'And the fact is, Puddock, I think I may undertake to promise you'll never again be misunderstood in that quarter,' said Cluffe, with a mysterious sort of smile.

'I'm sure, dear Cluffe, I'm grateful as I ought, for your generous pleading on my poor behalf, and I do prize the good will of that most excellent lady as highly as any, and owe her, beside, a debt of grat.i.tude for care and kindness such as many a mother would have failed to bestow.'

'Mother, indeed! Why, Puddock, my boy, you forget you're no chicken,'

said Cluffe, a little high.

'And to-morrow I will certainly pay her my respects,' said the lieutenant, not answering Cluffe's remark.

So Gertrude Chattesworth, after her long agitation--often despair--was tranquil at last, and blessed in the full a.s.surance of the love which was henceforth to be her chief earthly happiness.

'Madam was very sly,' said Aunt Becky, with a little shake of her head, and a quizzical smile; and holding up her folded fan between her finger and thumb, in mimic menace as she glanced at Gertrude. 'Why, Mr.

Mordaunt, on the very day--the day we had the pleasant luncheon on the gra.s.s--when, as I thought, she had given you your quietus--'twas quite the reverse, and you had made a little betrothal, and duped the old people so cleverly ever after.'

'You have forgiven me, dear aunt,' said the young lady, kissing her very affectionately, 'but I will never quite forgive myself. In a moment of great agitation I made a hasty promise of secrecy, which, from the moment 'twas made, was to me a never-resting disquietude, misery, and reproach. If you, my dearest aunt, knew, as _he_ knows, all the anxieties, or rather the terrors, I suffered during that agitating period of concealment--'

'Indeed, dear Madam,' said Mordaunt--or as we may now call him, Lord Dunoran--coming to the rescue, ''twas all my doing; on me alone rests all the blame. Selfish it hardly was. I could not risk the loss of my beloved; and until my fortunes had improved, to declare our situation would have been too surely to lose her. Henceforward I have done with mystery. _I_ will never have a secret from her, nor she from you.'

He took Aunt Becky's hand. 'Am I, too, forgiven?'

He held it for a second, and then kissed it.

Aunt Becky smiled, with one of her pleasant little blushes, and looked down on the carpet, and was silent for a moment; and then, as they afterwards thought a little oddly, she said,

'That censor must be more severe than I, who would say that concealment in matters of the heart is never justifiable; and, indeed, my dear,' she added, quite in a humble way, 'I almost think you were right.'

Aunt Becky's looks and spirits had both improved from the moment of this _eclairciss.e.m.e.nt_. A load was plainly removed from her mind. Let us hope that her comfort and elation were perfectly unselfish. At all events, her heart sang with a quiet joy, and her good humour was unbounded. So she stood up, holding Lord Dunoran's hand in hers, and putting her white arm round her niece's neck, she kissed her again and again, very tenderly, and she said--

'How very happy, Gertrude, you must be!' and then she went quickly from the room, drying her eyes.

Happy indeed she was, and not least in the termination of that secrecy which was so full of self-reproach and sometimes of distrust. From the evening of that dinner at the King's House, when in an agony of jealousy she had almost disclosed to poor little Lily the secret of their engagement, down to the latest moment of its concealment, her hours had been darkened by care, and troubled with ceaseless agitations.

Everything was now going prosperously for Mervyn--or let us call him henceforward Lord Dunoran. Against the united evidence of Sturk and Irons, two independent witnesses, the crown were of opinion that no defence was maintainable by the wretch, Archer. The two murders were unambiguously sworn to by both witnesses. A correspondence, afterwards read in the Irish House of Lords, was carried on between the Irish and the English law officers of the crown--for the case, for many reasons, was admitted to be momentous--as to which crime he should be first tried for--the murder of Sturk, or that of Beauclerc. The latter was, in this respect, the most momentous--that the cancelling of the forfeiture which had ruined the Dunoran family depended upon it.

'But are you not forgetting, Sir,' said Mr. Attorney in consultation, 'that there's the finding of _felo de se_ against him by the coroner's jury?'

'No, Sir,' answered the crown solicitor, well pleased to set Mr.

