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Lord Cochrane's exploit, however, though less complete than he had intended, was as successful in its issue as it was brilliant in its achievement.
The important, all-engrossing, delightful thing was that she could not look upon him as a casual acquaintance any more. Through all her life she would think of him she would know. Colonel Cochrane's camel was at one side, and the old soldier, whose wrists had been freed, had been looking down upon the scene, and wondering in his tenacious way whether all hope must really be abandoned.
This was the reason of a friendly duel between that vivacious woman Kirsty Howieson, Jean Cochrane's maid and humble friend, and that hard-headed and far-seeing man of Angus, Jock Grimond, Claverhouse's servant and only too loyal clansman.
Claverhouse, like a faithful gentleman, had done his best to conceal from her the injury which his marriage had done him, but she knew that his cunning and bitter enemy, the Duke of Queensberry, had constantly insinuated into the mind of the Duke of York and various high personages in London that no one who had married Lady Cochrane's daughter could, in the nature of things, be perfectly loyal.
The proposal that Lord Cochrane's case should be referred to a Select Committee was rejected without a division. The motion that he should be expelled from the House was carried by a hundred and forty members, against forty-four dissentients. That new act of injustice, however, though it added much to Lord Cochrane's suffering, brought him no fresh disgrace.
At the special instigation of Lord Ellenborough, as it was averred, the prosecution had been renewed in May, 1816, almost immediately after the rejection by the House of Commons of Lord Cochrane's charges against the vindictive and unprincipled judge; but the time was too far gone for trial to take place during the summer term.
Having been one of the counsel engaged in the cause, I can speak with some confidence respecting it, and I take upon me to assert that Lord Cochrane's conviction was mainly owing to the extreme repugnance which he felt to giving up his uncle, or taking those precautions for his own safety which would have operated against that near relation.
"Finally there was Cochrane's arrest and examination, the order for him to appear at the Supreme Court, his failure to do so, his recapture and trial, and his sentence of four years imprisonment on several counts, in all of which he was proved guilty.
Amid loud cries of "Put Lord Cochrane's motion first, for if the motion of thanks be disposed of, the Duke of York will leave the chair, and the noble lord's motion will not be put at all," the Duke of Kent declared that there could be no intention to get rid of the noble lord's motion by any side-wind.
He was at once sent back to England, to be rewarded with much popular favour, and with a knighthood of the Order of the Bath, conferred by George III., but to become the victim of an official persecution, which, embittering his whole life, lasted almost to its close. It must be admitted that this persecution was in great measure provoked by Lord Cochrane's own fearless conduct.
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