CHAPTER X.
“That is a burn, is it not?” he asked, quietly.
The girl was white, and she trembled from head to foot. Her white forehead grew damp, and glistened in the lamplight. Her lips seemed scarcely able to form the answer which she uttered in a mechanical fashion.
“Yes.”
“May I ask you to oblige me by telling me how it happened?”
She glanced up at him with a face which was rigid with fear.
“What—what does it matter? Why do you want to know?”
She seemed to the detective to be turning something over in her mind, and he at once assumed that she was trying to invent a plausible story to account for the mark on her hand.
“I’m sure you may guess, Miss, that it is not my business to put you to inconvenience by asking unnecessary questions; but, of course, if you refuse to answer, I can’t make you. Do you refuse?”
“Oh, no, certainly not,” she replied, quickly. “I was doing some ironing, and the iron touched my hand, and burned it.”
“And when did this happen, Miss?”
Again the girl hesitated. The detective took note of this fact also. He repeated his question.
“To-day; this morning.”
“I believe, Miss, you were not here this morning?”
“I was not in this house.”
“Have you any objection to tell me where you were, Miss?”
Her white face flushed.
“I would rather not.” Then, at once perceiving that he noted this fact against her, she added: “My only reason is that I was in the house of a friend, and I don’t want her to be disturbed by your making inquiries of her about—about—me.”
The man smiled dryly.
“I’m afraid, Miss, it’s too late to trouble ourselves about that. As I want really to save you all the trouble and annoyance I can, perhaps you’ll let me suggest where you were. Wasn’t it at Colonel Bostal’s, Miss, at the house they call ‘Shingle End?’”
“Yes. But she doesn’t know anything about this; I didn’t tell her why I came.”
“All right, Miss. Don’t you worry yourself about that. I shan’t put her to much trouble, I can promise you that. At this stage of the business it’s only asking questions. But, of course, you understand that we have to make sure we get truthful answers.”
Nell looked more anxious than ever, but she made no further objection.
“Do you want to ask me anything more?” she said, quietly.
“Nothing more at present, Miss. And I’m much obliged to you for the few minutes’ talk you’ve given me.”
He did not hide—perhaps he could not—the fact that his spirits had risen considerably. Not only was there the mark of the burn on her hand, but there were a dozen signs—in her lightness of foot, her height, her slenderness of figure, the softness of her hand, her hesitation in answering him, by which he began to feel absolutely sure that he was at last on the right tack. Therefore he had to persuade her that he was on the wrong one.
“Of course, Miss,” said he, “it doesn’t do to say too much when one is only investigating like. But I may tell you that you’ve helped me considerably, and in a way you wouldn’t think, to find out the thief who’s given all the bother.”
Again the girl’s face, with its delicate, tell-tale skin, blanched with a spasm of terror. But he did not appear to notice it.
“And now I may just add, in strict confidence, mind, as it’s a thing I don’t want to get known till I’ve actually nabbed the chap, that he’s one of the best-known thieves from the East End of London and has done time more than once.”
As he said these words, with an expression of great cunning, Nell’s face, as easily read as a book, exhibited first astonishment, then relief, and finally a joy which she tried in vain to hide. He could see, even though her eyes were downcast and her mouth tightly drawn, that she could scarcely contain herself for the wild impulse of delight which had succeeded to the torments of his interrogatory.
There was a moment’s pause before she could collect herself to reply in tranquil tones:
“Well, I’m sure, my uncle, and all of us, will be very glad when you’ve caught him. Will you go through this way?”
And opening the inner door of the sitting-room, she directed him to go out through the bar.
The detective smiled to himself when, after having refreshed himself at the bar, and apologized to George Claris, to whom he gave a similar hint to that which he had given to Nell, he found himself once more on the road to Stroan.
He had been so far eminently successful, but there was many a link still wanting in the chain of evidence which was to connect pretty Nell Claris with the robberies at the inn. As he had no intention of returning to his hotel until he had made further investigations at Shingle End, he doubled back by way of the fields when he had gone a short distance along the road, and hung about between the Blue Lion and Colonel Bostal’s house, taking advantage of every bit of hedge and tree to keep out of the range of chance observers.
And it was not very long before he found that some one else was on the watch also. The figure of a man, in a jersey and seaman’s boots, with a felt hat on the back of his head, and a pipe in his mouth, soon attracted his attention. He recognized the man as Jem Stickels, a frequent customer at the Blue Lion, and a person of whom report spoke ill as a confirmed “loafer” and idler, who only worked when he could not help it. He could not be quite certain whether Stickels saw him, but the fisherman was on the lookout for another person, and the detective had little difficulty in guessing that that person was Nell Claris.
For indeed Jem Stickels made no secret of his admiration for the young lady, nor of his determination to “bring down the hussy’s pride some fine day.”
It was the intention of the detective to go to Shingle End, to interrogate Miss Bostal on the subject of the burn on Miss Claris’s hand. But as he felt sure that Nell would try to outwit him by seeing the lady and preparing her for his questions, he wanted to wait until she had started on her journey, so that he might be with Miss Bostal when the girl arrived.
His expectations were realized to the letter. He was waiting behind a clump of bushes not far from the garden gate of Shingle End, when he caught the first sight of the girl coming across the fields at a rapid pace. As she drew near, he could hear her panting breath, could see, even in the waning light of the December day, that she cast anxious glances round her as she went.
When she was within a couple of hundred yards of him, she stopped, with a little scream, as Jem Stickels suddenly appeared at her side, springing up from the shelter of one of the numerous dikes with which the marsh was intersected in all directions.
“LOOK HERE! YOU HAD BETTER LISTEN TO WHAT I’VE GOT TO SAY.”—See Page [129].
