REDCOT, WITH SUSIE IN POSSESSION.

Driving up the avenue, the arrivals came upon the little Woods and their cousins the Crabtrees at play on the lawn.

Immediately a shrill chorus was set up, ‘Here they are already--Miss Gray and Aunt Jane! Miss Gray, have you brought us the Banbury cakes and the little boats like Uncle Jack’s you promised us? Oh! here is Uncle Jack himself! Hurrah! hurrah!’

The noise must have penetrated through the open drawing-room windows instantly. But there was not the immediate rush out Bennet Gray expected--only a muffled barking within which showed that Tommy was on the scent and giving tongue. At last eager eyes saw Mrs. Prior in her daintily neat dress appearing on the threshold, but John Prior, with a newspaper in his hand, stood arrested in the hall, while Susie, in the most elegant of tea-gowns, only nodded languidly from a window. It was for the new-comers to enter and pay homage to her, in the melancholy importance of the misfortune that had happened to Lamb, and through Lamb, to his wife. Even Mrs. Prior’s steps seemed to be clogged by some invisible burden. For the first time in Jack’s many returns to Redcot his mother did not hasten to meet him. After a moment’s puzzled disappointment the explanation occurred to him and Bennet simultaneously, and Bennet’s heart fell. Susie had told her garbled tale of Jack’s appearance two days before, of his tarrying with her, and of his unnecessary detour to Oxford. Jack was the same man, unstable and trifling as ever, and yet not the same, for he had grown unfaithful to his first love, his affection had cooled to his mother.

Mrs. Prior could not altogether conceal her mortification, though she was steeling herself to do so. But Tommy forced his way past her, got among everybody’s feet in an injudicious attempt to clear at a bound the distance between him and his young master, and finally rolled over in his foolish bliss, not minding at all that Jack was standing stock-still, taking no notice of him. Then Mrs. Prior got a full view of her son’s beetling brow, wistful eyes, and clumsy vigorous young figure, and she could resist no longer--she put her arms round his neck and forgave him without a word, though whether she would forgive another was quite a different story.

‘So you’re here again, Jack, though you’ve been in no haste to report yourself,’ said John Prior, in as chilly and aggrieved a tone as if he had every reason to feel hurt and resentful at Jack’s vagrancy and supineness, and none to take himself to task for the development of the objectionable qualities.

‘It is all there is for me, father, and it is not so much worth that my staying away a day or two longer need be of any moment,’ answered Jack, with equal curtness, and perhaps more heat and soreness than had been usual with him, for was not Bennet Gray a grieved witness of his sorry reception after many months of absence, and a long voyage, with its chances and changes?

That was the beginning of one of the most miserable evenings Bennet Gray had ever spent--the evening of the day when Jack had come back to her, she reflected piteously. She might have anticipated it, she had not deserved anything better, still this reversal of what had been her foolish day-dream had not come into her reckoning.

True, Susie Crabtree was more than willing to fill the foreground and engross the canvas with her adventures and woes. She hailed her brother and sister and Miss Gray when they came into the drawing-room with a half plaintive, half imperious demand. Why had they lingered outside and not hurried in to speak to her and comfort her? They ought to have done so, after all she had gone through. She might have been murdered since they saw her last. Of course it was the greatest wonder, a perfect interposition of Providence on her behalf, that she had not been put to death--a violent and shocking death--by the brutal wretches who had broken into the bank in Lamb’s absence. Had Jane and Miss Gray heard all about it? And oh! was not Jack astonished after he had left in the morning without suspecting anything? But nobody save herself could tell what she had undergone. She was afraid she would never get over it or sleep quietly again. She had started up a hundred times the previous night, though she was sensible she was away from it all, safe at dear old Redcot.

Susie’s looks were not without confirmation of her words. In the middle of her excitement she had a certain strained, spent air as if her great dark eyes had been wide awake and wide open for an unconscionable time. The carmine of her cheeks had settled into two fixed red spots, which spoke of feverish fatigue and unrest.

