; the grey pinnacle of the cathedral, and a few
branches of an elm-tree alone meeting her eye through the open
window, and the sole sound the cawing of the rooks, whose sailing
flight amused and attracted her glance from time to time with dreamy
interest. Grace had gone into court to hear Maria Hatherton's trial,
and all was still.

The first break was when her mother and Miss Wellwood came in, after
having wandered gently together round the warm, walled Deanery
garden, comparing notes about their myrtles and geraniums. Then it
was that amid all their tender inquiries after her headache, and
their administration of afternoon tea, it first broke upon Rachel
that they expected her to go down to dinner.

"Pray excuse me," she said imploringly, looking at her mother for
support, "indeed, I don't know that I could sit out a dinner! A
number of people together make me so dizzy and confused."

"Poor child!" said Miss Wellwood, kindly, but looking to Mrs. Curtis
in her turn. "Perhaps, as she has been so ill, the evening might be
enough."

"Oh," exclaimed Rachel, "I hope to be in bed before you have finished
dinner. Indeed I am not good company for any one."

"Don't say that, my dear," and Miss Wellwood looked puzzled.

"Indeed, my dear," said Mrs. Curtis, evidently distressed, "I think
the exertion would be good for you, if you could only think so."

"Yes, indeed," said Miss Wellwood, catching at the notion; "it is your
mind that needs the distraction, my dear."

"I am distracted enough already," poor Rachel said, putting her hand
up. "Indeed, I do not want to be disobliging," she said,
interpreting her mother's anxious gestures to mean that she was
wanting in civility; "it is very kind in you, Miss Wellwood, but this
has been a very trying day, and I am sure I can give no pleasure to
anybody, so if I might only be let off."

"It is not so much--" began Miss Wellwood, getting into a puzzle, and
starting afresh. "Indeed, my dear, my brother and I could not bear
that you should do anything you did not like, only you see it would
never do for you to seem to want to shut yourself up."

"I should think all the world must feel as if I ought to be shut up
for life," said Rachel, dejectedly.

"Ah! but that is the very thing. If you do not show yourself it will
make such a talk."

Rachel had nearly said, "Let them talk;" but though she felt
tormented to death, habitual respect to these two gentle, nervous,
elderly women made her try to be courteous, and she said, "Indeed,
I cannot much care, provided I don't hear them."

"Ah! but you don't know, my dear," said Mrs. Curtis, seeing her
friend looked dismayed at this indifference. "Indeed, dear Miss
Wellwood, she does not know; we thought it would be so awkward for
her in court."

"Know what?" exclaimed Rachel, sitting upright, and putting down her
feet. "What have you been keeping from me?"

"Only--only, my dear, people will say such things, and nobody could
think it that knew you."

"What?" demanded Rachel.

"Yes," said Mrs. Curtis, perhaps, since her daughter was to have the
shock, rather glad to have a witness to the surprise it caused her:
"you know people will gossip, and some one has put it about that--
that this horrid man was--"

Mrs. Curtis paused, Miss Wellwood was as pink as her cap strings.
Rachel grasped the meaning at last. "Oh!" she said, with less
reticence than her elders, "there must needs be a spice of flirtation
to give piquancy to the mess of gossip! I don't wonder, there are
plenty of people who judge others by themselves, and think that
motive must underlie everything! I wonder who imagines that I am
fallen so low?"

"There, I knew she would take it in that way," said Mrs. Curtis.
"And so you understand us, my dear, we could not bear to ask you to
do anything so distressing except for your own sake."

"I am far past caring for my own sake," said Rachel, "but for yours
and Grace's, mother, I will give as much ocular demonstration as I
can, that I am not pining for this hero with a Norman name. I own I
should have thought none of the Dean's friends would have needed to
be convinced."

"Oh, no! no! but--" Miss Wellwood made a great confusion of noes,
buts, and my dears, and Mrs. Curtis came to the rescue. "After all,
my love, one can't so much wonder! You have always been very
peculiar, you know, and so clever, and you took up this so eagerly.
And then the Greys saw you so unwilling to prosecute. And--and I
have always allowed you too much liberty--ever since your poor dear
papa was taken--and now it has come upon you, my poor child! Oh, I
hope dear Fanny will take warning by me," and off went poor Mrs.
Curtis into a fit of sobs.

"Mother--mother! this is worse than anything," exclaimed Rachel in an
agony, springing to her feet, and flying after sal volatile, but
feeling frightfully helpless without Grace, the manager of all Mrs.
Curtis's ailments and troubles. Grace would have let her quietly cry
it out. Rachel's remedies and incoherent protestations of all being
her own fault only made things worse, and perhaps those ten minutes
were the most overwhelming of all the griefs that Rachel had brought
on herself. However, what with Miss Wellwood's soothing, and her own
sense of the becoming, Mrs. Curtis struggled herself into composure
again by the time the maid came to dress them for dinner; Rachel all
the while longing for Grace's return, not so much for the sake of
hearing the verdict, as of knowing whether the mother ought to be
allowed to go down to dinner, so shaken did she look; for indeed,
besides her distress for her daughter, no small ingredient in her
agitation was this recurrence to a stated custom of her husband's
magisterial days.

