AN EMBASSY.

Days, even weeks, passed, until a sort of gruesome familiarity grew up in the minds of people interested and uninterested in an event so improbable, disgraceful, and unspeakably miserable as the charge against Mrs. Lambert Crabtree and her brother.

It began to be a matter of course, as if it had been a conclusion always to be anticipated, that Susie Crabtree and her brother had been accused of robbing Crabtree’s Bank, had been arrested, were out on bail, and must stand their trial at the Assize held at a country town which, fortunately, was not Newton, but Crowminster, several miles further from Redcot. The whole incredible, wretched story seemed to ring in Bennet Gray’s ears from morning to night till every syllable was lodged in her memory and riveted there, and her entire mind was usurped so that she could think of nothing else, as when life or death in a sick-room engrosses the faculties of the watchers. Remonstrances from without, of which there were some, though there could not be many, touched her but slightly. One of the late Josh Gray’s friends, a light of the law whom she had consulted, took the trouble to write and deliver a strong opinion upon the late great practitioner’s cousin and heiress mixing herself up with people who could get into such grave trouble as had befallen the Priors. But he received so unqualified an answer for his pains that he decided the young lady had a mind of her own, and must be left to waste poor Josh Gray’s money as she chose. Mary Burton left her school for a day, and brought her father with her, for additional weight to bear on her friend; and Bennet kissed and shook hands and thanked them, but was as stone to the faintest hint of giving up a lover in such a plight as Jack Prior’s.

Mat Crabtree, who had been fully enlightened throughout their acquaintance with regard to Miss Gray’s possessions, when he was told of the line of conduct she was pursuing, discussed it apart with John Prior, who had been overborne by her into taking her at her word. Mat induced the squire of Redcot to make a fresh stand, backed by a responsible ally, and to remonstrate anew on the sacrifice she was bent on making. Mat Crabtree explained elaborately how money could be raised as he himself was raising it, without having recourse to a young lady who at that moment was totally unconnected with the Priors either by blood or marriage.

But Miss Gray resisted the two men, either of them old enough to be her father, as stoutly as if they had been her contemporaries.

‘I can surely do what I like with my own. What is it to anyone else how I dispose of my money? I have often mourned over being an orphan without near relatives, but I have thought there was one small compensation--I was my own mistress,’ she protested, almost angrily. ‘Why do you force me to tell you over again that I promised myself to Jack when I was poor, and that, as I will never go back from my word, whatever he may do or say, he is the next thing to my husband in my eyes? If you will not accept my help I shall engage counsel on my own responsibility, and let the world think what it chooses.’

Bennet had imagined Jack Prior owning and claiming her before his friends; but, as it turned out, it was she who had to own and claim Jack, and she did not flinch from the obligation. She stood the brunt of every attack on her unmoved. Not only was she unlike Susie Crabtree in not being given to cast her burden on another, and to cling to whoever would bear the imposition, Bennet was not even upheld by Jack. He went on steadily, refusing to come out to Redcot, where Susie would have had no objection to reappear if she had got any encouragement. Jack only wrote one letter in return for the score of letters Bennet Gray sent him, not caring--at least not caring sufficiently to cause her to let her pen lie idle for twenty-four hours--that she had no answer save that single note. He told her so briefly in the page and a half she could only guess at the mortal misery with which the words were scrawled, that their engagement, with all their happy hopes and plans for the future, was at an end. A man charged with a bank robbery, and bound to undergo a trial, whether he were found guilty or not, was not a fit husband for her or any innocent girl of spotless reputation and honourable antecedents, even though she had been as penniless as he had thought her. She was to have nothing more to say to him. He believed it would have been a happy riddance, even if all this had not happened; an ugly, stupid, idle cub, who had been ‘no good’ to anybody connected with him. She would be infinitely better without him, if she could only see it, and he hoped she would be happy, and said with his whole heart, God bless her for all she had wished to be to him. But he could not hear of the connection lasting a day longer; he would be a selfish brute to think of it.

On the other hand, ever since she had known him, when Jack had fallen over head and ears in love with her on the first day of their acquaintance, Bennet had felt in some occult fashion accountable for the lad, bound to look after him, take care of him, and cherish him. It was from no want of manliness in him. Manliness was one of Jack’s most conspicuous characteristics; and in place of being backward, he had been rather too forward and sanguine in urging his suit when he had nothing, independent of his father, to offer the woman he sought for his wife. It was the peculiar tie which unites certain natures, the form which love takes in the hearts of some women, and those among the noblest of their sex. Bennet’s young lover was her natural charge, as well as her natural protector. He was, as coming events cast their shadows before, her lord and master; he was at the same time nearly as much her boy as he was his mother’s.

