Lady William had finished the letter, which was the one she had begun in the morning with the admission which Mr. Plowden thought so rash of the burning down of the chapel. She had struck out the line in which she said ‘one witness of my marriage is alive, but——.’ What she wrote was as follows:
‘There are two witnesses of my marriage alive, one Miss Grey, The Nook, Watcham, who will make an affidavit, or see anybody you may send to take her evidence; the other, Mrs. Artémise Mansfield. I do not know at this present moment where to find the latter, but she will appear if necessary. There is also a record in a diary of my father’s which I am told would hold good in law——’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Plowden doubtfully, ‘I suppose that is all right, Emily; Miss Grey’s evidence, of course, makes all the difference. Still, I can’t see why you should be so anxious to confess to them that the chapel is burnt down.’
‘They would discover that fact themselves: and they might think we knew it all the time, and had chosen that place on purpose to have a good excuse.’
‘Who is thinking ill of her fellow-creatures now?’ said the Rector. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it will do—with my father’s diary and Miss Grey to back you up, you may say anything you please. Yes, I think you may send it, and I think I may congratulate Mab now. Yes, I believe we may allow ourselves to think that it is all right now.’ He watched while Lady William folded up and put the letter into its envelope. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, so as to be heard by all, ‘this has been a very interesting day. There was first that untoward act of the schoolmistress going away—which indeed I must not call untoward, for she was not the sort of person for the place: but that also had to do with you, Emily: and then the quite unhoped-for, unthought-of discovery that Miss Grey had gone to see you married in such an easy, natural way; and then the great fact, to be announced to-day for the first time, that little Mab is an heiress. Do you hear, Florry? Could you have believed such a thing? The finest piece of news! that our little Mab is an heiress. She has come into a great deal of money. She will be able to take her proper position, which is far better than anything we can give her in Watcham. Mab,’ said the Rector, rising up and looking round him, as he had a way of doing when addressing a much larger audience, ‘has come into a fortune of fifty thousand pounds—as to-day.’
A little shriek broke from Florence—it came against her will. It was not wonder and sympathy, as might have been expected from her, but an intolerable sense of the contrariety and distraction of things. ‘Oh, papa!’ There was a protest in it against Mab, Mab’s mother, and all that could happen to those secondary persons. What did anything matter in comparison with what she herself had to tell? And they were all in a conspiracy against her to prevent her from getting it out!
At last, however, there arrived a crisis, as the Rector got his hat and prepared to go away. The curate rose, too.
‘I’ll go with you, if you will permit me. There is something I want to talk to you about,’ said Mr. Osborne, with a visible blush, which Lady William, looking suddenly up, caught, and started a little to behold, feeling for the first time some thrill in the air of the new thing.
‘Oh yes, to be sure, the schoolmistress,’ the Rector said. He gave a little sigh of impatience. ‘To be sure, that is a thing that must be attended to,’ he said.
‘No, it is not the schoolmistress. It is something much more important,’ said Mr. Osborne, at the end of his patience. There was something in the tone of his voice this time which made them all look up.