The Two Sides of the Shield

‘He would not have done it in such a blackguard fashion though,’ said Lord Rotherwood.

‘I saw what his defence would be,’ said Mr. Mohun, briefly.

‘There!’ said Colonel Mohun, with a boyish pleasure in confuting his sisters; but they were not subdued.

‘Now Maurice,’ cried Jane, ‘when that man was known to be utterly dishonourable and good for nothing, was it fair—was it not contrary to all common sense—to try to cast the imputation between those two poor girls? So the judge and jury felt it, I am happy to say! but I call it abominable to have thrown out the mere suggestion—’

‘Nay now, Jane,’ said the colonel, ‘if the man was to be defended at all, how else was it to be done?’

‘I wouldn’t have had him defended at all! but, unfortunately, that’s his right as an Englishman.’

‘That’s another thing! But as the cheque did not alter itself, one of the three must have done it, and nothing was left but to show that there had been an amount of shuffling, and—in short, nonsense—that might cast enough doubt on their evidence to make it insufficient for a conviction.’

‘Reginald! I can’t think how you can stand up for such a wretch, a vulgar wretch,’ cried Miss Mohun. ‘You put it delicately, as a gentleman who had the misfortune to be counsel in such a case might do, but he was infinitely worse than that, though that was bad enough.’

‘It was Yokes,’ put in Mr. Mohun; ‘but what did he say?’ looking anxiously at his daughter.

‘It was not so bad about her,’ said her uncle, ‘he only made her out a foolish child, easily played upon by everybody, and possibly ignorant and frightened, or led away by her regard for her supposed relation. It was the other poor girl—

‘The amiable susceptibilities of romantic young ladies!’ broke out Lady Merrifield. ‘Oh, the creature!’ To think of that poor foolish Constance sitting by to hear it represented that the expedition to Darminster, and all the rest of it, was because she was actually touched by that fellow. I really felt ready to take her part.’

‘She had certainly brought it on herself,’ said Aunt Jane; ‘but it was atrocious of him and if the other counsel had only known it, he stopped the cross examination just at the wrong time, or it would have come out that it was literary vanity that was the lure. No doubt he would have made a laughing-stock of that, but it would not have been as bad as the other.’

‘Poor thing,’ said Lady Merrifield; ‘it was a trying retribution for schoolgirl folly and want of conscientiousness. I should think she was a sadder and a wiser woman.’

‘He must have overdone it,’ said Mr. Mohun, ‘he is a vulgar fellow, and always does so; but, as Reginald says, the only available defence was to enhance the folly and sentiment of the girls; but of course the judge charged the other way—

‘Entirely,’ said Lord Rotherwood, ‘he brought Dolly rather well out of it, saying that as he understood it, a young girl who had seen a needy connection assisted from her home might think herself justified in corresponding with him, and even in diverting to his use money left in her charge, when it was probable that it would not be required for the original object. He did not say it was right, but it was an error of judgment by no means implying swindling—in fact. He disposed of Miss Hacket in the same way—foolish, sentimental, unscrupulous, but not to that degree. Girls might be silly enough in all conscience, but not so as to commit forgery or perjury. That was the gist of it, and happily the jury were of the same opinion.’

‘Happily? Well, I suppose so,’ said Mr. Mohun, with a certain sorrowfulness of tone, into which his little daughter entered.

‘I say, Rotherwood,’ exclaimed the colonel, as the town clock’s two strokes for the half-hour echoed loudly, ‘if you mean to catch the 4.50, you must fly.’

‘Fly!’ he coolly repeated. ‘Tell Mysie, Lily, that Fly has never ceased talking of her. That child has been saving her money to fit out one of Florence’s orphan’s. She—’

‘Rotherwood,’ broke in Mr. Mohun, ‘your wife charged me to see that you were in time for that dinner. A ministerial one.’

‘Don’t encourage him, Lily,’ chimed in the colonel. ‘I’ll call a cab. See him safe off, Maurice.’

