CHAPTER VI.
For some distance on the road to Stroan the delicious glow cast upon him by this stimulating conversation lasted and made Clifford as happy as a bird.
But when the irregular outline of the old-fashioned town grew more defined under the September sky, and the meeting with Jordan and Conybeare grew nearer, he had to concern himself with the manner in which he should get out of the difficulties which his stay under the roof of the Blue Lion had brought upon him.
What had they heard and what would they believe?
He had not to ask himself these questions long, for before he reached the town he came upon Jordan with an easel, a sketch-book and a pipe, and Conybeare with a strapful of books and a white umbrella.
Their demeanor was not kindly toward the errant Clifford. A garbled version of the story of the robbery had, indeed, reached them already, and they had both made up their minds that Nell was the thief. Willie Jordan, of course, was the more inclined to this view from his resentment at having been “cut out” by Clifford, who, on his side, was reticent and entirely silent on the subject of the sudden infatuation which had led him to propose marriage to the girl.
Very soon the subject of the Blue Lion and its inhabitants was tacitly tabooed among the friends, and it was not until ten days later that any of them found their way to the little inn by the shore.
When they did so, however, they were disappointed in the object of their visit. Nell was never to be seen, and not one of the three young men ever dared to ask for her, as George Claris, looking upon them apparently as fellow-conspirators against the fair fame of his house, was curt to the verge of rudeness to them all.
Now this invisibility on the part of Nell, far from cooling Clifford’s quickly sprung-up passion, served only to inflame it further. But it was in vain he wrote—in vain he hung about the neighborhood. Although on two or three occasions he caught sight of her, she always disappeared before he could come near.
The last day of the stay of the three friends arrived, and they made one despairing attempt to bid her good-by. Clifford had preserved his reticence concerning the girl, but the other two more than suspected him. Willie had softened in his views of the mysterious affair, and it was now only Conybeare who persisted in a harsh judgment of the innkeeper’s niece.
She was just the sort of girl, he said, to attract young fools and make them lose their wits and their money. He, however, was as anxious for a farewell peep at the mysterious beauty as his companions.
This time they were fortunate. When they had gone past the inn, they caught sight of the pretty figure whom they all had in their thoughts, and they all pretended to view it with indifference. Willie was the first to break down in this assumption.
“There she is!” he said, in quite a tremulous voice. “It’s no use pretending we don’t see her. Do you think she’ll run away if we get over the fence?”
Clifford had already made the experiment.
To the great relief of the whole party, Nell turned slowly and waited for their approach without a smile, with, indeed, a sort of quiet defiance.
“I suppose,” she said to Clifford, as soon as he came up, “you have come to say good-by, you and your friends, before you go back to town?”
She had remembered the date he had given her for that event, then. This was a ray of consolation, but she gave him no other. She was cold, reserved, almost hard. He felt so angry with her for her contemptuous disregard of his feelings that he thought for the moment that his passion was extinguished by it. However, she unbent so far as to invite them all in to tea, and the three young men were much puzzled as to which of them it was who had procured them this favor. Conybeare seemed to be, on the whole, the one to whom she talked the most; Clifford was, without any doubt, the one of whom she took the least notice.
The meal, on the whole, was a pleasant one, although Claris himself was more taciturn than he had been on that unlucky day when he and Nell and Clifford had spent such a merry hour in the little sitting-room.
Now the weather had changed; the autumn winds were whistling about the little inn, and the blue sea had become a dark-gray line, flecked with white crests. There was a fire in the little grate, and it was when Otto Conybeare moved quickly forward to poke it for Nell that the incident occurred which was to throw a shadow over the meeting.
In passing a side-table upon which stood a wicker work-basket, Otto dragged the cloth off, and brought the basket and all the rest of the things on the table with a crash to the floor. Willie, who was near him, went down on his knees with apologies for Otto’s clumsiness.
“He thinks it’s manly, you know, to show a contemptuous indifference to such feminine trifles. A sure sign of genius, you know, Miss Claris, and you must excuse it, as it’s the only sign he’s got. Oh, and just look at the pretty things he’s been trampling under his great intellectual feet!”
And Willie held up to the astonished gaze of the rest a glittering jewel which sparkled in the fire-light.
For a moment there was an oppressive silence. Then Nell, pale and agitated, snatched it from him with fingers so unsteady that the trinket fell to the floor again. It was Clifford who picked it up this time and gave it to the girl without a word. Nell would have put it back into her basket, but George Claris, on whom the appalled silence of the young men had not been lost, told his niece in a rough tone to give it to him.
