The Honour of the Clintons

by Archibald Marshall

It needed more than one intervention on the part of the magistrate before it was elicited that Mrs. Amberley had said, "Well, now, if anything happens you can't accuse me. You would know I should be the last person." Lady Sedbergh volunteered the additional information that she had remembered those words, and even repeated them to her husband, but added that she put them down to Mrs. Amberley's cunning.

"But isn't it true that if I had stolen your necklace I should have known positively that you would have suspected me at once?"

No volubility would disguise the truth of that, and it had what weight it deserved.

Mrs. Amberley asked no more questions, but her solicitor cross-examined Lady Sedbergh as to the means she had taken to preserve the knowledge of the hiding-place from her own maid, for instance, or from the other servants of the house. He made it appear rather absurd that in a great house, overrun with servants, like Brummels, she could always have carried cases of jewels to and fro without being observed, or that her own maid would have had no curiosity as to where she kept them. The poor lady explained eagerly that she seldom wore the things she kept in her hiding-place when she was in the country, and that there was a safe in her husband's room in which she was supposed to keep what valuables she did not keep upstairs; but she explained so much and so incoherently that it had small effect in view of his persistence. It did seem rather absurd to everybody when her cross-examination was over, that anyone so foolish as she should have been able for so long to keep such a secret from everybody about her, especially in view of the irresponsible and causeless way in which she was shown finally to have let it out. If the case had rested on her testimony alone, Mrs. Amberley would have been acquitted, with hardly an additional stain on her character.

Joan, standing up bravely in her fresh girlhood to tell her story, was far more damaging. Between Mrs. Amberley, completely self-possessed, and showing indignation only by the vibrations of her low voice, and Lady Sedbergh, with her flurried, rather pathetic efforts to put herself everywhere in the right, the advantage was on the side of the accused. She had no such foil in the frank bearing of the young girl, whose delicate bloom contrasted with her own exotic beauty only to show that whatever quality it may have had was not that of innocence. Joan repeated what she had told Bobby Trench, in much the same words, and the only discount that could be taken off her evidence was the admission that she had thought nothing of it at all until after she had been told of what Mrs. Amberley was suspected.

It was when she was just about to leave the witness-stand, and the Squire, who had been following the process of question and answer with spasms of nervousness at each fresh speech, was beginning to breathe freely once more, that Mrs. Amberley looked at her with a glance from which, with all her care to avoid the expression of feeling, she could not banish the malice, and asked her, "Would you have said what you did if it had been anybody but Mr. Trench who asked you?"

The insinuation was plain enough, and Joan met it with a warm blush which she would have given worlds to have been able to hold back. She felt the blood warming and reddening her cheeks and her neck, but she answered immediately in spite of it, "It was my sister who asked me what I had seen, when Mr. Trench told us both of what you were suspected"; and Mrs. Amberley let the answer pass, with an air of not finding it worth while to take further notice of such a childish person.

Joan made her way back to her seat between her father and mother, the blush slowly fading from her cheeks. She felt outraged at having had such a question put to her, and in such a tone, before all these knowing, sniggering people; and her distress was not lightened by her father saying to her in an angry whisper, "There now, you see what comes of making yourself free in that sort of company." He added, "Confound the woman's impudence!" in a tone still more angry, which took off a little of the edge of his previous speech; and Mrs. Clinton took Joan's hand in hers and pressed it. So presently she recovered her equanimity, and only blushed intermittently when she remembered what had been said to her.

A French jeweller gave evidence of Mrs. Amberley having sold pearls to him in Paris. She had been veiled and hooded, but he was sure it was the same lady. He should have recognised her by her voice alone. He gave the dates of the transactions, three in number; and other evidence was duly brought forward to show that Mrs. Amberley had been in Paris on each of those dates.

A London pawnbroker's assistant gave evidence of her having pawned a single pearl, which he produced. She had done it in her own name. He proved to be an indecisive witness under the pressure of Mrs. Amberley's lawyer, and said he was not sure now that it was the same lady, although he was nearly sure. But there was the transaction duly recorded, and Mrs. Amberley's name and London address entered in his books at the time. Asked whether he thought it likely that a lady who was pawning stolen property, obviously with no idea of redeeming it, would give her own well-known name and address, he recovered himself sufficiently to answer very properly that he had nothing to do with what was likely or unlikely; there was his book.