CHAPTER IV.
In spite of his own indignation and remorse on hearing Claris make this coarse and cruel speech, Clifford watched the girl narrowly, and was shocked and surprised to observe that while he and her uncle were at a white heat of excitement, she showed remarkable self-control. After a moment’s silence on her part, she interrupted Clifford’s protests and excuses with a little pettish movement of her hand.
“Never mind apologizing,” said she, curtly. “Let us hear what you have to say. Now I know what you meant by your being ‘disturbed.’”
She cast down her glance upon the shabby carpet of the little sitting-room, and stood, leaning with one hand upon the table, her head half turned away, in the attitude of close attention.
It was evident that she did not suffer half so keenly as did Clifford, whose voice was hoarse and tremulous as he spoke in answer.
“You don’t suppose, you can’t suppose, that I accuse you of anything,” said he, trying in vain to meet her eyes, and betraying even to the prejudiced eyes of George Claris the genuineness of his feeling. “I was disturbed in the night. I found a hand under my pillow. I caught the hand with my purse and my watch in it. The hand was a woman’s, small and soft and slender. There, that’s all I know.”
“But you think it’s enough to go upon when you accuse my niece of being a thief!” shouted George Claris, as he brought his heavy fist down with a sounding thump upon the table.
“Hush, uncle!” said the girl, with perfect calmness. “Mr. King never meant that. I am sure of it.”
And to the young man’s intense relief and gratitude, she looked straight in his face with a faint smile.
“Thank you. Thank you with all my heart,” said he, hoarsely.
Nell was still very pale, but she was quite calm and composed; and after a short pause, during which the two men had watched her, wondering what she was going to propose, she suddenly sat down upon a chair and leaned upon the table, in the endeavor to hide the fact that her limbs were not as much under her control as her mind was.
“Let us think it out,” said she. And then, before either of the others had spoken, there passed suddenly over her face a sort of spasm of horror-struck remembrance, as if a half-forgotten incident had suddenly flashed into her mind with a new significance. Clifford saw that a light had broken in upon her. But instead of communicating to her companions the idea, whatever it was, which had flashed through her own brain, she raised her head very suddenly, and meeting Clifford’s eyes with a piercing look, asked:
“You have some idea, some suggestion to make. What is it?”
It was strange how the man had blustered, and the woman prepared herself to reason. Clifford sat down on the other side of the table, feeling that here was a person with whom he could discuss the matter with all reasonableness.
“I was wondering,” he said, gently, “whether you ever walked in your sleep. I know it seems an infamous thing to have dared to connect you with the matter at all—”
“That will do,” she said, gravely. “I don’t want any apologies about that. I can see, Mr. King, that the very notion makes you much more unhappy than it does me.”
The tears sprang to Clifford’s eyes. Every trace of suspicion of her honesty had melted away long since under the influence of her perfect straightforwardness.
“It’s awfully good of you,” he said, gratefully. “As I was saying, somnambulism is the only explanation possible. You must have read of such things. You must have heard that it is possible for a person to take things in his sleep and hide them away without ever being conscious of what he’s done.”
Again there passed over the ingenuous face of the young girl that look which betrayed some vague but horrible memory. It perplexed Clifford and worried him. It was the one circumstance which marred his perfect belief in her, for it showed what all her words denied—that she had a little more knowledge than she confessed to.
“And what made you think the hand was mine?” asked she, in a troubled tone. And instinctively, as she spoke, she tried to hide her hands under the rim of the broad hat which she had taken off.
“Well, the hand was small and soft, like yours,” said Clifford in a low voice. “So small that it was almost like a child’s hand in mine. It seemed to me that I had only touched one hand in my life at all like it.”
Nell shot a frightened glance at him, and in the pause which followed Clifford saw a tear fall on to the table-cloth. He started up.
“Oh, this is horrible!” he moaned.
But the girl sprang up in her turn, and turning to her uncle, cried, in a voice full of energy:
“Uncle George, you must give to Mr. King the money he has lost, whatever it is. Of course,” she went on quickly, turning to Clifford with eyes now bright with excitement, “we cannot give you back your watch, but we can give you the value of it, if you will tell us what it is—the mere money value, I mean. For, of course, that is all we can do.”
But even before Clifford could protest against this suggestion, which he had, indeed, never contemplated for a moment, the innkeeper burst out into a torrent of indignant remonstrance.
“Me give him twenty-five pound! That’s what he said he had on him, an’ who’s to credit it? Who’s to prove it, I say? An’ the vally he likes to set on his watch besides? No, that I won’t. It’s my belief it’s a trumped-up story altogether, an’ I dare him to fetch the police in! I dare him to, I say!”
And he gave another thump on the table.
Avarice as well as anger gleamed in the man’s eyes as he spoke, the avarice of the man who has had to work hard for small gains.
Clifford looked from the niece to the uncle, and suspicion of the latter began to grow keen. Nell retained her presence of mind. She went up to the excited man and put a coaxing hand upon his shoulder.
