“And now, gentlemen, she is not here. She is sick forsooth at her own castle in Scotland, and sends to us a medical certificate. But the gentlemen who are carrying on the prosecution know their witness, and don’t believe a word of her sickness. Had she the feelings of woman in her bosom she ought indeed to be sick unto death. But they know her better, and send down a doctor of their own. You have heard his evidence, — and yet this wonderful lady is not before us. I say again that she ought to be here in that dock, — in that dock in spite of her fortune, in that dock in spite of her title, in that dock in spite of her castle, her riches, her beauty, and her great relatives. A most wonderful woman, indeed, is the widow Eustace. It is she whom public opinion will convict as the guilty one in this marvellous mass of conspiracy and intrigue. In her absence, and after what she has done herself, can you convict any man either of stealing or of disposing of these diamonds?” The vigour, the attitude, and the indignant tone of the man were more even than his words; — but, nevertheless, the jury did find both Benjamin and Smiler guilty, and the judge did sentence them to penal servitude for fifteen years.
And this was the end of the Eustace diamonds as far as anything was ever known of them in England. Mr. Camperdown altogether failed, even in his attempt to buy them back at something less than their value, and was ashamed himself to look at the figures when he found how much money he had wasted for his clients in their pursuit. In discussing the matter afterwards with Mr. Dove, he excused himself by asserting his inability to see so gross a robbery perpetrated by a little minx under his very eyes without interfering with the plunder. “I knew what she was,” he said, “from the moment of Sir Florian’s unfortunate marriage. He had brought a little harpy into the family, and I was obliged to declare war against her.” Mr. Dove seemed to be of opinion that the ultimate loss of the diamonds was upon the whole desirable, as regarded the whole community. “I should like to have had the case settled as to right of possession,” he said, “because there were in it one or two points of interest. We none of us know, for instance, what a man can, or what a man cannot, give away by a mere word.”
“No such word was ever spoken,” said Mr. Camperdown in wrath.
“Such evidence as there is would have gone to show that it had been spoken. But the very existence of such property so to be disposed of, or so not to be disposed of, is in itself an evil. Thus, we have had to fight for six months about a lot of stones hardly so useful as the flags in the street, and then they vanish from us, leaving us nothing to repay us for our labour.” All which Mr. Camperdown did not quite understand. Mr. Dove would be paid for his labour, — as to which, however, Mr. Camperdown knew well that no human being was more indifferent than Mr. Dove.
There was much sorrow, too, among the police. They had no doubt succeeded in sending two scoundrels out of the social world, probably for life, and had succeeded in avoiding the reproach which a great robbery, unaccounted for, always entails upon them. But it was sad to them that the property should altogether have been lost, and sad also that they should have been constrained to allow Billy Cann to escape out of their hands. Perhaps the sadness may have been lessened to a certain degree in the breast of the great Mr. Gager by the charms and graces of Patience Crabstick, to whom he kept his word by making her his wife. This fact, — or rather the prospect of this fact, as it then was, — had also come to the knowledge of the learned serjeant, and, in his hands, had served to add another interest to the trial. Mr. Gager, when examined on the subject, did not attempt to deny the impeachment, and expressed a strong opinion that, though Miss Crabstick had given way to temptation under the wiles of the Jew, she would make an honest and an excellent wife. In which expectation let us trust that he may not be deceived.
Amusement had, indeed, been expected from other sources which failed. Mrs. Carbuncle had been summoned, and Lord George; but both of them had left town before the summons could reach them. It was rumoured that Mrs. Carbuncle, with her niece, had gone to join her husband at New York. At any rate, she disappeared altogether from London, leaving behind her an amount of debts which showed how extremely liberal in their dealings the great tradesmen of London will occasionally be. There were milliners’ bills which had been running for three years, and horse-dealers had given her credit year after year, though they had scarcely ever seen the colour of her money. One account, however, she had honestly settled. The hotel-keeper in Albemarle Street had been paid, and all the tribute had been packed and carried off from the scene of the proposed wedding banquet. What became of Lord George for the next six months, nobody ever knew; but he appeared at Melton in the following November, and I do not know that any one dared to ask him questions about the Eustace diamonds.