Attorney right. 'The jury being sworn, found only that he came by his death, but whether by gout in his stomach, or by other disease, or by poison, they had no certain knowledge; there was therefore no such coroner's verdict, and no forfeiture therefore.'

'And I'm glad to hear it, with all my heart. I've seen the young gentleman, and a very pretty young n.o.bleman he is,' said Mr. Attorney.

Perhaps he would not have cared if this expression of his good will had got round to my lord.

The result was, however, that their prisoner was to be first tried in Ireland for the murder of Doctor Barnabas Sturk.

A few pieces of evidence, slight, but sinister, also turned up. Captain Cluffe was quite clear he had seen an instrument in the prisoner's hand on the night of the murder, as he looked into the little bed-chamber of the Bra.s.s Castle, so unexpectedly. When he put down the towel, he raised it from the toilet, where it lay. It resembled the b.u.t.t of a whip--was an inch or so longer than a drumstick, and six or seven inches of the thick end stood out in a series of circular bands or rings. He washed the thick end of it in the basin; it seemed to have a spring in it, and Cluffe thought it was a sort of loaded baton. In those days robbery and a.s.sault were as common as they are like to become again, and there was nothing remarkable in the possession of such defensive weapons.

Dangerfield had only run it once or twice hastily through the water, rolled it in a red handkerchief, and threw it into his drawer, which he locked. When Cluffe was shown the whip, which bore a rude resemblance to this instrument, and which Lowe had a.s.sumed to be all that Cluffe had really seen, the gallant captain peremptorily pooh-poohed it. 'Twas no such thing. The whip-handle was light in comparison, and it was too long to fit in the drawer.

Now, the awful fractures which had almost severed Sturk's skull corresponded exactly with the wounds which such an instrument would inflict, and a tubular piece of broken iron, about two inches long, exactly corresponding with the shape of the loading described by Cluffe, was actually discovered in the sewer of the Bra.s.s Castle. It had been in the fire, and the wood or whalebone was burnt completely away. It was conjectured that Dangerfield had believed it to be lead, and having burnt the handle, had broken the metal which he could not melt, and made away with it in the best way he could. So preparations were pushed forward, and Sturk's dying declaration, sworn to, late in the evening before his dissolution, in a full consciousness of his approaching death, was, of course, relied on, and a very symmetrical and logical bill lay, neatly penned, in the Crown Office, awaiting the next commission for the county.

CHAPTER XCVII.

IN WHICH OBEDIAH ARRIVES.

In the meantime our worthy little Lieutenant Puddock--by this time quite reconciled to the new state of things, walked up to Belmont, with his head a great deal fuller--such and so great are human vagaries--of the interview pending between him and Aunt Becky than of the little romance which had exploded so unexpectedly about a fortnight ago.

He actually saw Miss Gertrude and my Lord Dunoran walking side by side, on the mulberry walk by the river; and though he looked and felt a little queer, perhaps, a little absurd, he did not sigh, or murmur a stanza, or suffer a palpitation; but walked up to the hall-door, and asked for Miss Rebecca Chattesworth.

Aunt Becky received him in the drawing-room. She was looking very pale, and spoke very little, and very gently for her. In a reconciliation between two persons of the opposite s.e.xes--though the ages be wide apart--there is almost always some little ingredient of sentiment.

The door was shut, and Puddock's voice was heard in an indistinct murmur, upon the lobby. Then there was a silence, or possibly, some speaking in a still lower key. Then Aunt Becky was crying, and the lieutenant's voice cooing through it. Then Aunt Becky, still crying, said--

'A longer time than _you_ think for, lieutenant; two years, and more--_always_! And the lieutenant's voice rose again; and she said--'What a fool I've been!' which was again lost in Puddock's accents; and the drawing-room door opened, and Aunt Rebecca ran up stairs, with her handkerchief to her red nose and eyes, and slammed her bed-room door after her like a boarding-school miss.

And the general's voice was heard shouting 'luncheon' in the hall; and Dominick repeated the announcement to Puddock, who stood, unusually pale and very much stunned, with the handle of the open drawing-room door in his hand, looking up toward the bed-room in an undecided sort of way, as if he was not clear whether it was not his duty to follow Aunt Becky. On being told a second time, however, that the general awaited him at luncheon, he apprehended the meaning of the message, and went down to the parlour forthwith.

