'For shame!' she cried hotly. 'For shame! But there,' she continued, 'I know you do not mean it. I know that what you bid me do you would not do yourself. Would you have sold my cause, would you have hidden the truth for thousands? If Sir George had come to you to bribe you, would you have taken anything? Any sum, however large? I know you would not. My life on it, you would not. You are an honest man,' she cried warmly.

The honest man was silent awhile. Presently he looked out of the carriage. The moon had risen over Savernake; by its light he saw that they were pa.s.sing Manton village. In the vale on the right the tower of Preshute Church, lifting its head from a dark bower of trees, spoke a solemn language, seconding hers. 'G.o.d bless you!' he said in a low voice. 'G.o.d bless you.'

A minute later the horses swerved to the right, and half a dozen lights keeping vigil in the Castle Inn gleamed out along the dark front. The post-chaise rolled across the open, and drew up before the door.

Julia's strange journey was over. Its stages, sombre in the retrospect, rose before her as she stepped from the carriage: yet, had she known all, the memories at which she shuddered would have worn a darker hue.

But it was not until a late hour of the following morning that even the lawyer heard what had happened at Chippenham.

CHAPTEK x.x.xIV

BAD NEWS

The attorney entered the Mastersons' room a little before eleven next morning; Julia was there, and Mrs. Masterson. The latter on seeing him held up her hands in dismay. 'Lord's wakes, Mr. Fishwick!' the good woman cried, 'why, you are the ghost of yourself! Adventuring does not suit you, that's certain. But I don't wonder. I am sure I have not slept a wink these three nights that I have not dreamt of Bessy Canning and that horrid old Squires; which, she did it without a doubt. Don't go to say you've bad news this morning.'

Certain it was that Mr. Fishwick looked woefully depressed. The night's sleep, which had restored the roses to Julia's cheeks and the light to her eyes, had done nothing for him; or perhaps he had not slept. His eyes avoided the girl's look of inquiry. 'I've no news this morning,' he said awkwardly. 'And yet I have news.'

'Bad?' the girl said, nodding her comprehension; and her colour slowly faded.

'Bad,' he said gravely, looking down at the table.

Julia took her fostermother's hand in hers, and patted it; they were sitting side by side. The elder woman, whose face was still furrowed by the tears she had shed in her bereavement, began to tremble. 'Tell us,'

the girl said bravely. 'What is it?'

'G.o.d help me,' Mr. Fishwick answered, his face quivering. 'I don't know how I shall tell you. I don't indeed. But I must.' Then, in a voice harsh with pain, 'Child, I have made a mistake,' he cried. 'I am wrong, I was wrong, I have been wrong from the beginning. G.o.d help me! And G.o.d help us all!'

The elder woman broke into frightened weeping. The younger grew pale and paler: grew presently white to the lips. Still her eyes met his, and did not flinch. 'Is it--about our case?' she whispered.

'Yes! Oh, my dear, will you ever forgive me?'

'About my birth?'

He nodded.

'I am not Julia Soane? Is that it?'

He nodded again.

'Not a Soane--at all?'

'No; G.o.d forgive me, no!'

She continued to hold the weeping woman's hand in hers, and to look at him; but for a long minute she seemed not even to breathe. Then in a voice that, notwithstanding the effort she made, sounded harsh in his ears, 'Tell me all,' she muttered. 'I suppose--you have found something!'

'I have,' he said. He looked old, and worn, and shabby; and was at once the surest and the saddest corroboration of his own tidings. 'Two days ago I found, by accident, in a church at Bristol, the death certificate of the--of the child.'

'Julia Soane?'

'Yes.'

'But then--who am I?' she asked, her eyes growing wild: the world was turning, turning with her.

'Her husband,' he answered, nodding towards Mrs. Masterson, 'adopted a child in place of the dead one, and said nothing. Whether he intended to pa.s.s it off for the child entrusted to him, I don't know. He never made any attempt to do so. Perhaps,' the lawyer continued drearily, 'he had it in his mind, and when the time came his heart failed him.'

'And I am that child?'

Mr. Fishwick looked away guiltily, pa.s.sing his tongue over his lips. He was the picture of shame and remorse.

'Yes,' he said. 'Your father and mother were French. He was a teacher of French at Bristol, his wife French from Canterbury. No relations are known.'

'My name?' she asked, smiling piteously.

'Pare,' he said, spelling it. And he added, 'They call it Parry.'

She looked round the room in a kind of terror, not unmixed with wonder.