Of Lizzie, and her future career, something further must be said in the concluding chapters of this work. She has been our heroine, and we must see her through her immediate troubles before we can leave her; but it may be as well to mention here, that although many threats had been uttered against her, not only by Mr. Camperdown and the other attorneys, but even by the judge himself, no punishment at all was inflicted upon her in regard to her recusancy, nor was any attempt made to punish her. The affair was over, and men were glad to avoid the necessity of troubling themselves further with the business. It was said that a case would be got up with the view of proving that she had not been ill at all, and that the Scotch doctor would be subjected to the loss of his degree, or whatever privileges in the healing art belonged to him; — but nothing was done, and Lizzie triumphed in her success.
CHAPTER LXXIX
Once More at Portray
On the very day of the trial Mr. Emilius travelled from London to Kilmarnock. The trial took place on a Monday, so that he had at his command an entire week before he would be required to appear again in his church. He had watched the case against Benjamin and Smiler very closely, and had known beforehand, almost with accuracy, what witnesses would appear and what would not at the great coming event at the Old Bailey. When he first heard of Lady Eustace’s illness, he wrote to her a most affectionately pastoral letter, strongly adjuring her to think of her health before all things, and assuring her that in his opinion, and in that of all his friends, she was quite right not to come up to London. She wrote him a very short but a very gracious answer, thanking him for his solicitude, and explaining to him that her condition made it quite impossible that she should leave Portray.
“I don’t suppose anybody knows how ill I am; but it does not matter. When I am gone, they will know what they have done.” Then Mr. Emilius resolved that he would go down to Scotland. Perhaps Lady Eustace was not as ill as she thought; but it might be that the trial, and the hard things lately said of her, and her loneliness, and the feeling that she needed protection, might, at such a moment as this, soften her heart. She should know at least that one tender friend did not desert her because of the evil things which men said of her.
He went to Kilmarnock, thinking it better to make his approaches by degrees. Were he to present himself at once at the castle and be refused admittance, he would hardly know how to repeat his application or to force himself upon her presence. From Kilmarnock he wrote to her, saying that business connected with his ministrations during the coming autumn had brought him into her beautiful neighbourhood, and that he could not leave it without paying his respects to her in person. With her permission he would call upon her on the Thursday at about noon. He trusted that the state of her health would not prevent her from seeing him, and reminded her that a clergyman was often as welcome a visitor at the bedside of the invalid, as the doctor or the nurse. He gave her no address, as he rather wished to hinder her from answering him, but at the appointed hour he knocked at the castle-door.
Need it be said that Lizzie’s state of health was not such as to preclude her from seeing so intimate a friend as Mr. Emilius? That she was right to avoid by any effort the castigation which was to have fallen upon her from the tongue of the learned serjeant, the reader who is not straight-l
aced will be disposed to admit. A lone woman, very young, and delicately organised! How could she have stood up against such treatment as was in store for her? And is it not the case that false pretexts against public demands are always held to be justifiable by the female mind? What lady will ever scruple to avoid her taxes? What woman ever understood her duty to the State? And this duty which was required of her was so terrible, that it might well have reduced to falsehood a stouter heart than her own. It can hardly be reckoned among Lizzie’s great sins that she did not make that journey up to London. An appearance of sickness she did maintain, even with her own domestics. To do as much as that was due even to the doctor whom she had cajoled out of the certificate, and who was afterwards frightened into maintaining it. But Mr. Emilius was her clergyman, — her own clergyman, as she took care to say to her maid, — her own clergyman, who had come all the way from London to be present with her in her sickness; and of course she would see him.
Lizzie did not think much of the coming autumnal ministration at Kilmarnock. She knew very well why Mr. Emilius had undertaken the expense of a journey into Scotland in the middle of the London season. She had been maimed fearfully in her late contests with the world, and was now lame and soiled and impotent. The boy with none of the equipments of the skilled sportsman can make himself master of a wounded bird. Mr. Emilius was seeking her in the moment of her weakness, fearing that all chance of success might be over for him should she ever again recover the full use of her wings. All this Lizzie understood, and was able to measure Mr. Emilius at his own value of himself. But then, again, she was forced to ask herself what was her value. She had been terribly mauled by the fowlers. She had been hit, so to say, on both wings, and hardly knew whether she would ever again be able to attempt a flight in public. She could not live alone in Portray Castle for the rest of her days. Ianthe’s soul and the Corsair were not, in truth, able to console her for the loss of society. She must have somebody to depend upon; — ah, some one whom, if it were possible, she might love. She saw no reason why she should not love Mr. Emilius. She had been shockingly ill-treated by Lord Fawn, and the Corsair, and Frank Greystock. No woman had ever been so knocked about in her affections. She pitied herself with an exceeding pity when she thought of all the hardships which she had endured. Left an early widow, persecuted by her husband’s family, twice robbed, spied upon by her own servants, unappreciated by the world at large, ill-used by three lovers, victimised by her selected friend, Mrs. Carbuncle, and now driven out of society because she had lost her diamonds, was she not more cruelly treated than any woman of whom she had ever read or heard? But she was not going to give up the battle, even now. She still had her income, and she had great faith in income. And though she knew that she had been grievously wounded by the fowlers, she believed that time would heal her wounds. The world would not continue to turn its back altogether upon a woman with four thousand pounds a year, because she had told a fib about her necklace. She weighed all this; but the conviction strongest upon her mind was the necessity that she should have a husband. She felt that a woman by herself in the world can do nothing, and that an unmarried woman’s strength lies only in the expectation that she may soon be married. To her it was essentially necessary that she should have the protection of a husband who might endure on her behalf some portion of those buffetings to which she seemed to be especially doomed. Could she do better with herself than take Mr. Emilius?
