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