To that room they had retired to review their plans on their first arrival at the Castle Inn--when all smiled on them. Thither they had fled for refuge after the brush with Lady Dunborough and the rencontre with Sir George. To that room she had betaken herself in the first flush and triumph of Sir George's suit; and there, surrounded by the same objects on which she now gazed, she had sat, rapt in rosy visions, through the livelong day preceding her abduction. Then she had been a gentlewoman, an heiress, the bride in prospect of a gallant gentleman. Now?

What wonder that, as she looked round in dumb misery, recognising these things, her eyes grew wild again; or that the shrinking lawyer expected an outburst. It came, but from another quarter. The old woman rose and trembling pointed a palsied finger at him. 'Yo' eat your words!' she said. 'Yo' eat your words and seem to like them. But didn't yo' tell me no farther back than this day five weeks that the law was clear? Didn't yo' tell me it was certain? Yo' tell me that!'

'I did! G.o.d forgive me,' Mr. Fishwick murmured from the depths of his abas.e.m.e.nt.

'Didn't yo' tell me fifty times, and fifty times to that, that the case was clear?' the old woman continued relentlessly. 'That there were thousands and thousands to be had for the asking? And her right besides, that no one could cheat her of, no more than me of the things my man left me?'

'I did, G.o.d forgive me!' the lawyer said.

'But yo' did cheat me!' she continued with quavering insistence, her withered face faintly pink. 'Where is the home yo' ha' broken up? Where are the things my man left me? Where's the bit that should ha' kept me from the parish? Where's the fifty-two pounds yo' sold all for and ha'

spent on us, living where's no place for us, at our betters' table? Yo'

ha' broken my heart! Yo' ha' laid up sorrow and suffering for the girl that is dearer to me than my heart. Yo' ha' done all that, and yo' can come to me smoothly, and tell me yo' ha' made a mistake. Yo' are a rogue, and, what maybe is worse, I mistrust me yo' are a fool!'

'Mother! mother!' the girl cried.

'He is a fool!' the old woman repeated, eyeing him with a dreadful sternness. 'Or he would ha' kept his mistake to himself. Who knows of it? Or why should he be telling them? 'Tis for them to find out, not for him! Yo' call yourself a lawyer? Yo' are a fool!' And she sat down in a palsy of senile pa.s.sion. 'Yo' are a fool! And yo' ha' ruined us!'

Mr. Fishwick groaned, but made no reply. He had not the spirit to defend himself. But Julia, as if all through which she had gone since the day of her reputed father's death had led her to this point, only that she might show the stuff of which she was wrought, rose to the emergency.

'Mother,' she said firmly, her hand resting on the older woman's shoulder, 'you are wrong--you are quite wrong. He would have ruined us indeed, he would have ruined us hopelessly and for ever, if he had kept silence! He has never been so good a friend to us as he has shown himself to-day, and I thank him for his courage. And I honour him!' She held out her hand to Mr. Fishwick, who having pressed it, his face working ominously, retired to the window.

'But, my deary, what will yo' do?' Mrs. Masterson cried peevishly. 'He ha' ruined us!'

'What I should have done if we had never made this mistake,' Julia answered bravely; though her lips trembled and her face was white, and in her heart she knew that hers was but a mockery of courage, that must fail her the moment she was alone. 'We are but fifty pounds worse than we were.'

'Fifty pounds!' the old woman cried aghast. 'Yo' talk easily of fifty pounds. And, Lord knows, it is soon spent here. But where will yo'

get another?'

'Well, well,' the girl answered patiently, 'that is true. Yet we must make the best of it. Let us make the best of it,' she continued, appealing to them bravely, yet with tears in her voice. 'We are all losers together. Let us bear it together. I have lost most,' she continued, her voice trembling. Fifty pounds? Oh, G.o.d! what was fifty pounds to what she had lost. 'But perhaps I deserve it. I was too ready to leave you, mother. I was too ready to--to take up with new things and--and richer things, and forget those who had been kin to me and kind to me all my life. Perhaps this is my punishment. You have lost your all, but that we will get again. And our friend here--he, too, has lost.'

Mr. Fishwick, standing, dogged and downcast, by the window, did not say what he had lost, but his thoughts went to his old mother at Wallingford and the empty stocking, and the weekly letters he had sent her for a month past, letters full of his golden prospects, and the great case of Soane _v_. Soane, and the grand things that were to come of it. What a home-coming was now in store for him, his last guinea spent, his hopes wrecked, and Wallingford to be faced!