Bennet’s command of the means to carry on the contest had earned for her, without claim on her part, the right to be consulted. Besides, her quick intelligence and fearless spirit would have qualified her to come forward in any difficulty. She had learned all there was to know, and had been taken into masculine confidences from which the other women in tenderness for them had been excluded. Yet Mrs. Prior could have shared the knowledge with Bennet and not have given way, but only grown more full of resource the greater the demand on her powers--only Mrs. Prior had elected that there should be no alliance between her and her future daughter-in-law. The consciousness of the severed friendship, which had been so sore at first, had ceased almost to be felt by Bennet. For how could she pause to dwell on any minor grievance when her heart was full to bursting of Jack and his piteous strait?

Bennet had been forced to apprehend the seriousness of the outlook, not only that the presumptive evidence was next to damning against Susie before so startling and prejudicial a step as the arrest of a woman in her position was risked by competent authorities, but that there were many unlucky coincidences in apparent corroboration of Jack Prior’s participation in his sister’s guilt which might compromise him fatally. His too opportune arrival at Newton the night before the volunteer ball and the robbery. His failing to repair at once to Redcot, which would only have been natural after a long absence, instead of staying on with his sister, yet with a kind of secret consciousness, neither showing himself in the town nor appearing at the ball, but lying in wait, as it were, till his services were called for. His anxiety to get away before the baffled attempt at robbing the bank had been discovered; so that he started next morning without so much as waiting for breakfast. Above all, his dogged silence in declining to make any statement which would throw light on the matter, all were so many suspicious circumstances which the accused man’s counsel, however skilful and eminent in his profession, would find it hard to get rid of.

There was one little glimmer of comfort which came to Bennet in her tribulation; not only was Jane free from envy of the supremacy to which her fellow-student had attained, and inclined to be sisterly with a greater longing for sympathy on her own account than the girl had ever before experienced; but just as a spiritual door had closed between Bennet and Mrs. Prior, so a mode of communication was opened, and grew wider day by day, between Miss Gray and John Prior. The young woman, the heritage of whose age and character it was that she could not despair and would not doubt, who was devoted to her purpose unhesitatingly and unsparingly, gained with every hour upon the beaten, disappointed man. Her nature worked upon his, till she restored to some extent his tottering belief in his son. At least Jack could not be base when she vouched for his truth. Her unshaken conviction of his worth went far to prove him worthy in a fashion. Bennet shed tears of joy in her night of sorrow when she found out for herself that John Prior had been to Newton, and been at the Bank House, where he had asked Jack to accompany him to the post-office and the railway station--a request which Jack, taken unawares and suspecting nothing, had granted. The result was that the father and son had been seen together in the most public places in the town, and that one of the disastrous exaggerated allegations likely to be brought against the young man--namely, that he was an incorrigible scapegrace, at open war with his father--must be materially weakened by this contradictory evidence.

Bennet did not know whether the incident reached Mrs. Prior, and whether she set it down also to the debtor and creditor account she had established between herself and the woman whom her son loved, and who loved him. Mrs. Prior might look upon it as a fresh wrong done to that other woman who had loved him longer, asking nothing again; as one more instance in which she, the wife and mother, had been defrauded even of her wifely voice, her influence with the father on behalf of the son.

Withal, Mrs. Prior had risen up to meet adversity as best she could. She had been quiet and self-restrained. For some time previously the reins of domestic government had been held slackly in her hands. The old house, with old Martha the cook, old Richard the coachman, the old gardener, and the younger servants under them, had very much kept itself. It was different now, when a stormy blast had shaken the establishment to its foundations, upset routine and rules, and let loose the elements of disorder, well-nigh of anarchy. However faithful the staff of servants, they could not be expected to sustain the ordeal unmoved. But Mrs. Prior gathered up the reins, superintended each department as in her younger, more active years, saw that all was ordered rightly as it had been heretofore, and provided carefully for the comfort of each member of the community, including her natural enemy, Miss Gray. When the domestic machinery worked once more like clock-work, a sense of stability returned to the house, which had been, as it were, rocking wildly. Men and women went back to their several duties--dinner was not three minutes too late, the plate was cleaned, the horses were groomed with the accustomed regularity. A fulness of confidence succeeded to the sense of unsteadiness when Mrs. Prior was heard talking to Tommy, checking an uncanny disposition to howl which the old dog, as he detected something wrong, with canine acuteness, had manifested lately to the superstitious horror of the servants’ hall. The mistress of the family was even seen to sit down in her own corner and put a few stitches into one of her quilts--a proceeding which had an excellent effect. The little Woods ceased to stray over the house and gather such husks of gossip as the children could pick up. They began to play again at their old familiar games, to attend to their rabbits and pigeons, to confine the children’s chatter to their own small concerns. The grown-up people commenced to believe it possible not only that the sky would not fall and the world would go on as it used to do, but that the clouds might pass away from Redcot, the sun shine out once more as it had shone a year--a month ago, and everything be as it had been formerly.

