THE BLOW FALLS.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ enjoined Mat Crabtree for the second time, an impossible piece of advice, considering the hour of his call, his aspect, his head turned to listen for the approaching footsteps of still more untimely visitors on the heels of the first. ‘I was coming to tell you that there has been an unaccountable egregious mistake somewhere. It will all be rectified presently.’ His voice stopped suddenly upon the entrance of the pretty prim housemaid. She was a more formal creature even than a footman, and would have died before she had lost her mannerly composure--a great part of her stock-in-trade. Yet she betrayed plainly enough, behind her shocked decorum, that she was, as she would have said, ‘struck all of a heap.’

She announced, ‘Two gentlemen wishing to speak to Mr. Prior and Mr. John. Shall I show them in here or up to the drawing-room?’ Her mincing, slightly quavering voice was drowned by a piercing shriek from Susie, who was sitting bolt upright panting for breath. ‘Don’t let them come near me,’ she cried wildly. ‘It is not true. What has Lamb said?’

Jack said not a word. His jaw fell a little; a lack-lustre look came into his eyes as he leaned against the window-frame so heavily that his mother in her bewilderment and consternation put her hand upon his arm to draw him back. ‘Take care, you will be through the glass,’ she warned him.

John Prior looked up like a man dazed.

‘Eh! What is it, Crabtree? What ails Susie? Who else does the girl say has come before breakfast is well over?’

The visitors answered in person. They had taken the liberty, conceiving it part of their duty, to follow on the servant’s steps, while Susie’s shriek had further accelerated their progress. Two respectable enough looking men of their class, in plain clothes, but with an official air, men perfectly well known in Newton, stepped forward. ‘We are very sorry, Mr. Prior, but we have no choice,’ said the spokesman, like a man accustomed to bear down opposition--not harshly, but as a matter of simple necessity. ‘We have business here this morning. These are the warrants.’ He took out two papers and offered them for inspection. ‘We have come over to arrest, at the instance of the crown, Susan Prior or Crabtree, wife of Lambert Crabtree, of Crabtree’s Bank--this here young lady,’ and he looked up to put in the parenthesis, ‘and John Prior, younger, of Redcot, that young gentleman there,’ he added another explanatory note to all concerned, ‘on the charge of having wickedly and feloniously, on the night of the nineteenth or the morning of the twentieth of June, broken open the safe of Crabtree’s Bank, Newton, and stolen from it the sum of seven thousand pounds in Bank of England notes, together with a parcel of South American bonds of the value of six thousand pounds.’ He ended by the usual caution to his prisoners against making any statement, whether of innocence or guilt, which might be used against them on their trial.

There was a second’s dead silence, in which one might have heard a pin fall. Susie all convulsed a moment before, sat motionless, as if she were stiffening into stone. Jack did not stir. The next instant the spell was broken by a jarring discord. Tommy rushed barking upon the scene. Instead of the unearthly stillness there arose a maddening, senseless clamour, for Tommy’s example was followed in the form of crying by the two younger children. They wanted no further provocation to express their ignorant alarm in a style in keeping with their tender years. If the officers of justice plainly heard the intolerable din, and were seriously disturbed by it in the discharge of their duty, not another grown-up person was distinctly conscious of the hideous noise, though Mrs. Prior made a mechanical motion with her hand, which signified ‘Down, Tommy; be quiet, good old dog.’ Just as instinctively and unconsciously Bennet Gray caught up Sam Wood’s and Piers Crabtree’s crumpled-together fingers in her own, clasping them in sign of restraint and encouragement.

‘It is an outrageous blunder, as I said,’ gasped Mat Crabtree, his voice half choked; ‘the best plan to clear up the error without delay will be for you, Susie, and you, Jack, to go at once along with the officers and me to Newton.’

‘Of course we’ll go,’ declared Susie, in a melodious but highly-pitched voice which startled everybody afresh. She was sitting up, smoothing her hair with both hands, in her flushed beauty and natural grace, perfectly recovered from her recent distress, apparently mistress of the situation. ‘I was taken by surprise, and nearly frightened out of my wits,’ she apologised suavely. ‘You know I don’t believe my nerves ever will recover from the effects of that atrocious robbery. But when one comes to think of it, was there ever anything so ridiculous heard as proposing to arrest me and Jack for the theft? Why don’t you laugh, Jack? Of course we’ll go, and have the joke out with the magistrate. But won’t pa-pa here do? He is a Justice of the Peace. No! Well, it will be greater fun to go to Newton; I was just about to start--you all remember? And then Lamb will share the fun. But first, my good men, have you had any refreshment after your journey?’ and Susie turned to the officers of justice who had arrested her, with a movement of the most gracious consideration. ‘Mam-ma, will you bid cook see to it, while I am getting ready and the phaeton is brought out?’

Susie took away what breath was left in the assembled party. The very policemen gaped like the children, glanced inquiringly at each other, and at the rest of the audience, and forgot their good-breeding more than Camilla the housemaid had forgotten hers by grinning in a sickly, imbecile fashion.

John Prior had crushed the newspaper he had been holding, let it drop, and risen to his feet, and was staring about him with a working face. ‘The lawyers must be stark-staring mad,’ he muttered. ‘Accuse Susie of robbing the bank, a woman, a gentlewoman, the banker her husband, and her brother mentioned as her accomplice--it is more than preposterous.’

Then he suddenly faced round with bent brows on his son.

‘What have you to say to it, Jack? You can surely say something,’ with rising irritation.