Might she have chosen from all the world, Mr. Emilius was not, perhaps, the man whom she would have selected. There were, indeed, attributes in the man, very objectionable in the sight of some people, which to her were not specially disagreeable. She thought him rather good-looking than otherwise, in spite of a slight defect in his left eye. His coal-black, glossy hair commanded and obtained her admiration, and she found his hooky nose to be handsome. She did not think much of the ancestral blood of which he had boasted, and hardly believed that he would ever become a bishop. But he was popular, and with a rich, titled wife, might become more so. Mr. Emilius and Lady Eustace would, she thought, sound very well, and would surely make their way in society. The man had a grasping ambition about him, and a capacity, too, which, combined, would enable him to preach himself into notoriety. And then in marrying Mr. Emilius, should she determine to do so, she might be sure, almost sure, of dictating her own terms as to settlement. With Lord Fawn, with Lord George, or even with her cousin Frank, there would have been much difficulty. She thought that with Mr. Emilius she might obtain the undisputed command of her own income. But she did not quite make up her mind. She would see him and hear what he had to say. Her income was her own, and should she refuse Mr. Emilius, other suitors would no doubt come.
She dressed herself with considerable care, — having first thought of receiving him in bed. But as the trial had now gone on without her, it would be convenient that her recovery should be commenced. So she had herself dressed in a white morning wrapper with pink bows, and allowed the curl to be made fit to hang over her shoulder. And she put on a pair of pretty slippers, with gilt bindings, and took a laced handkerchief and a volume of Shelley, — and so she prepared herself to receive Mr. Emilius. Lizzie, since the reader first knew her, had begun to use a little colouring in the arrangement of her face, and now, in honour of her sickness, she was very pale indeed. But still, through the paleness, there was the faintest possible tinge of pink colour shining through the translucent pearl powder. Any one who knew Lizzie would be sure that, when she did paint, she would paint well.
The conversation was at first, of course, confined to the lady’s health. She thought that she was, perhaps, getting better, though, as the doctor had told her, the reassuring symptoms might too probably only be too fallacious. She could eat nothing, — literally nothing. A few grapes out of the hothouse had supported her for the last week. This statement was foolish on Lizzie’s part, as Mr. Emilius was a man of an inquiring nature, and there was not a grape in the garden. Her only delight was in reading and in her child’s society. Sometimes she thought that she would pass away with the boy in her arms and her favourite volume of Shelley in her hand. Mr. Emilius expressed a hope that she would not pass away yet, for ever so many years. “Oh, my friend,” said Lizzie, “what is life, that one should desire it?” Mr. Emilius of course reminded her that, though her life might be nothing to herself, it was very much indeed to those who loved her. “Yes; — to my boy,” said Lizzie. Mr. Emilius informed her, with confidence, that it was not only her boy that loved her. There were others; — or, at any rate, one other. She might be sure of one faithful heart, if she cared for that. Lizzie only smiled, and threw from her taper fingers a little paper pellet into the middle of the room, — probably with the view of showing at what value she priced the heart of which Mr. Emilius was speaking.
The trial had occupied two days, Monday and Tuesday, and this was now the Wednesday. The result had been telegraphed to Mr. Emilius, — of course without any record of the serjeant’s bitter speech, — and the suitor now gave the news to his lady-love. Those two horrid men had at last been found guilty, and punished with all the severity of the law. “Poor fellows,” said Lady Eustace, — “poor Mr. Benjamin! Those ill-starred jewels have been almost as unkind to him as to me.”
“He’ll never come back alive, of course,” said Mr. Emilius. “It’ll kill him.”
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