Chapter XIII

"They draw a nourishment Out of defamings, grow upon disgraces; And, when they see a virtue fortified Strongly above the battery of their tongues, Oh, how they cast to sink it!"

One of the most interesting cases in the Law Courts that winter was _Perivale_ v. _Brown Smith_, a claim of £10,000 damages on account of a gross libel published in a paper of which the defendant was editor and proprietor.

Brown Smith pleaded justification, and it was said that he was going to make a good fight, and that he would produce witnesses who had met the lady and gentleman on their travels as Mr. and Mrs. Randall.

The case came on late in November, when there were a good many people in town, staying for the weeks before Christmas, or passing through; and the court was packed with smart clothes and well-known faces. Conspicuous among these curious impertinents were two well-known figures in the little world of Belgravia and Mayfair: Lady Morningside, whose ample person, clothed in black satin and chinchilla, filled a considerable space on the privileged seats; and the spare and wiry form of "the most honourable," her husband, a man whose weather-beaten countenance, trim whiskers and keen eye, cut-away coat and Bedford cords, indicated the indomitable sportsman.

Eye-glasses and opera-glasses glittered across the fog, and the point to which they were chiefly directed was the figure of Lady Perivale, in a neat black gown, with cape and toque of Russian sable, seated in the well of the court, with Arthur Haldane sitting beside her.

There was much whispering among the eye-glasses about the lady and her companion.

"She is as handsome as ever," said one; "I was told she had gone off dreadfully. Rather audacious to bring this action, ain't it?"

"Rather a dangerous move, I should think."

"Oh! she's got Sir Joseph Jalland. He always wins when there's a pretty woman to orate about. You'll see, he'll make the jury shed tears."

"What odds will you give me against that fat man in the corner being the first to weep?"

"Hush! It's going to begin."

Mr. Waltham, Sir Joseph's junior, opened the pleadings in an undertone, which sent all the picture-hats distracted. They thought they were losing the fun. And then a thrill ran round the Court as Sir Joseph Jalland rose in his might, adjusted his pince-nez, trifled with the leaves of his brief, and then slowly began to unfold his case. The deep, grave voice made all the aigrets shiver, and every lorgnette and binocular was turned to him.

"This greatly injured lady--this lady, whose life of blameless purity, life spent in an exalted sphere--in the sheltered haven of a congenial marriage, this lady whose spotless character should have shielded her from the lightest breath of slander, has been made a target for the salaried traducer of a venomous rag that calls itself a newspaper, and has been allowed to drivel its poisonous paragraphs week after week, secure in its insignificance, and a disgrace to the Press to which it pretends to belong," flinging down the _South London Bon Ton_ on the desk before him, with a movement of unutterable loathing, as if his hand recoiled instinctively from the foul contact. "She has been made the subject of a slander so futile, so preposterous, that one marvels less at the malice of the writer than at his imbecility. A woman of gentle birth and exalted position, hemmed round and protected by all those ceremonial ramparts that are at once the restraint and privilege of wealth and social status, is supposed to have roamed the Continent with her paramour, braving public opinion with the brazen hardihood of the trained courtesan."

This and much more, in its proper place and sequence, did Sir Joseph's deep voice give to the listening ears of the Court, before he summoned his first witness, in the person of the plaintiff, Grace Perivale.

Her evidence was given in a steady voice and with perfect self-control.

"Did you ever travel on the Continent with Colonel Rannock?"

"Never."

"Were you in Corsica in the January of this year?"

"No."

"Or in Algiers in February?"

"No."

"Will you be so good as to say where you were living during January and February last?"

"I was at my villa near Porto Maurizio from November last year until the beginning of April in this year."

Sir Joseph had no more questions to ask. The defendant's counsel exercised his right to cross-examine the witness, who stood facing the Court, calm and proud, but deadly pale.

"Were these paragraphs in the--er"--looking at his brief--"_Bon Ton_, the first you had heard of a scandal associating your name with Colonel Rannock's, Lady Perivale?" he asked blandly.

"It was the first time such a scandal had appeared in print."

"But the scandal was not unfamiliar to you?"