‘What frightened you first, Susie?’ inquired Jane.

‘Oh! all sorts of things--the turning of locks, and the scraping of files, heavy feet, and men’s voices,’ enumerated Susie, with rapid precision. In fact she had told her tale till she had it by heart.

‘Did you not call out or ring the bell?’ asked Miss Gray, naturally.

‘Of course not,’ answered Susie, almost petulantly, ‘I did not wish to bring the monsters upon me and Piers, whose crib had been carried into my room. I did get up and put on my dressing-gown and steal to the door, wondering if I might venture to go to Jack.’

‘You did get up,’ exclaimed Jack eagerly, ‘and you came----’

‘No farther than the first lobby,’ she interrupted him, not only with her flow of words, but with an unflinching stare, under which his eyes, not hers, fell. ‘I cannot tell what happened then. I think I must have fainted, crouching down against the wall, for when I came to myself I was so cold, huddled up in the corner, between the cabinet and the pedestal with Lamb’s bust. It was all I could do to creep back to my room and get into bed again. There was no more noise and I felt sick and giddy. I fell asleep at last, and when I awoke I persuaded myself it had been a dreadful dream,’ ended Susie, with a deep sigh and an expression of injured innocence, as she examined the costly rings on her slender fingers.

‘Were your ears so impervious to sounds that you heard nothing outside your room, Jack?’ John Prior asked his son, with several shades both of suspicion and irony in his voice, as if he implied ‘Has it come to this, that you drug yourself and sleep like a log? Are you not even of as much good as a reasonably alert watch-dog?’

Susie put up her hand to her temples. She had the air of suffering from a twinge of neuralgia. She shaded her face with her hand, and bent her head in the best attitude for catching the first syllables of the reply.

‘Outside my room?’ muttered Jack, repeating his father’s words, and articulating them as if he were speaking in his sleep. ‘No; I heard nothing outside my room, unless a slight slamming of doors, which was not likely to be the work of thieves, and that must have been after the time which Susie refers to.’

He was silent, and so was Susie, while the rest of the company were left to compare and do what they could to reconcile the conflicting statements. Jack’s room had been, in fact, nearer the room which held the safe in the adjoining bank. It was odd that Mrs. Lambert Crabtree had detected conspicuous signs of the presence of burglars and yet he had distinguished nothing. There was no explanation of the discrepancy unless, as somebody obligingly pointed out, in the different degrees of light and heavy sleep which are to be found in members of the same family.

Susie had not heard from her husband with any announcement of his trip to the Scilly Isles. All that she had to say of his absence was that it was _silly_ of him to go yachting at such a time; though of course he could not foresee the bank robbery. He would be worse than silly--he would be like a madman when he did know, which she had no doubt would be presently.

During the first part of the evening Susie--who made herself much more the lion of the circle than the returned traveller put in any claim to the rôle--either went over her story with slight variations again and again, or she managed to lose sight of her terrors, passing from one extreme to the other, and getting into outrageous spirits. She returned to the details of the volunteer ball and tore them to tatters, laughing and jesting over them. The servants when they passed in and out stared at the incongruity. The cloud which she had brought with her to overhang the house only grew the darker for Susie’s frantic, intermittent efforts to escape from it. She insisted on having music and played and sang herself, though she complained that the piano was out of tune, and it was clear to the listeners that she herself was out of the little voice she had, for she sang hoarsely before she stopped--an accident which annoyed her out of all proportion to its slightness. ‘I am not going to get like a raven,’ she kept telling herself indignantly. She teased her mother till the elder woman sat down and played her pieces, her ‘Light of other days,’ and so on, without much spirit. Finally, Susie fell back on Miss Gray as the musician, and then the _contretemps_ of the evening occurred.