Persuasion was unavailing. At any cost the Curtis family must
present an unassailable front to the public eye, and if Mrs. Curtis
had forced forward her much tried and suffering daughter, far more
would she persist in devoting herself to gaiety and indifference, but
her nervousness was exceeding, and betrayed itself in a continual
wearying for Grace, without whom neither her own dress nor Rachel's
could be arranged to her satisfaction, and she was absolutely
incapable of not worrying Rachel about every fold, every plait, every
bow, in a manner that from any one else would have been unbearable;
but those tears had frightened Rachel into a penitent submission that
endured with an absolute semblance of cheerfulness each of these
torments. The languor and exhaustion had been driven away, and
feverish excitement had set in, not so much from the spirit of
defiance that the two elder ladies had expected to excite, as from
the having been goaded into a reckless determination to sustain her
part. No matter for the rest.

It often happened in these parties that the ladies would come in from
the country in reasonable time, while their lords would be detained
much later in court, so when the cathedral clock had given notice of
the half-hour, Mrs. Curtis began to pick up fan and handkerchief, and
prepare to descend. Rachel suggested there would be no occasion so
to do till Grace's return, since it was plain that no one could yet
be released.

"Yes, my dear, but perhaps--don't you think it might be remarked as
if you chose to keep out of sight?"

"Oh, very well."

Rachel followed her mother down, sustained by one hope, that Captain
Keith would be there. No; the Deanery did not greatly patronize the
barracks; there was not much chance of any gentleman under forty,
except, perhaps, in the evening. And at present the dean himself and
one canon were the entire gentleman element among some dozen ladies.
Everybody knew that the cause of delay was the trial of the cruel
matron, and added to the account of Rachel's iniquities their
famished and weary state of expectation, the good Dean gyrating among
the groups, trying to make conversation, which every one felt too
fretful and too hungry to sustain with spirit. Rachel sat it out,
trying to talk whenever she saw her mother's anxious eyes upon her,
but failing in finding anything to say, and much doubting whether her
neighbours liked talking to her.

At last gentlemen began to appear in twos and threes, and each made
some confidence to the womankind that first absorbed him, but no one
came in Rachel's way, and the girl beside her became too unfeignedly
curious to support even the semblance of conversation, but listened
for scraps of intelligence. Something was flying about respecting
"a gentleman who came down by the train," and something about "Lady
Temple" and "admirable," and the young lady seized the first
opportunity of deserting Rachel, and plunging into the melee. Rachel
sat on, sick with suspense, feeling utterly unable to quit her seat.
Still they waited, the whole of the party were not arrived, and here
was the curfew ringing, and that at the Deanery, which always felt
injured if it were seven o'clock before people were in the dining-
room! Grace must be upstairs dressing, but to reach her was
impossible!

At last Mr. Grey was announced, and he had mercy upon Rachel; he came
up to her as soon as he could without making her remarkable, and told
her the cause of his delay had been the necessity of committing
Mauleverer upon an accusation by a relation of Colonel Keith, of very
extensive frauds upon Miss Williams's brother. Rachel's illness and
the caution of the Williamses had prevented her from being fully
aware of the complication of their affairs with her own, and she
became paler and paler, as she listened to the partial explanation,
though she was hardly able as yet to understand it.

"The woman?" she asked.

"Sentenced to a year's imprisonment with hard labour, and let me tell
you, Rachel, you had a most narrow escape there! If that army doctor
had not come in time to see the child alive, they could not have
chosen but have an inquest, and no mortal can tell what might have
been the decision about your homoeopathy. You might have been
looking forward to a worse business than this at the next assizes."

Mr. Grey had done his work at last! The long waiting, the weary
constraint, and at last the recurrence of Lovedy's sufferings and her
own share in them, entirely overcame her. Mists danced before her
eyes, and the very sensation that had been so studiously avoided was
produced by her fainting helplessly away in her chair, while Mr. Grey
was talking to her.

To be sure it brought deliverance from the multitude, and she awoke
in the quiet of her room, upon her bed, in the midst of the
despairing compunction of the mother, and the tender cares of Grace,
but she was too utterly overdone for even this to be much relief to
her; and downstairs poor Miss Wellwood's one desire was to hinder the
spread of the report that her swoon had been caused by the tidings of
Mauleverer's apprehension. It seemed as if nothing else had been
wanting to make the humiliation and exposure complete. Rachel had
despised fainting ladies, and had really hitherto been so
superabundant in strength that she had no experience of the symptoms,
or she might have escaped in time. But there she lay, publicly
censured before the dignitaries of her county for moral folly, and
entirely conquered before the rest of the world by the physical
weakness she had most contemned.