"No."

"You had heard of it before?"

"Yes."

"On several occasions?"

"I was told that such a thing had been said."

"And that your friends believed it?"

"Not one!" the witness answered indignantly. "No friend of mine believed one word of the story!"

She flushed and paled again as she spoke. She shot one involuntary glance towards the man who was so much more than a friend, and who had almost believed that slander.

"You will admit, I think, Lady Perivale, that the story had been common talk for a long time before this society journal got hold of it?"

"I know nothing about common talk."

"That will do, Lady Perivale," said the counsel.

Lady Perivale's butler and maid were the next witnesses.

They had been with their mistress at Porto Maurizio from November to April, during which period she had never been absent from the villa for twenty-four hours.

The defendant's counsel cross-examined both witnesses, and made a praiseworthy--but unsuccessful--attempt to cast ridicule and doubt upon the two old servants, whom he tried hard to place before the jury as overpaid and venal hirelings, willing to perjure themselves to any extent for their employer. He gratified his professional vanity by letting off two or three forensic bon-mots, and succeeded in raising a laugh or two at the expense of the country-bred Abigail and the dignified London butler; but the endeavour to weaken their testimony was an ignominious failure.

"That, my lord, would complete my case," said Sir Joseph Jalland, "were it not essential that the falsehood and the folly of the slander in this scurrilous rag," striking the _Bon Ton_ with his open hand, "should be stamped out at once and for ever; and in order that this may be effectually done--to prove indubitably that Lady Perivale was not with Colonel Rannock during his Continental wanderings last winter, I shall produce the person who was with him."

Miss Kate Delmaine stepped into the box, admirably dressed, like Lady Perivale, in a black cloth gown, and wearing a sable toque almost of the same fashion. A murmur of surprise ran round the Court, an excited whispering and twittering, which the usher hastened to suppress.

Seen in that November gloom, the witness looked like Grace Perivale's double.

Kate Delmaine! There were some among the wigs and gowns, and some among the smart audience who remembered her in her brief career, a girl of startling beauty, whose dazzling smile had beamed across the footlights at the Spectacular Theatre for a season or two. They had seen, admired, and forgotten her. She rose before them like the ghost of their youth.

"Will you tell me where you were living last February, Miss Delmaine?" Sir Joseph began quietly, when her carmine lips had hovered over the Book: "from the 7th to the 25th?"

"I was at the Mecca Hotel, in Algiers."

"Alone?"

"No. Colonel Rannock was with me."

"You were in Corsica and in Sardinia before that, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Also with Colonel Rannock?"

"Yes."

"In what capacity were you travelling with him?"

The phrase produced a faint titter, and the younger of the smart young ladies became suddenly occupied with their muffs and lace handkerchiefs.

"We were travelling as Mr. and Mrs. Randall, if that's what you want to know!" Miss Delmaine replied, with a look that challenged the Court to think the worst of her.

"That is precisely what I want to know. You were going about with Colonel Rannock as his wife--under the _nom de guerre_ of Randall?"

"Yes."

"Good! Pray, Miss Delmaine, can you tell me where Colonel Rannock is at this present time?"

The witness had given her evidence in an agitated and angry manner from the beginning. The bloom on her cheeks was hectic, and not rouge, as the smart young women thought. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, splendid eyes, that flashed angry fire. She had stood up boldly in her place, defying the world's contempt; but it seemed as if the effort had been too much for her. She looked distractedly round the court, turned white as ashes, and fell in a dead faint, before she had answered the counsel's question, which was irrelevant, and might not have been allowed.

There was the usual rush with glasses of water and smelling-salts, and the witness was carried out of court.

The Court then adjourned for luncheon. The picture-hats all waited, sniffed salts and eau de Cologne, nibbled chocolates, hungry, and yawning for want of air, but determined to see it out.

There was bitter disappointment for the curious impertinents when, on the judge returning to his seat, Sir Joseph Jalland informed his lordship that Mr. Brown Smith had offered an ample apology for the offensive article in his paper, and that his client had no desire to continue the action in a vindictive manner.

The judge highly approved of this course.