Poor Jack had always been famous for blundering, and it seemed that he was to keep up his character for proficiency in that questionable accomplishment. He was standing a little way from the piano turning over some illustrated papers lying on one of the gilt legged tables. Miss Gray was singing a Berkshire ballad, without the aid of printed music. Like everyone else that night she was absent-minded, and was staring straight before her into one of the large mirrors. It reflected the room and its occupants, including Mr. Prior, making a feint of reading his Quarterly at his own little table, as he had sat and read, and nervously tapped with his paper knife, on the night of Bennet’s arrival eight months before.

On the spur of the moment, as usual, Jack called out when the song was finished--‘There is another verse; won’t you give us that?’

‘I do not remember any more of the song,’ said Bennet Gray, in a hasty undertone which ought to have conveyed a warning.

‘But you used to sing another verse,’ insisted the incorrigible Jack, and the young fool spoke reproachfully. ‘I cannot be mistaken; you sang another verse down in Berkshire.’

Dead pause, but for the rustle of the pages of John Prior’s magazine and the faint stir of the fall of part of the quilt at which Mrs. Prior was working.

Bennet felt compelled to stare aghast in the great mirror before her, like one who would read her fate there, and met the reflection of a group of faces marvelling, indignant, incredulous, distressed. One of them--that of Mrs. Prior--was as white as her own. But for the culprit’s, it was not white; successive waves of red were mounting to his hair, while he bit his lips--as the next best thing to biting his tongue out, and bent again over his _Graphic_.

Susie’s voice broke the silence, rising into a shrillness of mingled surprise and gratification because her prophecy had come true, and she had stumbled on what appeared on the face of it a not particularly honourable secret. Her elation at the discovery broke down the barrier against interesting herself in anything save her own concerns which she had erected for the present. ‘Why, Jack, how can you tell Miss Gray’s songs? I thought you had never met each other before to-day.’

Jack mumbled something of having had the pleasure or the honour before he went to Australia.

Then good, true-hearted Jane, who had never had an awkward secret of her own, but could not bear to witness the discomfiture of another woman, especially when that woman was Miss Gray, came to the rescue, and tried to turn off the unpleasantness of the moment, even at the risk of incurring blame herself.

‘I knew that Miss Gray and Jack were acquainted before,’ she said, with an effort at carelessness, as if the fact were of no consequence, and without descending to particulars--such as the date of her knowledge.

‘It is a pity Miss Gray did not do us the favour of mentioning the circumstance,’ said Mrs. Prior icily, while John Prior took no notice of the turn the conversation had taken, unless by a restless movement, akin to a weary shrug, which said that nothing signified much. That revelation was what might have been expected. Jack’s friends or enemies were no business of his father’s, beyond the fact that either were pretty sure to be an annoyance, for where Jack was there was mischief. Miss Gray had been a nice girl enough, and all had gone smoothly till Jack had appeared on the scene, when, presto! Miss Gray, of whom everybody had thought so much, was found to have been imposing upon them the whole time, and another vexatious and objectionable entanglement of Jack’s had come to light.

In despair Bennet played on. She did not know what she was playing, but she felt she must be making horrible discord with her hands if they reflected her state of mind. This was Jack’s disinterested owning and claiming of her before his kindred on which she had plumed herself, for which he was to have had so much credit--this standing at the first brunt, bending down over the paper which everybody there knew he was not reading or even seeing, hanging his head and saying not a word after the slip of the tongue which had compromised them both! This was not particularly heroic behaviour. But what could he have done at the time and under the circumstances? It was not likely that he would stamp and stride to her side, draw her arm through his, and announce to his father, on whom he was dependent, and to the rest of the family--full of another pressing care, ‘This is my future wife. This is your future daughter and sister, who has been living for these many months unsuspected in the house, serving you for hire.’ The conventionalities and probabilities of the situation, which Bennet had ignored in her glad anticipation of the tableau, ought to have been taken into account.

