“Neither your uncle nor I wish to interfere in your private affairs, my dear. You are grown up, and you have a right to do as you please. But your uncle has a very wide knowledge of life, and I think you would probably find that, in the long run, it would be worth your while to take him into your confidence.”
Jean burst into bitter sobs, and her aunt got up from her chair and put her arms around her.
“Come, come, don’t be offended, childie! It’s only that we’re so anxious—that’s all. The matter’s so terribly important, not only to you but to your uncle—perhaps you don’t quite realize that, eh?”
“How d’you mean?” exclaimed Jean, glancing from the one to the other.
“Well,” said Dr. Maclean slowly, “I’ve not said anything about it, for I’ve known that your trouble, my dear, has been much, much greater than mine. But of course this terrible affair is a fearful blow to my professional reputation. And though for a little while people will be eager to see me—after I’ve been badgered and worried like a rat worried by a terrier, in the witness-box—the better class of my patients are sure to say: ‘Better not send for old Maclean. D’you remember that stupid mistake he made over the death certificate of that patient of his who was poisoned?’”
“I didn’t realize all that. Oh, how sorry I am that I’ve brought all this awful trouble on you!” exclaimed Jean, looking from the one to the other of them with unhappy, haunted eyes.
For the first time since this great trouble had come on them all, they separated that evening not on their usual affectionate, open terms, the one with the other. And it was after a night spent wide awake in bitter self-communing that Jean got up early the next morning.
“I’ll breakfast with you in the kitchen,” she said to Elsie. “I’ve got to be at the prison by ten o’clock, and I should like to get out of the house before my uncle and aunt come downstairs.”
The modern prison of Grendon was built at a time in the nineteenth century when there was still but small reverence for historic buildings. Within the vast enclosure surrounded by walls five feet thick still stands the mound crowned by the ruins of a Norman keep known to antiquaries as Grendon Castle. And close to that high mound rises the mediæval mass of brick and stone locally called the Old Prison. To the imaginative historian that house of woe, long emptied though it be of suffering humanity, is of far greater interest than are the remains of the castle.
Last, but, from the point of view of the townspeople, by far the most important, within the same vast enceinte is the eighteenth-century pillared building where the county assizes are always held, and where many a famous trial has taken place. But the public doors to the Assize Court are reached from without the great walls, some way from the jealously guarded entrance to the modern prison, and to the vast space in which it stands.