"If Lady Perivale brought this action in order to clear her character of a most unmerited aspersion, she has been completely successful, and can afford to be lenient," said his lordship, with feeling.

The defendant was to publish his apology, both in his own paper and such other papers as Sir Joseph should name. He was to destroy every number of his paper still unsold, and to call in any numbers remaining in the hands of the retail trade, and was further to give one hundred guineas to any charitable institution selected by the plaintiff.

Only to Lady Perivale's solicitors and to Mr. Faunce was it known that the defendant would not be out of pocket either by this hundred guineas, or for the costs of the action, against which a considerable sum had been paid into his banking account by Mr. Faunce, before the libel--written by that very Faunce, in collaboration with one of the ladies who did the _Bon Ton_ gossip--appeared in Mr. Brown Smith's popular journal.

Faunce had said there would be a libel when it was wanted, and Faunce, who was an old friend of Brown Smith's, had produced the libel. Nobody was any the worse, and Society was deeply humiliated at discovering how cruelly it had misjudged a charming member of its own privileged body. Lady Morningside and her husband made their way to Lady Perivale directly the judge left his seat, and the old Marquis, with an old-fashioned gallantry that recalled "Cupid" Palmerston, bent over Grace's ungloved hand and kissed it: a demonstration that thrilled the smart hats and eye-glasses.

Cards and letters of friendly congratulation poured in upon Lady Perivale at Grosvenor Square that evening--letters from the people who had cut her, making believe that the aloofness had been all on her side.

"And now, dear, after this plucky assertion of yourself, I hope you are not going to shut yourself from your old friends any more. It has been so sad to see No. 101 empty all the season, and not even to know where you were to be found," concluded one of those false friends.

Grace flung the letters into her waste-paper basket with angry scorn.

"To think people can dare to pretend they did not know I was in town, when I drove in the park nearly every day!" she exclaimed.

"I hope you are satisfied, madam," said Faunce, when he called upon Lady Perivale the day after the trial.

No one had seen Faunce in court, though Faunce had seen and heard all that happened there. His work had been finished before the case came on, and the family solicitors in Bedford Row took all the credit of the successful result, and congratulated Lady Perivale upon their acumen in retaining Sir Joseph Jalland.

"I hope you are satisfied, madam," Faunce said modestly, when he called in Grosvenor Square, in response to Lady Perivale's request.

"I am more than satisfied with your cleverness in bringing the wretched business to an issue," she said; "and now all I hope is that I may be able to forget it, and that I shall never hear Colonel Rannock's name again."

"I hope you will not, madam--not in any unpleasant connection," Faunce answered gravely.

"I must refer you for your professional charges to my lawyers, Mr. Faunce," pursued Grace. "But I must beg you to accept the enclosed as a token of my sincere gratitude for the trouble you have taken, and as a souvenir of your success." She handed him an envelope.

"I assure you, Lady Perivale, I do not require anything beyond the ordinary payment for my time and trouble."

"Oh, but you must take this, to please me," she answered. "I want you to remember that I value your services at more than their professional price."

She gave him her hand at parting, as she had given it at the end of their first interview, and he thought more of that cordial handshake than of her present, which he found to be a cheque for £500.

In the third week in December there was a very quiet wedding at St. George's, Hanover Square, a marriage which was celebrated at half-past eight o'clock in the morning, and at which the only witnesses were Susan Rodney and Mr. George Howard, newly returned from Pekin--a wedding so early and so quiet as to escape the most invincible of the society paragraphists, the insatiable pens that had been writing about this very marriage as an imminent event.

The bride's dark-grey cloth gown, sable-bordered travelling-cloak, and black chip hat offered no suggestion of wedding raiment. The breakfast was a _parti carré_ in the dining-room at Grosvenor Square; and the married lovers were able to leave Charing Cross at eleven by the Continental Express without provoking any more notice from the crowd than the appearance of a beautiful woman, perfectly dressed for the business in hand, and leading the most perfect thing in brown poodles, must inevitably attract. The honeymooners were established at their hotel in Cairo before the paragraphists had wind of the marriage.