While one of the _suspects_ was breaking the intolerable silence with a crashing noise, Susie shifted her seat to one next Jane’s and poured out her feelings to her sister. ‘I told you so, and if it was not Mat, it had been Jack all the time. She must be a perfect _intrigante_. What a woman to have in the house with us! I remember how Jack glared the evening he came back, when I spoke of the governess here. I saw that there was something wrong. I thought he was in a scrape with a girl beneath him, but I did not follow it out and connect it with this girl. I should not have thought that she could have had the audacity to come here. Oh, and I gave him such a pat piece of advice,’ and Susie began to titter in a way that was ominous of the hysterics to which Jane had said her sister was liable.

‘Oh, hush, Susie, for shame,’ cried Jane under her breath, and Susie did hush in an instant to what Germans call ‘a mouse stillness,’ when a servant with a particularly grave air entered and said that Mr. Crabtree of Haybridge was in the library wishing to speak to Mr. Prior. Mr. Crabtree would not come up to the drawing-room to disturb the ladies at so late an hour.

There was one good in these two entirely distinct and different sources of excitement and anxiety, that they seemed to balance and neutralise each other, just as a sick man with a brain ailment is said to have the current of disease diverted from the original channel and another chance of recovery granted to him by an attack of lung complaint. There is a limit to our capacity for astonishment, anger, apprehension. Having reached, or nearly reached, the limit at the first assault on our nerves and tempers, we have not unstinted forces to draw on for the second charge made on us from an opposite quarter.

Mr. Prior was out of the room before the messenger had done speaking. Susie’s eyes seemed to stand in her head as the others exchanged startled glances.

‘What is it?’ she demanded, almost wildly. ‘Mat has no right to come like this. I am entitled to hear first. Has Lamb come? Has he said anything? I will be told at once. I am going to them.’

She was on her way to the door when a new impulse seized her. She shrank back and sank into a chair, weeping passionately, and resentfully repulsing her mother and Jane when they came to her and sought to comfort her. ‘You know nothing about it. Why should you care?’

Jack was not among the would-be comforters, kind to soft-heartedness as he had shown himself hitherto. He remained standing aloof, with the air partly of a man in a suppressed rage, partly dazed and thunder-struck. He was like one who cannot bring himself to admit--who fights hard against the conviction that he is wounded to the quick, sick with loathing, appalled and outraged to the very centre of his being. The same look, wondering, questioning, horrified, had come over him in a faint and flitting fashion with the first news of the robbery, but he had put aside the recollection which lay at the root of the sensations with something like fierce shame. He had trampled it with all his might under foot, being stern and stubborn in his unbelief. He had been helped by the tumult of other interests--the most important to him--which had come between and usurped his attention. But now the evil foretaste of unexampled misfortune and disgrace was again upon him, and he could not go forward and try to soothe Susie; he could only writhe under what seemed to him abject and helpless wretchedness.

The suspense did not last long. Mr. Prior, in common humanity to his daughter, came back in a few minutes to say, not only that Mat Crabtree was gone, but to explain that the errand he had come upon had no immediate connection with Lambert Crabtree--who was not returned, nor, for that matter, with the robbery. It was simply a detail of bank business which Mr. Crabtree had ridden over to report. As John Prior made the brief statement to all whom it might concern, his deep-set eyes looked more sunken than ever under their pent-house brows, and his under-lip quivered so that he could scarcely hold it tight to render his words plain. His wife, who, under the individual blow which had been dealt at her, still watched her husband narrowly, trembled in sympathy with his repressed agitation, but nobody doubted his words.

Susie composed herself. She glanced up like a child with a fluttering smile beginning to hover again over her mouth, and the tear-drops still hanging on her long lashes. She claimed from all around her the concession that after she had borne up wonderfully throughout the affair, it was little wonder that she had broken down at last. She allowed herself to be taken away to her room with the expression of the sweetest of martyrs.