The general, and my lord Dunoran, and Miss Gertrude, and honest Father Roach, were there; and Aunt Becky being otherwise engaged, could not come.

Puddock, at luncheon, was abstracted--frightened--silent, for the most part; talking only two or three sentences during that sociable meal, by fits and starts; and he laughed once abruptly at a joke he did not hear.

He also drank three gla.s.ses of port.

Aunt Rebecca met him with her hood on in the hall. She asked him, with a faltering sort of carelessness, looking very hard at the clock, and nearly with her back to him--

'Lieutenant, will you take a turn in the garden with me?'

To which Puddock, with almost a start--for he had not seen her till she spoke--and, upon my word, 'tis a fact, with a blush, too--made a sudden smile, and a bow, and a suitable reply in low tones; and forth they sallied together, and into the garden, and up and down the same walk, for a good while--a long while--people sometimes don't count the minutes--with none but Peter Brian, the gardener, whom they did not see, to observe them.

When they came to the white wicket-door of the garden, Aunt Rebecca hastily dropped his arm, on which she had leaned; and together they returned to the house very affably; and there Aunt Becky bid him good-bye in a whisper, a little hastily; and Puddock, so soon as he found Dominick, asked for the general.

He had gone down to the river; and Puddock followed. As he walked along the court, he looked up; there was a kind of face at the window. He smiled a great deal and raised his hat, and placed it to his heart, and felt quite bewildered, like a man in a dream; and in this state he marched down to the river's bank.

They had not been together for a full minute when the stout general threw back his head, looking straight in his face; and then he stepped first one, then another, fat little pace backward, and poked his cane right at the ribs of the plump little lieutenant, then closing with him, he shook both Puddock's hands in both his, with a hearty peal of laughter.

Then he took Puddock under his arm. Puddock had to stoop to pick up his hat which the general had dislodged. And so the general walks him slowly towards the house; sometimes jogging his elbow a little under his ribs; sometimes calling a halt and taking his collar in his finger and thumb, thrusting him out a little, and eyeing him over with a sort of swagger, and laughing and coughing, and whooping, and laughing again, almost to strangulation; and altogether extraordinarily boisterous, and hilarious, and familiar, as Cluffe thought, who viewed this spectacle from the avenue.

Mr. Sterling would not have been quite so amused at a similar freak of Mrs. Hidleberg's--but our honest general was no especial worshipper of money--he was rich, too, and his daughter, well dowered, was about to marry a peer, and beside all this, though he loved 'Sister Becky,' her yoke galled him; and I think he was not altogether sorry at the notion of a little more liberty.

At the same moment honest Peter Brien, having set his basket of winter greens down upon the kitchen-table, electrified his auditory by telling them, with a broad grin and an oath, that he had seen Lieutenant Puddock and Aunt Rebecca kiss in the garden, with a good smart smack, 'by the powers, within three yards of his elbow, when he was stooping down cutting them greens!' At which profanity, old Mistress Dorothy, Aunt Rebecca's maid, was so incensed that she rose and left the kitchen without a word. The sensation there, however, was immense; and Mistress Dorothy heard the gabble and laughter fast and furious behind her until she reached the hall.

Captain Cluffe was asking for Aunt Rebecca when Puddock and the general reached the hall-door, and was surprised to learn that she was not to be seen. 'If she knew 'twas I,' he thought, 'but no matter.'

'Oh, _we_ could have told you that; eh, Puddock?' cried the general; ''tisn't everybody can see my sister to-day, captain; a very peculiar engagement, eh, Puddock?' and a sly wink and a chuckle.

Cluffe smiled a little, and looked rather conscious and queer, but pleased with himself; and his eyes wandered over the front windows hastily, to see if Aunt Becky was looking out, for he fancied there was something in the general's quizzing, and that the lady might have said more than she quite intended to poor little Puddock on the subject of the gallant mediator; and that, in fact, he was somehow the theme of some little sentimental disclosure of the lady's. What the plague else could they both mean by quizzing Cluffe about her?

Puddock and he had not gone half-way down the short avenue, when Cluffe said, with a sheepish smile: