“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 clearheaded 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 getup 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 wagonette 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 wagonette, 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
