The Two Sides of the Shield

‘Yes, yes, yes. She assured me! I know something was said about seven.’

‘Then you cannot swear to the contents of the envelope you forwarded?’

‘I don’t know. It was all such a confusion and hurry.’

‘Why so?’

‘Oh! because it was a secret.’

The counsel of course availed himself of this handle to elicit that the witness had conducted a secret correspondence between the prisoner and her young friend without the knowledge of the child’s natural protectors. ‘A perfect romance,’ he said, ‘I believe the prisoner is unmarried.’

Perhaps this insinuation would have been checked, but before any one had time to interfere, Constance, blushing crimson, exclaimed, ‘Oh! Oh! I assure you it was not that. It was because she said he was her uncle and that they ill-used him.’

This brought upon her the searching question whether the last witness had stated the prisoner to be really her uncle, and Constance replied, rather hotly, that she had always understood that he was.

‘In fact, she gave you to understand that the prisoner was actually related to her by blood. Did you say that she also told you that he was persecuted or ill-used by her other relations?’

‘I thought so. Yes, I am sure she said so.’

‘And it was wholly and solely on these grounds that you assisted in this clandestine correspondence?’

‘Why—yes—partly,’ faltered Constance, thinking of her literary efforts, ‘so it began.’

There was a manifest inclination to laugh in the audience, who naturally thought her hesitation implied something very different; and the judge, thinking that there was no need to push her further, when Mr. Calderwood represented that all this did not bear on the matter, and was no evidence, silenced Mr. Yokes, and the witness was dismissed.

The next point was that Colonel Reginald Mohun was called upon to attest that the handwriting was his brother’s. He answered for the main body of the draft, and the signature, but the additions, in which the forgery lay, were so slight that it was impossible to swear that they did not come from the hand of Maurice Mohun.

‘Had application been made to Mr. Mohun on the subject?’

‘Yes, Colonel Mohun had immediately telegraphed to him at the address in the Fiji Islands.’

‘Has any answer been received?’

‘No!’ but Colonel Mohun had a curious expression in his eyes, and Mr. Calderwood electrified the court by begging to call upon Mr. Maurice Mohun.

There he was in the witness-box, looking sunburnt but vigorous. He replied immediately to the question that the cheque was his own, and that it had been left under his daughter’s charge, also that it had been for seven pounds, and the ‘ty’ and the cypher had never been written by him. The prisoner winced for a moment, and then looked at him defiantly.

The connection with Alfred Flinders was inquired into and explained, and being asked as to the term ‘Uncle,’ he replied, ‘My daughter was allowed to get into the habit of so terming him.’

The sisters saw his look of pain, and Jane remembered his strong objection to the title, and his wife’s indignant defence of it.

Dolores stood trembling outside in the waiting-room, by her Uncle Reginald, from whom she heard that her father had come that morning from London with Lord Rotherwood, but that it had been thought better not to agitate her by letting her know of it before she gave her evidence.

‘Has he had my letter?’ she asked.

‘No; he knew nothing till he saw Rotherwood last night.’

All the misery of writing the confession came back upon poor Dolores, and she turned quite white and sick, but her uncle said kindly, ‘Never mind, my dear, he was very much pleased with your manner of giving evidence. Such a contrast to your friend’s. Faugh!’

In a few more seconds Mr. Mohun had come out. He took the cold, trembling hands in his own, pressed them close, met the anxious eyes with his own, full of moisture, and said, ‘My poor little girl,’ in a tone that somehow lightened Dolly’s heart of its worst dread.

‘Will you go back into court?’ asked the colonel.

‘You don’t wish it, Dolly?’ said her father.

‘Oh no! please not.’

‘Then,’ said the colonel, ‘take your father back to the room at the hotel, and we will come to you. I suppose this will not last much longer.’

‘Probably not half an hour. I don’t want to see that fellow either convicted or acquitted.’

Then Dolores found herself steered out of the passages and from among the people waiting or gazing, into the clearer space in the street, her father holding her hand as if she had been a little child. Neither of them spoke till they had reached the sitting-room, and there, the first thing he did when the door was shut, was to sit down, take her between his knees, put an arm round her, and kiss her, saying again, ‘My poor child!’

‘You never got my letter!’ she said, leaning against him, feeling the peace and rest his embrace gave.

‘No; but I have heard all. I should have warned you, Dolly; but I never imagined that he could get at you there; and I was unwilling to accuse one for whom your mother had a certain affection.’

‘That was why I helped him,’ whispered Dolores.

‘I knew it,’ he said kindly. ‘But how did he find you out, and how had he the impertinence to write to you at your Aunt Lily’s—’

‘I wrote to him first,’ she said, hanging down her head.

‘How was that? You surely had not been in the habit of doing so whilst I was at home.’

‘No; but he came and spoke to me at Exeter, the day you went away. Uncle William was not there, he had gone into the town. And he—Mr. Flinders, said he was going down to see you, and was very much disappointed to hear that you were gone.’

‘Did he ask you to write to him?’

‘I don’t think he did. Father, it seems too silly now, but I was very angry because Aunt Lilias said she must see all my letters except yours and Maude Sefton’s, and I told Constance Hacket. She said she would send anything for me, and I could not think of any one I wanted to write to, so I wrote to—to him.’

‘Ah! I saw you did not get on with your aunt,’ was the answer, ‘that was partly what brought me home.’ And either not hearing or not heeding her exclamation, ‘Oh, but now I do,’ he went on to explain that on his arrival at Fiji he had found that circumstances had altered there, and that the person with whom he was to have been associated had died, so that the whole scheme had been broken up. A still better appointment had, however, been offered to him in New Zealand, on the resignation of the present holder after a half-year’s notice, and he had at once written to accept it. A proposal had been made to him to spend the intermediate time in a scientific cruise among the Polynesian Islands; but the letters he had found awaiting him at Vanua Levu had convinced him that the arrangements he had made in England had been a mistake, and he had therefore hurried home via San Francisco, as fast as any letter could have gone, to wind up his English affairs, and fetch his daughter to the permanent home in Auckland, which her Aunt Phyllis would prepare for her.

Her countenance betrayed a sudden dismay, which made him recollect that she was a strangely undemonstrative girl; but before she had recovered the shock so as to utter more than a long ‘Oh!’ they were interrupted by the cup of tea that had been ordered for Dolores, and in a minute more, steps were heard, and the two aunts were in the room. ‘Seven years,’ were Jane’s first words, and ‘My dear Maurice,’ Lady Merrifield’s, ‘Oh! I wish I could have spared you this,’ and then among greetings came again, ‘Seven years,’ from the brother and cousin who had seen the traveller before.

‘I’m glad you were not there, Maurice,’ said Lady Merrifield. ‘It was dreadful.’

‘I never saw a more insolent fellow!’ said Lord Rotherwood.

‘That Yokes, you mean,’ said Miss Mohun. ‘I declare I think he is worse than Flinders!’

‘That’s like you women, Jenny,’ returned the colonel; ‘you can’t understand that a man’s business is to get off his client!’

‘When he gave him up as an honest man altogether!’ cried Lady Merrifield.

‘And cast such imputations!’ exclaimed Aunt Jane. ‘I saw what the wretch was driving at all the time of the cross-examination; and if I’d been the judge, would not I have stopped him?’

‘There you go. Lily and Jenny!’ said the colonel, ‘and Rotherwood just as bad! Why, Maurice would have had to take just the same line if he had been for the defence.’