Then the mother was so terrified and distressed that all sorts of
comforting reassurances were required, and the chief object soon
became to persuade her to go downstairs and leave Rachel to her bed.
And at last the thought of civility and of the many Mrs. Grundys
prevailed, and sent her downstairs, but there was little more comfort
for Rachel even in being left to herself--that for which she had a
few minutes before most ardently longed.

That night was perhaps the most painful one of her whole life. The
earnest desire to keep her mother from uneasiness, and the longing to
be unmolested, made her play her part well when the mother and Grace
came up to see her before going to bed, and they thought she would
sleep off her over-fatigue and excitement, and yielded to her desire
that they should bid her good night, and leave her to rest.

But what sort of rest was it? Sometimes even her own personal
identity was gone, and she would live over again in the poor
children, the hunger and the blows, or she would become Mrs. Rawlins,
and hear herself sentenced for the savage cruelty, or she would
actually stand in court under sentence for manslaughter. Her pulses
throbbed up to fever pitch, head and cheeks burnt, the very power to
lie still was gone, and whether she commanded her thoughts or lapsed
into the land of dreams, they worked her equal woe.

Now it was the world of gazing faces, feverishly magnified,
multiplied, and pressing closer and closer on her, till she could
have screamed to dispel them; now it was her mother weeping over the
reports to which she had given occasion, and accusing herself of her
daughter's errors; and now it was Lovedy Kelland's mortal agony, now
the mob, thirsting for vengeance, were shouting for justice on her,
as the child's murderer, and she was shrieking to Alick Keith to
leave her to her fate, and only save her mother.

It would hardly be too much to say that the positive wretchedness of
actually witnessing the child's death was doubled in these its
imaginary repetitions on that still more suffering night of waking
dreams, when every solemn note of the cathedral clock, every resolute
proclamation from its fellow in the town hall, every sharp reply from
the domestic timepiece in the Deanery fell on her ears, generally
recalling her at least to full consciousness of her identity and
whereabouts, and dispelling the delusion.

But, then, what comfort was there? Veritably she had caused
suffering and death; she had led to the peril of Fanny's children;
she had covered her mother with shame and grief! Nay, in her
exaggerated tone of feeling, she imagined that distress and poverty
might have been entailed on that beloved mother. Those title deeds--
no intelligence. Captain Keith had taken no notice. Perhaps he
heard and believed those degrading reports! He had soul enough to
pity and sympathize with the failure of extended views of
beneficence; he despised the hypocrisy that had made charity a cloak
for a credulous debasing attachment, and to such an object! He might
well avoid her! His sister had always bantered her on what had
seemed too absurd to be rebutted, and, at any rate, this fainting fit
would clench his belief. No doubt he believed it. And if he did,
why should not every one else whose opinion she cared for: Ermine,
her Colonel, even gentle Fanny--no, she would never believe any harm,
she had suffered too much in her cause.

Oh, for simple genuine charity like Fanny's, with eyes clear with
innocence and humility! And now what was before her? should she ever
be allowed to hide her head, or should she be forced again to brave
that many-eyed world? Perhaps the title-deed business would prove
utter ruin. It would have been acceptable to herself, but her mother
and sister!

Chastisement! Yes, it was just chastisement for headstrong folly and
conceit. She had heard of bending to the rod and finding it a cross,
but here came the dreadful confusion of unreality, and of the broken
habit of religious meditation except as matter of debate. She did
not know till her time of need how deeply sneers had eaten into her
heart. The only text that would come to her mind was, "And in that
day they shall roar against them like the roaring of the sea; and if
one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow, and the light is
darkened in the heavens thereof." Every effort at prayer or at calm
recall of old thoughts still ended in that desolate verse. The first
relief to these miserable dreams was the cool clear morning light,
and by-and-by the early cathedral bells, then Grace's kind greeting
made her quite herself; no longer feverish, but full of lassitude and
depression. She would not listen to Grace's entreaties that she
would remain in bed. No place was so hateful to her, she said, and
she came down apparently not more unwell than had been the case for
many days past, so that after breakfast her mother saw no reason
against leaving her on the sofa, while going out to perform some
commissions in the town, attended, of course, by Grace. Miss
Wellwood promised that she should not be disturbed, and she found
that she must have been asleep, for she was taken by surprise by the
opening of the door, and the apologetic face of the butler, who told
her that a gentleman had asked if she would see him, and presented
the card of "Captain Alexander Keith."

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