Mrs. Prior contributed her quota, and that not a small one, in stemming the tide, which might have prevailed till it accomplished the demolition of the family framework.

John Prior forbade his wife and daughter to enter Newton. Mrs. Prior complied conditionally. She would respect her husband’s wishes unless--she did not say what misadventure or what epoch was to limit her obedience. Jane shrank of her own accord from the expedition. She could bear to see Jack, but not Susie. Her unprincipled extravagance had much to do with all the misery. Jane did not dare to say more even to her own heart.

It had come to this, then, that Bennet Gray, acting on her own idea and on a hint from Jack Prior’s counsel, volunteered her services, and accepted a commission from Mr. Prior to go to Newton, see both Susie and Jack, and gather what she could of the truth from them. If John Prior had to give up his daughter, there was no help for it--at least he might take refuge in the knowledge that she was a married woman, and that, if she had committed a crime, it must have been at the instigation of a reprobate of a husband, who had exposed her to the danger of which he was to have reaped the fruits. But John Prior could not suffer his son to be the victim of his sister’s treachery. Whatever the father had thought of the son in the past, it was John Prior’s part to come to Jack’s rescue now; it was all the more and not the less his part because of the alienation which had existed between the two. Jack’s cause was his father’s cause, and that of the woman who would go through fire and water for her lover, who loved him even as the woman who had borne him loved him. The lad was not forsaken.

There was no objection to Bennet Gray’s going to Newton. She would not be openly shamed in the deed. As Mat Crabtree had said, there was as yet no confessed connection of blood or marriage between her and any Prior or Crabtree. Her position in the Redcot family, which was all the public knew of her, would render it not at all out of the way that she should go as a messenger between Redcot and the Bank House.

Bennet had almost forgotten during these heavily-cumbered days whether the season was summer or winter. When she went up to her room for her hat and jacket, she recognised, almost with wonder, that the noisette roses were still drooping in great white clusters, like sculptured flowers, on a railing opposite. The shiver which, when she had leisure to feel it, was always running through her veins now, must be in the blood and not in the air. As she came down stairs she saw Jane by the hall table tying string round some little parcels. One of them contained a few of Susie’s superfluities, a pet fan, a favourite scent bottle, a hood to wear when she indulged in a nap, which their owner had left behind her at Redcot and was clamouring to have sent to her. With another unusual instance of recollection and consideration in trifles, showing how Jane was waking up from her mental absorption, she had also put up some of cook’s cakes, and the little Woods’ books and toys for Molly and Piers Crabtree. Jane explained--‘Their uncle says they are very much left to themselves, poor children, while Susie will not let them be taken out of the turmoil to run about in peace either here or at Haybridge. What I have sent may help to amuse them. You will not mind looking after the parcels, will you, Miss Gray?’

Jane refrained from the use of Bennet’s Christian name, not because of any reluctance to take the privilege of their future relationship with her friend, but because of that habitual obliviousness and lack of glibness which made Jane in her wisdom so devoid of tact and practical cleverness, compared to Susie in her folly. Even under the circumstances, Bennet could not refrain from a suspicion that Jane Prior had probably let her stumbling choice fall on the most indigestible of cook’s dainties and the most unentertaining of the Woods’ books and toys--those ‘Conversations on the Telescope’ and that miniature globe, Jane’s own gifts originally, which were supposed to combine instruction and amusement. Molly and Piers might snatch these loans out of each other’s hands, come to blows over the temporary novelties, tear or break them, but would not otherwise honour them with juvenile patronage. However, the amiable intention was everything.

‘Of course, I’ll not mind,’ said Bennet. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

Yes, there were two small baskets--one of summer pears, the other of mushrooms--also standing on the hall table, but Jane knew nothing of them. She would hardly have proposed the last as a free gift to the little Crabtrees. Perhaps the baskets were on the table by accident, and it was not meant that Miss Gray should take them in the phaeton with her.