“Uncle,” she said, almost in a whisper, “you remember there have been other robberies here.”
Her voice sank until the last word was almost inaudible.
George Claris started violently, and shook his fist in the air in a tumult of rage.
“I know there has! I know there has!” said he, between his teeth. “An’ I’d like to catch the rascal as did ’em. But nobody before ’as dared to say you or me was at the bottom of it, Nell. Nobody before has dared to say we wasn’t honest. Why, man, I’ve been settled here these twenty-five years, and I’m known to every man, woman and child between Stroan and Courtstairs. Me take a man’s watch or purse—me or my niece! It’s a plant, my girl, a plant of this fine London gentleman. Twenty-five pounds! You bet it’s more than he’s worth, every rag and stick of him. He’s heard of my misfortunes lately, an’ he’s come an’ trumped up this story, thinking it’ll be better worth my while to pay him the money than have another scandal about the place. But I won’t! I won’t! I’ll do time rather.”
Clifford was torn with battling emotions as he listened to this speech, which was indeed like that of a broken-hearted man. He had not been able to stem the torrent of the poor fellow’s fierce wrath, and it was only when Claris sank down with his head upon the table that he was able to say, very quietly:
“I never thought of asking for compensation, Mr. Claris. I should not think of doing so. All I want is to clear up this detestable puzzle, much more in your interests than in mine. I am not a rich man, but neither am I a beggar, as you have rather unkindly suggested. I can afford the loss of my watch and money, but I cannot afford to leave you and poor Miss Nell here without doing my best to find out the cause of these unfortunate occurrences.”
Then Nell looked again in his face with a smile which made him ready to go on his knees and worship her for her sweet forbearance.
“Thank you,” said she. Then turning to her uncle: “It will all come right,” she said; “or, at least,” she added, hurriedly, “we will hope it may. You go back to your work, uncle, and I will see if I can’t set my wits to work and have something to tell you when I next meet you.”
Claris allowed himself to be coaxed into compliance with her wishes, and presently disappeared into the bar. Then, when they were alone together, Clifford noticed a sudden alteration in her manner toward himself. It was no longer the confiding, childish behavior of a light-hearted girl; it was the responsible gravity of an older and thoughtful woman.
“You are not to distress yourself, Mr. King,” she said, quietly. “Although it is a terrible thing for us, we are, in a way, used to it, for, as you heard me say, there have been two or three cases of theft here before. I hope you are not in a hurry to get back to Stroan, for I should like, before you go, to have a search made of the house and a few more inquiries.”
She would not listen to his protests, his objections, but left him and went upstairs. Clifford, miserable and perplexed, went out into the garden and strolled among the cabbages and carrots, torn by doubts which he tried in vain to suppress.
In about ten minutes he saw, from the corner of the garden where he was smoking his pipe under an apple-tree, Nell coming quickly out of the house by the back way, and flying like an arrow down to the river’s bank. From the glimpse he caught of her face, he saw that she looked scared and guilty, and that she cast around her the glance of a person who does not wish to be observed.
Hastily unmooring one of the boats which lay by the bank, she got in, sculled across the stream, made the boat fast to the opposite shore, and began to run across the open fields as fast as her feet could carry her.
It occurred at once to Clifford that she must be going to take counsel with her friend, Miss Bostal, and he started in the direction of Shingle End himself, thinking that it would be a good idea for him to open his heart to that lady, and re-assure Nell as to his own trust in her through the unimpeachable lips of her elderly friend.
He went by the road, and sauntering along at a very sedate pace, reached the little tumbledown residence of Colonel Bostal just as Nell, emerging from it by a back-gate into the fields, started on her journey back home. She did not see him, but he, looking through the hedge at her, was able to discern that her face was, if anything, more sad than it had been when she left home, and that her eyes were swollen with recent tears.
The prim old maid had been unsympathetic and harsh to her poor little protégée, that was evident, and Clifford felt that he hated the starchy spinster for it.
He could not, however, help feeling that he should like to hear the opinion on the whole matter of people who, like the Bostals, were acquainted with the family at the Blue Lion, and who were at the same time on friendly terms with them.
Miss Bostal herself opened the door as before, and from this and other signs it was easy for Clifford to discover that she and her father kept no servants. She seemed not to be at all surprised by his visit, and when he began to apologize for intruding upon her again, and at such an early hour of the day, she only smiled and asked him to come in.
“I must own that I was engaged in the homely pursuit of peeling potatoes for our early dinner,” said she, as she showed him the old worn table-knife which she held in her carefully gloved hands.
Very careful she was, this dried-up little elderly lady, about the care of her person; she never went into the garden without a sunbonnet to preserve her complexion, nor did any sort of rough work without an old pair of gloves on her hands.
