“Alice love, listen to me; this is not a mere matter of personal feeling, or I would yield to you without a moment’s hesitation, but it involves a question of right and wrong. I could not refuse to prosecute these men without diffusing an amount of moral evil amongst the whole of my poorer tenantry, which years of the most careful supervision would fail to eradicate. The utmost I can promise you is, that the culprits shall have every opportunity afforded them of clearing themselves; and if, as I am convinced, that proves impossible, every palliating circumstance shall be brought forward and allowed its fullest weight. I have already given you my free permission to assist the poor woman and her children, and more than this you cannot expect me to say.”
“But I do, or rather I did, expect you to say more,” returned Alice, with flashing eyes and glowing cheeks; “I expected you to say what I would have said to you, if you had appealed to me thus—that there was NOTHING, even if it were life itself, that I would not give up for your sake. But I see how it is, you do not really care for me, or, if you do, man’s love is not like woman’s, it is merely the excitement of the pursuit that interests you—the prize once attained becomes valueless in your eyes: in fact, love, which makes the entire joy or sorrow of a woman’s life, is to men but a superior kind of sporting—more engrossing than a foxchase, or than hunting a poor stag to death, simply because the game is of a higher order.” She paused to give vent to a sob which she was unable entirely to repress, then continued in a sarcastic tone of voice: “However, mighty hunter as you are, I do not intend to give you the satisfaction of being in at my death; I have too much of the old Hazlehurst spirit about me to break my heart for a man who does not love me. There is a quiet way, as you call it, of arranging these affairs: you have your own pursuits and amusements, henceforward I shall have mine. You need not dread my again attempting to interfere either with your pleasures, or your graver occupations. I have had too severe a lesson on each point to forget it readily. But I expect you to exercise the same forbearance towards me. From this day forth we each follow our own line!” and, drawing her shawl over her shoulders, with an imperious gesture, as of an offended queen, Alice swept out of the room, leaving Harry in a frame of mind which may be more easily imagined than described.
A complete change, which might have been dated from the above conversation, appeared to have taken place in Alice Coverdale. Instead of shrinking, as she had hitherto done, from society, she rather courted it than otherwise—ordering the carriage, and visiting the different families in the neighbourhood, without consulting Harry on the subject, or seeming to care in the slightest degree whether he accompanied her or not. At first this conduct on his wife’s part occasioned Coverdale the greatest uneasiness; but, after a time, seeing that she was amused and interested by the new acquaintances she thus formed, he began to hope that good might perhaps come out of evil, and that the intimacies then commenced might afford sources of lasting pleasure when the feeling of pique which had led her to seek them should have long since died away. And so the time glided on, working its usual changes in men and things as it passed away.
Mr. Gouger having ventured one day to commit himself to the rash assertion that Markum was sinking rapidly, and could not possibly survive the week, from that hour the gamekeeper began to amend, and had sufficiently advanced in his progress towards recovery to be able to appear and give evidence in person, when Jack Hargrave and his accomplice took their trial at the next assizes. So unmistakeably was their guilt brought home to them, that they were each sentenced to seven years’ transportation, and would probably Have had fourteen allotted to them, but for the thorough good faith with which Harry redeemed his promise to Alice that every extenuating circumstance should be clearly placed before the jury. Indeed he laboured so strenuously to impress this point upon the counsel for the prisoners, that the learned brother, entertaining a proper degree of professional scepticism in regard to the purity of human motives, immediately settled, to his own satisfaction, that Jack Hargrave must be a natural son of the late Admiral Coverdale, commended, with his dying breath, to his nephew’s especial care and protection. Alice received the news of the verdict with great sang froid, merely remarking that she had felt certain all along that it would be so; but when she had gained the privacy of her own chamber, she indulged in a hearty flood of tears, occasioned as much by what she was pleased to consider her husband’s inhumanity, as by her compassion for the poor woman and her transcendental baby.
As these latter individuals exercise no further influence over the destinies of our principal dramatis personæ, we may as well, ere we finally take leave of them, add the information that Alice (having supported them much better than Jack Hargrave had done in his best days), at the expiration of two years sent them out at her own expense to join that worthy, who, reformed by seasickness and the amenities of convict discipline, had obtained a ticket of leave, by reason of which privilege he was enacting the part of a penitent bullock-driver, to the admiration of all right-minded settlers in Australia.
The month of May had begun to temper with a dash of sunshine the fine old English east winds of April, which annually sow their share of the seeds of consumption in the glorious British constitution—Harry Coverdale had ceased to oppress the brute creation, leaving foxes and pheasants to increase and multiply by antagonistic progression—and all London was flocking to the Royal Academy Exhibition, to see a great many very original portraits of gentlemen, who scarcely looked the character after all—when one fine morning Alice received a letter from the modern Babylon, in Mrs. Crane’s handwriting. Having eagerly perused it, she exclaimed,—
“Kate has written a most kind and pressing invitation to us to come and stay with them; Mr. Crane wishes it as much as she does.”
“Or as much as she orders him to do rather,” muttered Coverdale, sotto voce.
“Of course you can have no objection to my accepting it,” continued Alice; “for myself, at all events?”
“Am not I invited?” inquired Harry, gravely.