“What is the thing?” he asked, sharply.
“Only one of a pair of old-fashioned earrings, uncle,” answered Nell, with emotion, which no efforts on her part could hide.
“Earrings! I didn’t know you had any! Where did you get them? Who gave them to you?”
For one moment the girl fenced with him, trying to treat the matter lightly, as she got upon a chair and placed the work-basket at the top of the high cupboard by the fireplace. But George Claris was not a man to be trifled with. Seizing the girl by the shoulder so roughly that he almost dragged her to the ground, he tore the work-basket out of her hands, flung back the lid, and turned out the contents upon the table, the chairs, anywhere, until he had found both the earrings.
Then he held them up to the light critically; then he looked at Nell with a puzzled frown.
“Who gave ’em to you?” he asked, sharply.
The young men, trying to hide their interest in her answer by talking among themselves, yet listened eagerly. She blushed, stammered, then turned white as she said:
“The colonel gave them to me—Colonel Bostal. At least, he and Miss Theodora.”
George Claris rubbed one of the earrings on his sleeve, and then rather quickly thrust them both out of sight under a little pile of old papers and magazines which had been replaced upon the side-table.
“Well, I don’t know what folks want spending money on jew’lry for, when you can get just as good to look at for next to nothing. And next to nothing must be the vally of anything as Miss Theodora gives away,” he added, with a rather forced attempt at jocularity.
Clifford, who was much perturbed by this incident, on account of the construction his two friends were sure to put upon it, made haste to turn the talk into another channel. He knew that he had not heard the last of it. And he was not surprised to see Otto, at a later period of the evening, when the rest were in the garden, draw the earrings from the place where they had been put, and examine them carefully by the light of the lamp.
While Clifford lingered behind for a few last words with Nell, the other two, having taken their leave, walked on together.
Willie spoke first. Puffing at the pipe he had just lit, he glanced up at Otto.
“Well, and what is your opinion of our fair friend now?” he asked.
“My opinion is that she is a thief, and a very daring, if not a very skillful, one. Those earrings were pearls and rubies, real ones, very old-fashioned, but worth something.”
“And you don’t think they may have been given to her?”
“My dear fellow, look at the story. Is there anything to blush about in the fact of receiving a present from an old man and his old daughter? Yet, undoubtedly, she did blush. Then look at the improbability of the thing. The Bostals are as poor as church mice. Would they have such a thing as these earrings? Well, perhaps they might have. But would they give them away? The old man might, infatuated with her pretty face, but not the starchy, elderly-young lady.”
“You had better not tell Clifford what you think.”
“I don’t mean to. But I mean to try to save him from this entanglement; and in order to carry out my plan, he must not suspect that I have one. He won’t say much about her, you bet; he will be afraid of our raillery. And we shall say no more than he does. And, of course, if he asks me my opinion about the earrings, I shall say they were worthless. See?”
Willie nodded. He no longer bore Clifford malice for cutting him out; he was only too thankful that he had been himself saved from a deep tumble into the same pitfall.
It was about a fortnight after the return to town of the three friends that there drove up to the Blue Lion, one bitter evening, a hired dog-cart from Stroan, in which sat a gentleman who told the landlord that he was on the way to Courtstairs, but that he found the weather too severe, and should be glad to put up at the inn until the following morning. He was a pleasant, talkative young fellow, and George Claris, who had been growing rather moody and reserved of late, thawed under the influence of the stranger’s genial manners, and passed the evening smoking and talking by the fire in the little bar-parlor. Only once in the course of the evening did he catch sight of Nell.
She was passing through the passage on her way upstairs, and she appeared at the door of the room for an instant only, to give a message to her uncle. As she stood there, the young man took occasion to mention that he must try to push on to-morrow, as he was carrying property of some value for a firm in whose employment he was, which was expected by another firm to whom he was commissioned.
And he noticed that, as he said this, the girl’s bright color left her cheeks.
“Why don’t you push on to-night, then?” she said, brusquely, advancing a step into the room and fixing her eyes earnestly upon him. “The weather may be worse to-morrow, and if you are afraid of a little wind, you should have gone by rail, and not by road.”
The young man rose politely, and looked at her curiously as she spoke. But before he had had time to utter a word in answer, her uncle dismissed her from the room with a by no means gentle reminder that it was no business of hers.