Mrs. Prior arrived on the scene in time to account for the baskets.

‘May I trouble you?’ she said formally yet simply enough; ‘Susie is very fond of mushrooms, which none of the rest care for. She used always to claim the first from Redcot, where we have not had them early this year. The pears are from the tree which Jack planted when he was a boy in his garden.’

‘Is there nothing more I can say from you?’ asked Bennet, faltering in her wistfulness.

‘Nothing; thanks.’ Mrs. Prior froze again instantly.

Bennet was not to be favoured with any communication beyond what the things themselves called for. Mrs. Prior chose they should go, and therefore used the go-between, though the tokens of the mother’s faithful remembrance and affection had to pass through Bennet Gray’s hands. Well, Susie wouldn’t care if she had the mushrooms, and surely the pears would taste all the sweeter to Jack in spite of the renunciation he had brought himself to write--a renunciation to which the person to whom it was written would not consent.

‘Make Jack come out and see us,’ was Jane’s last injunction, given with a wavering smile, aloud, before everybody who cared to listen. Oh, it was not very difficult for her to transfer her right to Jack and her influence over him to another woman! Her own thoughts were straying from Redcot to a new home with another master than either John Prior or his son after him.

Bennet drove in solitary state to Newton, her mind wandering now and then from the business which engrossed it to her first drive along that road with Jane on the November afternoon, and to the last coming home, in the June prime of the year, with Jack, to be soon followed by a disastrous parting. But she was never sufficiently disengaged, hopeful, and far-sighted to dream of herself as one day mistress of Redcot driving in to Newton in a new carriage, with young horses and a young husband.

The market town had resumed its normal aspect--sleepy in summer, with dogs stretched in the middle of the pavement, cats sitting basking at open doors, birds in their cages hanging by open windows--stagnant in winter, with the animal world housed and doors and windows closed tightly. However vigorously gossip might still be prevailing in the interiors, it had ceased till a more exciting moment to flow out and be demonstrative in the streets. The aristocratic quarter of the Bank House, which had been roused from its repose on the day when Crabtree’s Bank stopped payment, was restored to its pristine quiet. The large houses with the flights of broad steps to their front doors, and the pillars to their garden gates, looked as fixed in their substantial respectability and serene dignity as ever. When Bennet passed the little green, shaded by its one big elm opposite the church porch, the clock in the church tower chimed the hour with a drowsily precise monotony that added to the peace of the blue air in which white butterflies and brown bees and swallows with ringed throats went and came. Did Susie and Jack listen to the bells as they rang out at sunset and in the hush of the night? And did they remind him of an all-seeing Judge who knew what the young man would not tell, though his silence might be dooming him and those he loved best to shame and misery? Was Susie moved by the old familiar sound to repent of the destruction she was bringing upon her father’s house, the brother’s ruin she was compassing beyond the hope of redemption? Susie had accustomed herself to regard these bells as among the relics of a worn-out superstition, but did the solemn, wistful reverberations awaken no lingering echo in her heart in what must be her sharp tribulation?

The region was like itself, but its centre had undergone a melancholy transformation. The closed bank with its shuttered windows, was an image of death which gave a shock to the visitor who had not been there since the current of business was arrested at its source. The Bank House had no drawn blinds or locked doors, but it had a dead-alive, and, what was worse, a stigmatised air. The spacious, important building figured to Bennet’s fancy as a ticket-of-leave house subjected to the unslumbering vigilance of the law, and to a nervous, horrified avoidance on the part of its neighbours. The man loitering at the corner was like a policeman out of uniform. There was nobody arriving or departing from the most hospitable of mansions. The door-steps were not so spotlessly white as they had been wont to be when the numerous callers on Mrs. Lambert Crabtree’s visiting list flocked from far and near to pay her their respects. The bell was not so promptly answered. Roger, the man-servant, who did duty in the _déshabille_ of his working jacket, either for that or for some other reason, stared stupidly for a moment in answer to Bennet’s inquiry for his mistress, as if he had not been accustomed to hear her asked for lately or to show up visitors to her.

Susie without her court! It was hard to conceive, even by one behind the scenes. But the mistress of the house was at home to Bennet, and she had only to wait a very few moments in the back drawing-room, where Jack had waited on the night before the ball. He was not waiting there now. Roger, who had taken up her card and slipped on his coat in the interval, returned to say Mrs. Crabtree would see Miss Gray in Mrs. Crabtree’s room. Bennet followed the man, with barely time to speculate where Jack could be, and to school her heart in the near prospect of the meeting with Susie in such circumstances.