Jordan looked disgusted, re-seated himself in his cab and drove away. Susan repeated her expressions of regret at what she still looked on as a miscarriage of justice; but Ralph replied:
"Not at all! No one who was present at the trial could have looked for any other conclusion. We must just try again; but--now that old Jordan is out of hearing, one may venture to say it--the whole case has been mismanaged. Why did they not offer a reward at the first? Now, I fear, it will be too late! The little circumstances which detectives are able to piece together to so good a purpose are soon forgotten, and so the clue is lost."
"Poor Mary!" said Susan, "my heart bleeds for her. It may turn out for the best, perhaps, and remedy the iniquity of Gerald's preposterous will, by keeping the money in his own family, but it is very sad. She seems crushed. If her boy had been spared to her--but to lose them both! It is turning her hair grey. She who used to be the flower of our family!"
Judith's lips tightened at "flower of the family." Herself was that interesting blossom she thought, but that was not what she said. On the contrary she expressed herself with evangelical superiority to such trifles.
"I regard it as a dispensation, to wean her from earthly joys. It is in love that, when we make ourselves idols, they are taken away. Perhaps, too, it may be a judgment on her for marrying in defiance of those who were older and wiser than herself. There are warnings in all these mysterious happenings, and food for thought;" and she rolled her eyes Sibyl-wise over Ralph to the curate.
There was an irreverent gleam in Ralph's eyes, and he turned to watch a passing dray till his inclination to laugh went off. The curate was regarding her with a puzzled expression. He was a well-meaning young man, who wished both to be and to do good; but who, not being any wiser than his neighbours, notwithstanding the higher ground on which, in right of his orders, he believed himself to stand, was often in doubt both as to what he ought to feel and to say. He was very sure it would never have occurred to himself to use the language he had listened to, and he began to wonder if he had stumbled on some advancedly serious person, whose acquaintance would be improving, or--or something else. There seemed a fine devotional tone in her opening words, especially enunciated as they were, with a full and rounded unction. They were not very novel, perhaps; he seemed to have heard the like before, and more than once; but then, what that is true is also new?--as was said, or something not unlike it in sound, by a late prime minister. Her next proposition rather startled him, carrying him back to his college days, and reminding him of the stealing of Jove's thunderbolts; but there was a third-like the third course beloved by another prime minister, reconciling contradictions and committing to nothing--"mysterious happenings, food for thought." That was it! He would think it over; and there was balm in this, for had she not been listening to him, as they came along, as to another Gamaliel, while he described the charitable schemes of St. Wittikind's? and would it not be painful to think otherwise than well of so responsive a lady?
Confused by all these thoughts the curate did not speak; and Susan, thinking it high time to break up the meeting, reminded Judith that their dressmaker lived hard by, and now would be a good opportunity to order their winter gowns. Judith said goodbye regretfully and made the curate promise to come very soon and tell her more about St. Wittikind's, and the two gentlemen walked townwards together.
"You seem to know my aunt well," said Ralph. "I am agreeably surprised. I fancied she was too grimly Low Church to speak to any clergyman not of St. Silas or St. Zebedee. I hope your acquaintance will broaden her views, which are rather extreme, and something of a nuisance in the family. However, Aunt Judy means well. We all allow that. The trouble is that she will never allow that we mean well, when we go counter to her advice; and then she treats us to a word in season, which is apt to be very highly seasoned with brimstone and what not."
There was a tone of levity and indifference to his cloth in this talk which jarred on Mr. Bunce. It was evident that Ralph looked on him as just like a secular person, or perhaps as less shrewd, and this was not as he liked. His associations were mostly with the docile of the other sex, and the more reverential of his own, and the company of this robust worldling was so unpleasantly bracing that they soon parted, and Ralph was alone when he reached his office.
"A man waiting to see you, sir."