The visitor, in spite of the importance of his commission, seemed to be in no great hurry to push on with his journey; for on the following day, as the wind was still cold, and the sky still gloomy, he remained at the Blue Lion.
George Claris had a shrewd suspicion that it was the blue eyes of his pretty niece which made the stranger so dilatory, and he took care that the girl should be invisible throughout the whole of the day. As he had expected, the young man grew evidently uneasy, and presently found occasion to ask if the young lady had left the house.
“No,” answered George, shortly, “she’s in the house right enough, but you won’t see no more of her. My niece is a lady, sir, for all she is my niece, and she don’t ’ave nothin’ to do with my business.”
The young man, rather to the landlord’s surprise, appeared entirely satisfied with this explanation.
Indeed, he had every reason to be so, for he was a friend of Otto Conybeare’s, whom that young gentleman had sent down to do a little amateur detective work in the supposed interest of Clifford King, but without, of course, informing Clifford of his benevolent intention.
The young man had been much disappointed that the first night of his stay under the roof of the Blue Lion had passed off uneventfully. The second, however, fully made up for this lack of excitement. So fearful was he of missing a possible visitor by oversleeping himself, that he never closed his eyes at all; and he was rewarded for his vigilance when, between two and three o’clock, he heard a slight noise at his door, and a moment later saw dimly that there was a figure moving in his room.
He held his breath while the intruder went softly toward the head of the bed, making no noise, feeling about, stooping, searching. At last, when the figure, which could now be discerned as that of a woman, reached his clothes, and began hunting in them, the amateur detective, allowing his excitement to get the better of him, sat up in bed, making, in doing so, just enough noise to arouse the attention of the watchful thief. The next moment she had darted across the room, and out at the door. But the young man, being prepared for such a contingency as this, sprang out of bed half-dressed, and dashed out on to the landing in pursuit. The woman had got the start of him, and was by this time halfway up the attic staircase. He followed, saw her open the door of the room on the right and close it. He heard the key turn in the lock. Without a second’s hesitation, he flung himself with all his strength against the door. It shook, it creaked; another such blow and the rickety old frame-work would give way. Just as he hurled all his weight against the door for the second time, however, he heard the unmistakable sound of the throwing open of the window of the room.
The next instant, the door gave way under the force of his blows, and he dashed into the room just in time to see a head disappear behind the sill of the open window.
Dashing through the room without a moment’s hesitation, the young fellow reached the window, and looked out. There was the sloping roof of an outhouse underneath, and although he could see no one, he flung himself out, slid down the tiles and found himself precipitated quickly if not very gently to the ground. Then he saw a dim something moving in front of him, under the trees, and he followed.
The shadowy something paused. A cry escaped him, a low cry of triumph, as he found that he was gaining on the creature he was pursuing. But the next moment he uttered a cry of a different sort, and a much louder one, as he found himself precipitated with great suddenness into a bath of ice-cold water.
Not being acquainted with the geography of the place, he had walked straight into the little river. Cries and shouts quickly brought him assistance, for the landlord, who had been already awakened by the hammering in of the upstairs door, came out in his night-shirt and rescued him with a boat-hook.
“The thief!” sputtered the amateur detective with chattering teeth. “The thief! I’ve found her out! I’ve found her!”
“What thief?” said Claris, surlily, as he dragged the shivering man towards the back door of the inn with no gentle hand. “Who do you mean by thief, you addle-pated rascal?”
“You’ll see, you’ll see to-morrow,” replied the other, undaunted, not heeding his own pitiful plight in his excitement. “Whose is the bedroom upstairs at the back on the right?”
“That’s my niece’s room,” said Claris, sullenly, “and if you dare to say that she had anything to do with your fool’s outing to-night, I’ll shake such brains as you’ve got out of yer!”
“SPEAK OUT, MAN, OR BACK YOU SHALL GO INTO THE RIVER AGAIN.”—See Page [84].
“Well, you may, and welcome, if you don’t find that she’s left her room and got away by the window. Ah!” he stopped short suddenly in the middle of the cabbage-garden, through which they were walking, and pointed to a white figure which was stealing its way into the house: “Is that your niece, or is it not?” roared the young man excitedly, as he pointed with a shaking finger in the direction of the disappearing woman.
For answer George Claris sprang forward, and seized the girl’s wrist just as she reached the shelter of the doorway.
“Nell!” cried the man, in tones so hoarse, so terrible that they sounded like those of a stranger. “Tell me, lass, what were you doing out there?”
But the girl only stammered and shook, and he waited in vain for an answer.