‘I can’t,’ answered Jack, with so great an effort that it sounded like a groan, bending brows which were marvellously like those of his questioner.

An indignant voice spoke up for him. ‘The accusation is so unutterably absurd, it is not worth replying to.’

It was not Mrs. Prior or Jane who said these words. Mrs. Prior, indeed, had not given way; she was very pale, but she stood erect, with eyes which saw all that passed and ears that heard every word; and she stepped forward between her husband and son as if to put a hand on each. But Jane clung to her mother as she had not clung since she was a little child. It was Bennet Gray who spoke with impatient scorn, which changed to abashed mortification before the words were well out of her mouth. She had no acknowledged right to speak there. How could she stand up and defend him before his father and mother, friends and strangers, when their relations--hers and Jack’s--had neither been openly proclaimed by him nor rightly recognised by others? Even at this moment--after one glance that seemed to appeal to her passionately--he turned away from her.

There was no farther outcry, Susie’s bearing and Jack’s silence forbade it. It would have been equivalent to admitting a belief in the sister and brother’s guilt. It would have been unworthy of the family themselves, as well as an insult to Susie and Jack, to resent and resist the action of the law, however eccentric, and to reproach or execrate the men who were there to do their duty. Susie was certainly hurrying her departure. In place of getting up any obstacle or betraying the least reluctance, she was continuing to remind everyone that she had been on the point of starting for the Bank House. She was calling for aid to collect her various properties and to see her off. She was slightly staggered on being told that she was to go with her brother and the policemen in a cab, which they had brought from Newton, instead of being driven over in the phaeton by Jack, as she had proposed, while her luggage should follow her. As for her brother-in-law, it was only by the courtesy of the officers that he was to be permitted to accompany them.

But Mrs. Lambert Crabtree insisted, against every prohibition and remonstrance, that she would take her children with her. According to Susie, she could not now be parted from darling little Mollie and Piers even for a few hours, though she had often before left them for twice as many weeks. What were the speakers thinking of? They did not know a mother’s feelings. The idea was not to be entertained for a second that she was to leave her blessed babies behind her, even in the care of their grandmamma, and Aunt Jane, and Miss Gray--who was so obliging in hearing the children say their lessons along with Molly and Piers’s cousins. It was not altogether nice to take the little ones home in a common cab. She was afraid their papa would not like it; but she was not aware that there had been any fever patients driven to the infirmary lately, and she would run the risk rather than be separated an hour longer than she could help from her pets. Susie had her way at this moment, as usual. The children were suffered to accompany her, room being made for them with some difficulty by the bigger of the policemen going on the box with the driver.

The preparing and starting Mollie and Piers increased the confusion, as well as threw a slightly different air over the party--so that, if Susie had these ends also in view, she attained them likewise.

Jane and Miss Gray, instead of the servants, waited upon Susie and the children. Jane’s hands shook, while Susie’s were steady, and Bennet was dumb before the excited chatter which the little Crabtrees struck up in the prospect of the journey.

Mr. Prior had gone aside with Mat Crabtree, Mrs. Prior had one moment which she could call her own with her son. ‘What is it, my boy?’ she asked him piteously. ‘Of course, it is all a stupid blunder; but why do you take it in this way? Why are you not able to make a jest of it, as Susie does? What is it, Jack?’

‘I can’t tell you, mother,’ answered Jack, with a restless gesture, and at the same time with an expression as if he was weary of the whole matter with utter weariness. ‘Ask Susie, if you like; I have nothing to tell.’

John Prior scarcely appeared to follow the arguments of his friend urging him to stay where he was at Redcot, pledging himself--Mat Crabtree--to see Susie and Jack through this amazing farce of a trouble, undertaking to find bail (which might be asked as a form), swearing that, if offered, bail would be accepted. Mat tried farther to explain how so unnatural a charge had been brought. The stolen bank notes had been found secreted in the Bank House. The dishonest servant who had most probably done the deed had not yet been detected. It was incumbent on the police and detectives to do something. By venturing on a ruse like this--however transparent the ruse--they might succeed in throwing the real culprits off their guard, and so let the law get on their track.

Jack mechanically kissed his mother and sister and wrung Bennet’s hand, but without looking in her face. He was going away silent and gloomy, as if he was the actual depredator.

Susie, on the contrary, was as lavish in reassuring smiles as in tender caresses. ‘Oh, how we’ll laugh at it all some day,’ she cried. ‘What a story it will be to tell, that I was taken up--actually taken up--for robbing my husband’s bank! Poor little me a burglar! It is a subject for _Punch_,’ and she held up her small hands. ‘How on earth did I do it? On the night of the volunteer ball, too, of all nights, when I was so tired and sleepy. Molly and Piers, your mam-ma is a heroine labouring under a grotesquely grim accusation, or else she is a virago or a ghoul, for anything you know or she herself can tell’ When her foot was on the step of the cab she turned lightly and ran back into the hall, to give a last direction about her trunks. Her father was standing half-way down the stair; she went up to him swiftly, passed an arm round his neck and kissed him again. ‘Cheer up, papa darling. It is a horrid bore, but it is all a wild nightmare, an insane delusion.’

‘Was it so?’ John Prior asked himself, as the cab rolled off, and the servants who had been hiding away for very shame on the family’s account came stealing into sight. Had Susie kissed him just under that grisly daub of Judas Iscariot betraying his Master, which the squire of Redcot had well nigh forgotten these many years? Whom did that strange, haggard face--wan--but with a hectic glow like a splash of blood on the pallid cheeks, resemble? Was it Susie or was it Jack?