“I hope you found her quite well. I had barely time to speak to her myself.”
“Yes, she was very well. This is a sad thing about her father.”
“Very sad,” said Johnny. Perhaps the major had heard about the accusation for the first time today, and was going to find an escape on that plea. If such was the case, it would not be so well to be particularly civil.
“I believe Mr. Crawley is a cousin of yours?” said the major.
“His wife is my mother’s first-cousin. Their mothers were sisters.”
“She is an excellent woman.”
“I believe so. I don’t know much about them myself—that is, personally. Of course I have heard of this charge that has been made against him. It seems to me to be a great shame.”
“Well, I can’t exactly say that it is a shame. I do not know that there has been anything done with a feeling of persecution or of cruelty. It is a great mystery, and we must have it cleared up if we can.”
“I don’t suppose he can have been guilty,” said Johnny.
“Certainly not in the ordinary sense of the word. I heard all the evidence against him.”
“Oh, you did?”
“Yes,” said the major. “I live near them in Barsetshire, and I am one of his bailsmen.”
“Then you are an old friend, I suppose?”
“Not exactly that; but circumstances make me very much interested about them. I fancy that the cheque was left in his house by accident, and that it got into his hands he didn’t know how, and that when he used it he thought it was his.”
“That’s queer,” said Johnny.
“He is very odd, you know.”
“But it’s a kind of oddity that they don’t like at the assizes.”
“The great cruelty is,” said the major, “that whatever may be the result, the punishment will fall so heavily upon his wife and daughters. I think the whole county ought to come forward and take them by the hand. Well, goodbye. I’ll drive on, as I’m a little in a hurry.”
“Goodbye,” said Johnny. “I’m very glad to have had the pleasure of meeting you.”
“He’s a good sort of a fellow after all,” he said to himself when the gig had passed on. “He wouldn’t have talked in that way if he had meant to hang back.”
XXXII
Mr. Toogood
Mr. Crawley had declared to Mr. Robarts, that he would summon no legal aid to his assistance at the coming trial. The reader may, perhaps, remember the impetuosity with which he rejected the advice on this subject which was conveyed to him by Mr. Robarts with all the authority of Archdeacon Grantly’s name. “Tell the archdeacon,” he had said, “that I will have none of his advice.” And then Mr. Robarts had left him, fully convinced that any further interference on his part could be of no avail. Nevertheless, the words which had then been spoken were not without effect. This coming trial was ever present to Mr. Crawley’s mind, and though, when driven to discuss the subject, he would speak of it with high spirit, as he had done both to the bishop and to Mr. Robarts, yet in his long hours of privacy, or when alone with his wife, his spirit was anything but high. “It will kill me,” he would say to her. “I shall get salvation thus. Death will relieve me, and I shall never be called upon to stand before those cruel eager eyes.” Then would she try to say words of comfort, sometimes soothing him as though he were a child, and at others bidding him be a man, and remember that as a man he should have sufficient endurance to bear the eyes of any crowd that might be there to look at him.
“I think I will go up to London,” he said to her one evening, very soon after the day of Mr. Robarts’s visit.
“Go up to London, Josiah!” Mr. Crawley had not been up to London once since they had been settled at Hogglestock, and this sudden resolution on his part frightened his wife. “Go up to London, dearest! and why?”
“I will tell you why. They all say that I should speak to some man of the law whom I may trust about this coming trial. I trust no one in these parts. Not, mark you, that I say that they are untrustworthy. God forbid that I should so speak or even so think of men whom I know not. But the matter has become so common in men’s mouths at Barchester and at Silverbridge, that I cannot endure to go among them and to talk of it. I will go up to London, and I will see your cousin, Mr. John Toogood, of Gray’s Inn.” Now in this scheme there was an amount of everyday prudence which startled Mrs. Crawley almost as much as did the prospect of the difficulties to be overcome if the journey were to be made. Her husband, in the first place, had never once seen Mr. John Toogood; and in days very long back, when he and she were making their first gallant struggle—for in those days it had been gallant—down in their Cornish curacy, he had reprobated certain Toogood civilities—professional civilities—which had been proffered, perhaps, with too plain an intimation that on the score of relationship the professional work should be done without payment. The Mr. Toogood of those days, who had been Mrs. Crawley’s uncle, and the father of Mrs. Eames and grandfather of our friend Johnny Eames, had been much angered by some correspondence which had grown up between him and Mr. Crawley, and from that day there had been a cessation of all intercourse between the families. Since those days that Toogood had been gathered to the ancient Toogoods of old, and the son reigned on the