Everybody retired. The ill-starred evening had come to a close. Bennet Gray was at liberty to bemoan herself in private, a good deal more quietly, but certainly as sincerely as Susie had been doing in the family circle half an hour before. Bennet was seeing plainly in the end how wrong she had been, what a silly deception she had practised, what a foolish romance she had indulged in. It all appeared doubly wrong, silly, and foolish in the reality of the trial which had befallen the Priors. Bennet would be punished. For this painful experience was the first result of the explanation on which even that morning, and during the journey from Oxford, she had still been confidently and complacently counting. But Jack could not help himself, poor dear fellow! Bennet stuck to that conclusion not incorrectly. He had not trained himself in deceit as she had done, and already he had been snubbed and sat upon all round, instead of being received with open arms, as he should have been. What actual harm had he done? Whom had he injured save himself--at least as Bennet put it to herself when she stood convicted of sophistical reasoning, he had injured himself worst of all, and for the injury to others there was ample reparation in store, if they would but wait and take it. But even his mother--oh, dear! oh, dear!--here was ‘the most unkindest cut of all.’ The only thing worse was that the chapter of disasters had happened on the evening of the day, long looked and prayed for, of Jack’s return to Bennet, and after the secret triumph of what had occurred in his absence, which was to have burst on those interested with all the glory of the _dénouement_ of a fairy tale--the transformation scene of a pantomime.

Bennet Gray was a woman rather of tender, tenacious affections than of strong passions. She had been extremely fond of Mrs. Prior, both for her own sake and for Jack’s. Bennet had been very proud of winning Mrs. Prior’s regard. The girl had looked forward in the most shortsighted style--clever woman though she was--to the exquisite reward of letting Jack see what his mother thought of her, as well as what she thought of his mother, and of winning the son’s pardon no less than her own for the concealment they had practised. Bennet had coveted the generous satisfaction which not every wife or husband is wise enough to impart to her or his mate, of showing Jack unmistakably that his mother was her mother in very truth, as his people were her people, and she trusted humbly and reverently his God was her God. The fair fabric was dashed to the ground.

‘She used to be so glad to see me back,’ lamented poor Bennet simply, ‘but she did not care to have me again this time. She was too much put out by Jack’s having stayed away, and I suppose she connected me intuitively with his delay, though really I don’t know that I had anything to do with it beyond the fact that he heard I was going with Jane to Oxford. I don’t know what took him to Susie first, or what she said to him--no good, I am afraid. _She_ kissed me when I went away. I don’t mean that Susie kissed me--she would not have gone so far as to dab a schoolmistress’s cheek, and I should not have cared if she had. I cannot help thinking Susie’s kisses, like her tears, are crocodile productions, though she is to be pitied just now, poor little society queen. I mean my dear Mrs. Prior, the most magnanimous and kindest of unappreciated women, and I seemed to carry off her kiss on my lips like a blessing--Jack’s mother’s blessing on my head. Will she ever kiss me again? When shall I be able to persuade her that I have not taken her son from her--not really, not more than any other woman would have taken him, and she would not have wished him to remain single for her sake--to have gone without a wife, Jack, of all men! When will she believe that I did not steal into her good graces, and cheat her into caring for me?--when I did, I did! _Mea culpa._ When will Jane, who stood by me even in her sturdy truth, believe in me once more? Mary Burton was right--it would have been ever so much wiser, better, honester in all respects, if I had let matters take their course--if I had waited to be introduced to Jack’s family in the ordinary way. Now, when I tell them of my money it will be like a bribe flung in their faces to close their mouths. And the whole family are so worried about the robbery of that detestable Lambert Crabtree’s bank, that to introduce my affairs is like an impertinent intrusion, while, in place of being able to comfort them, I am only causing them fresh chagrin and affront.’

To a woman of Bennet Gray’s cast of character the punishment which she thus shadowed forth for herself was severe.