And off he was hunted amid the laughter of the ladies; the manner of all to one another was so exactly what it had been in the old times.

‘I could hardly help telling him to take care, or Victoria would never let him out again,’ said Miss Mohun. ‘Poor old fellow, it would have been a fine chance for him with four of us together.’

‘You can come back with us, Jenny!’

‘I brought my bag in case of accidents.’

‘And we’ll telegraph to Adeline to join us tomorrow,’ said Mr. Mohun, who seemed to have been seized with a hunger for the sight of his kindred.

‘Telegraph! My dear Maurice, Ada’s nerves would be torn to smithereens by a telegram without me to open it for her. I’ve a card here to post to her; but I expect that I must go down tomorrow and fetch her, which will be the best way, for I have a meeting.’

‘Jenny, I declare you are a caution even to Miss Hacket,’ said Colonel Reginald, re-entering.

‘Well, Ada always was the family pet. Besides, I told you I had a G.F.S. meeting. Did you get a cab for us; Lily has had quite walking enough.’

The ladies went in a cab, while the gentlemen walked. There was not much time to spare, and in the compartment into which the first comers threw themselves, they found both the Hacket sisters installed, and the gentlemen coming up in haste, nodded and got into a smoking-carriage, on seeing how theirs was occupied.

‘Oh, we could have made room,’ said Constance, to whom a gentleman was a gentleman under whatever circumstances.

‘Dear Miss Dolores’s papa! Is it indeed?’ said Miss Hacket.

‘So wonderfully interesting,’ chimed in Constance. And they both made a dart at Dolores to kiss her in congratulation, much against her will.

The train clattered on, and Lady Merrifield hoped it would hush all other voices, but neither of the Hackets could refrain from discussing the trial, and heaping such unmitigated censure on the counsel for the prisoner, that Miss Mohun felt herself constrained to fly in the face of all she had said at the hotel, and to maintain the right of even such an Englishman to be defended, and of his advocate to prevent his conviction if possible. On which the regular sentiment against becoming lawyers was produced, and the subject might have been dropped if Constance had not broken out again, as if she could not leave it. ‘So atrocious, so abominably insolent, asking if he was unmarried.’

‘Evidently flattered!’ muttered Aunt Jane, between her teeth, and unheard; but the speed slackened, and Constance’s voice went on,

‘I really thought I should have died of it on the spot. The bare idea of thinking I could endure such a being.’

‘Well,’ said Dolores, just as the clatter ceased at a little station. ‘You know you did walk up and down with him ever so long, and I am sure you liked him very much.’

An indignant ‘You don’t understand’ was absolutely cut off by an imperative grasp and hush from Miss Hacket the elder; Aunt Jane was suffocating with laughter, Lady Merrifield, between that and a certain shame for womanhood, which made her begin to talk at random about anything or everything else.

CHAPTER XXII. – NAY

‘What a mull they have made of it!’ were Mr. Maurice Mohun’s first words when he found the compartment free for a tete-a-tete with his brother.

‘All’s well that ends well,’ was the brief reply.

‘Well, indeed! Mary would not have thought so.’ To which the colonel had nothing to say.

‘It serves me out,’ his brother went on presently. ‘I ought to have done something for that wretched fellow before I went, or, at any rate, have put Dolly on her guard; but I always shirked the very thought of him.’

‘Nothing would have kept him out of harm’s way.’

‘It might have kept the child; but she must have been thicker with him than I ever knew. However I shall have her with me for the future, and in better hands.’

‘You really mean to take her out?’

‘That’s what brought me home. She isn’t happy; that is plain from her letters; and Jane does not know what to make of her, nor Lilias either.’

‘When were your last letters dated?’

‘The last week in September.’

‘Early days,’ muttered the colonel.

‘I thought it an experiment, you know; but you said so much about Lily’s girls being patterns, that I thought Jasper Merrifield might have made her more rational and less flighty, and all that sort of thing; but of course it was a very different tone from what the child was used to, and you couldn’t tell what the young barbarians were out of sight.’