She led Clifford into the drawing-room, a long, pleasant apartment with a low ceiling, with an old-fashioned bow-window that looked to the west and another that looked to the south. The sunshine showed up the shabbiness of which Clifford had noted some traces the day before. The faded cushions, the rickety chairs, the bare fireplace, with nothing but a small sheet of brown paper in the grate to replace the winter’s fire, all spoke of desperate shifts, of the meanest straits of genteel poverty. But Miss Bostal gave him very little time to look about him.
“I can guess what you have come about,” she began, as she put down her old knife upon the side-table in the passage before entering the room. “It is about this dreadful thing that has happened at the Claris’s. But I must tell you frankly that if you have any suspicions of old Claris or his niece, it is of no use your talking to me, for you will get no sympathy. I have known old George Claris for nearly twelve years; and as for Nell, I don’t think I could care more for the girl if she were my own sister. She is as incapable of theft as an angel.”
The lady’s thin, pale face grew quite pink under the energy of this protest, which Clifford hastened to assure her was not needed.
“I believe that just as heartily as you do,” he said, earnestly. “I only want the mystery cleared up for their own sake; and I thought that you, who live so near, might, perhaps, have a notion which would help us to arrive at the truth.”
Miss Bostal smiled triumphantly.
“I have,” she said, emphatically. “I have a very strong notion, indeed. I will tell you in confidence whom I suspect, and I shall try my hardest to find out the truth.”
Clifford’s face glowed with excitement and expectancy.
“Who—who is it?” he asked, breathlessly.
“Jem Stickels,” she answered with decision.
“And who is that? You know I am a stranger here.”
“A young fisherman who owes Nell a grudge because she would not listen to the fellow’s impudent advances. He is always hanging about the place, though, and he doesn’t scruple to threaten the girl to do her some harm, and he is always prattling to people who come this way about the robberies which have been committed at the Blue Lion.”
Clifford listened doubtfully. He remembered the young fisherman in the punt, with his unprepossessing manner and low type of face; and if it had been possible to connect him with the robbery, he would have jumped at the idea as a plausible one. But then the hand he had touched was certainly not that of Jem Stickels, and, moreover, he could not conceive how the young fisherman could have got into the house and out of it unless by collusion with some one within. Rather disappointed, therefore, with the lady’s fantastic idea, as it seemed to be, Clifford, upon finding that she had no better suggestion to make, soon took leave of her, begging her to impress upon Nell his own unwavering belief in her innocence.
In the hope that he might overtake Nell on her way home, or perhaps only with the lover’s wish to tread in the loved one’s footsteps, Clifford obtained Miss Bostal’s permission to go through the little gate at the bottom of her garden, so that he could return to the Blue Lion by the fields. Nell was out of sight, however, by the time he started, and whatever pleasure he extracted from the walk was due only to the knowledge that she had passed this way.
There was a faint track over the fields, not defined enough to be called a footpath, but just clear enough for him to discern by the trodden look of the short grass.
He was within a couple of hundred yards of the little river, and was looking out for any sign of Nell’s presence in the little kitchen garden on the other side, when he became aware that the questionable Jem Stickels was in sight, punting slowly down the stream, as he had done the day before. Catching sight of the gentleman, Jem drew his punt to the shore, and with his black felt hat on the back of his head, his short clay pipe in his mouth, his hands in his pockets, he landed, and slouched along toward Clifford.
“Well, sir, I warned you as how it were not a wise thing to put up at the Blue Lion,” said Jem, with a swaggering insolence which made Clifford want to kick him. “I ’eard of it up at Fleet yonder,” and he jerked his head back in the direction of the old ruined castle up the river. “I s’pose there’s been a grand pretense o’ huntin’ about the place, and how they’ve found nothin’. They’re gettin’ used to these little scenes by this time.”
After one glance at Clifford’s face, the man let his eyes wander elsewhere. Looking shiftily and idly about as he spoke, his attention was suddenly arrested, just as he finished his speech, by something on the ground, apparently a few feet from where Clifford was standing. The latter noticed the rapid change which came over the man’s face, the eager look of interest and astonishment with which he stood gazing open-mouthed at the one particular spot on the ground.
In spite of himself, Clifford turned his head and looked, too.
There, on the grass behind him, not three feet from the track he had followed, was his own watch, with the chain still attached to it, lying half-hidden in the stubbly growth of the field.
For the first moment Clifford stared without speaking or moving, dumb with confusion, with astonishment.
“My watch! How did it get there?” he stammered at last.
The man laughed scornfully.
“Aye, how did it? I think I could give a good guess, if I dared.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why, that this is the way Miss Nell Claris goes to see Miss Bostal at Shingle End, and that nobody but her ever uses it. That is what I should make so bold as to mean, if I could speak my mind. And I’ll wager Miss has been along here this morning. Oh, she don’t get round the swells for nothing, she don’t.”
Clifford sprang at the man and pinioned him by the throat.
“You lying cur!” he hissed out, savagely. “You deserve a thrashing for this!”
But even as he flung the fellow sprawling in the mud of the river-bank, Clifford felt a chill at his heart when he saw the evidence closing round pretty Nell.