“He wants her, you see,” she added pitifully.
So little Lady Susan trotted forward and said that if Miss Audaer would stay and help to nurse Rees she should be very pleased. And Deborah, with some reluctance, had to yield.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Deborah was saved the pain of giving evidence against Amos Goodhare, for that gentleman, having by his ruse of a sprained ankle, put the policemen in whose charge he was a little off their guard, managed to escape from their guardianship before they got to the end of the court, and by means of the London fog which had helped him so much already, got away, doubled on his pursuers, and took refuge, with great astuteness, in the very house in which he had been caught, even before the men who were now in charge of the body of the murdered man had left the building with their burden.
Amos was never caught; indeed, the authorities seemed rather slack in his pursuit; and as he had the astuteness to leave the country immediately, nothing more was ever heard of him until two years later, when he died in Paris, in abject poverty.
The sensational death of Lord St. Austell was never fully explained to the public. As the recovered crown jewels were immediately re-set and restored to their places among the rest, the temporary loss of them was never widely known, and the country bumpkins who go to the Tower to stare at the treasures, which many Londoners have never seen, are still as much impressed as ever by the antiquity of the gold of King Edward’s crown. So that the murder of the earl was generally believed to have been merely the sequel to a commonplace affair of robbery, affected by means of a decoy.
Rees and Sep also got off much more easily than they deserved, the whole affair having died out of the public mind before the former was in a fit condition to be moved from Lady Susan’s house to his mother’s home in Carstow. But Rees was injured for life. No physician could give him hopes of more than a sickly existence, with constant danger of the re-opening of the wound. So much his excesses of the past year had done to undermine a fine constitution. And another wound was in store for him.
Sep crawled back one cool April evening, shivering, miserable, and half crazy, from want on the one hand, and a guilty conscience on the other, to his old aunt at Carstow, who took him in and nursed and tended him with unquestioning goodness. But he was never the same man again. Without suffering evidently from impaired reason, he fell into a lethargic state, and was subject for the few remaining years of his life to fits of nervous depression which nothing could cure. One sign of the change in him was that he hated the sight of Rees, and would turn hurriedly out of his way as soon as his formerly beloved companion came in sight.
Rees, in spite of his wound, took things more easily, and was easily nursed back, by the adoration of his mother and of Lady Marion, into nearly his old belief in himself. Lady Marion, whose devotion was, if possible, more pronounced than ever, returned to Llancader as soon as he went back to Carstow, in order to be as near to him as possible. His evident preference for Deborah did not disconcert her; she was resigned to everything but losing sight of him, and accepted any small crumbs of gratitude and kindness which he chose to throw to her with humble joy.
Partly, perhaps, because Deborah showed no particular devotion, but more of a kindly and even contemptuous pity in her ministrations to his comfort, Rees showed for her something nearer to genuine affection than he had ever showed to a girl before. Nothing was done rightly for him except by her; and as Mrs. Pennant had not resolution enough to interfere with any caprice of her darling boy’s, the young girl was in danger of losing her health by the close confinement his demands upon her care involved.