The detective heard the fisherman’s hoarse, jeering laugh. Then he saw the girl dart forward, with the evident intention of escaping her unwelcome admirer by fleetness of foot.
“That’s the very movement by which she got away from me!” thought the detective, as he saw the slight figure bend suddenly to the right, avoiding the rough touch with which she was threatened.
But Jem Stickels knew with whom he had to deal. Thrusting his hands into his pockets, he contented himself with barring her passage with his person, skillfully baffling each attempt she made to pass him. These attempts on her side, and the successful movements by which Jem frustrated them, brought both the young people near enough to the detective in his place of concealment for him to hear the words which the fisherman addressed to the girl.
“Look here,” he said, roughly, and in no very subdued voice, “you had better listen to what I’ve got to say, and so I tell you. For if you don’t, I’ll just take myself off and say it to somebody else instead.”
“Indeed, that is just what I want you to do,” answered Nell, indignantly. “You know very well that I don’t wish to talk to you now or at any other time, but especially now.”
“What do you mean by ‘especially now,’ eh, Miss Fine-lady-peacock?” asked Jem, who had evidently been drinking, although he knew what he was doing.
But for answer the girl turned suddenly and started to run back to the inn. Jem, however, being prepared for some such attempt, soon caught her, and this time they were too far away from the detective to hear what they said, although he could distinguish the tones of their respective voices.
It was evident that the very next words uttered by Jem made a great and terrible impression upon Nell. Her face, which had at first expressed nothing but loathing and disgust, became in a moment rigid with horror, as the young man, standing quite close to her, and speaking in a hoarse whisper, said something to her in an excited and earnest manner.
So anxious was the detective to learn what it was which produced so strong an effect upon the girl, that he crawled from his hiding-place to the ditch which ran alongside the road, and crept along, sometimes in the water and sometimes only in the mud, until he was close enough to the two speakers to catch most of their words. When he stopped, the girl was refusing some request of the man’s, with all the energy of loathing and detestation.
“Of course I will not,” she was saying vehemently. “Of course, nobody would believe your stories for a moment. And I don’t suppose you would dare to tell them to anybody else, for fear of being taken for a lunatic.”
“Don’t you? Oh, all right, then,” sneered Jem. “I may tell that Hemming then, that’s been spying round here lately, and that’s put your uncle’s back up so by the questions he’s been asking. I may tell him, eh, Miss?”
The detective could not see the girl’s face as she answered, after a little pause:
“You may come up with me to Shingle End, and tell your story to the colonel and Miss Theodora; that’s what you may do—if you dare.”
There was another pause, and the detective knew, from the way in which she had uttered these words, as well as from the attitude in which she waited for the fisherman’s answer, that she was less defiant than her words. At last the fisherman spoke again. And it was clear that the proposal was not to his taste.
“Look here, Miss Nell!” said he, in argumentative tone, “do you really dare me to do that? Come, you know as I shouldn’t have dared to have spoken to you so open if I hadn’t got proof positive. Now, come, should I? Why, your face told as how you knowed I knowed, and so what’s the good of braving me? And knowing what I know, isn’t it plain I mean no harm, when I could easy earn a pound or two out of peachin’ to the detective chap? Come, now, you must see it, eh?”
“Come and say it out, then, before witnesses—I dare you to do it!” retorted Nell, with a little more assurance as she noted the man’s reluctance to take this step.
“No, I shan’t!” he replied, sullenly. “I shall go to work my own way. And I say this: if you choose to speak civil to me, I don’t ask for much more, and to ask me in to tea with you and your uncle just how you asked the young swells as were down here three months back, why, I hold my tongue, and it’ll go no farther than you and me. But if you don’t choose to do this—”
“I don’t choose!” retorted Nell, quite fiercely. “I tell you the whole story you tell is absurd, and that nobody would believe you for a moment, and you can tell it to whom you please.”
And she suddenly sprang away from Jem, and gaining the road with rapid steps, walked quickly in the direction of Shingle End.
“All right!” shouted Jem, threateningly, in stentorian tones, as he kept pace with her, walking towards the colonel’s house by the fields, as she went by the road. “But if you’ll take my advice, you’ll make a clean breast of it to your grand friends, and see if they don’t say you’d best keep in with me!”
As he shouted the last words, Jem Stickels passed the spot where the detective was in hiding. Within a few moments the latter took the opportunity of issuing from his uncomfortable shelter, and, following Jem at a quick pace, came up with him before he reached the fence which surrounded the colonel’s garden.
“Is that you, Stickels?” asked he, as if he were not quite certain of his man. “Here, I want to have a word with you!”
He spoke in a low voice, not wishing to be heard by Nell, who had now got some little way ahead, still walking along the high road. But Jem, who did wish to be heard, bawled out his answer at the very top of his voice:
“Yes, Mr. Hemming, it’s me right enough. And maybe I’ve got as much to tell you as you’ve got to ask me, sir!”
The detective saw that Nell, who was now at the corner of the road, and about to turn to go up to the front door of the house, stopped, hesitated, and seemed half-inclined to return to where Jem stood.
Perceiving this, Jem drew back a step, and appeared to wait for her. But Nell did not come back. After a few moments of indecision, she disappeared round the corner of the white house. Jem Stickels, however, seemed either to have changed his mind about telling the detective what he knew or to have only meant to frighten the girl by pretending that he was going to do so; for instead of speaking again to Hemming, he jumped over the fence into the garden, and, running at full speed across the now bare flower-beds, flattened his nose against the window of the kitchen, where a light was burning.
By moving a few paces to the left, the detective, from where he stood outside the fence, could see that there were figures moving inside the kitchen, and could presently distinguish the two figures within as those of Nell and Miss Bostal respectively. He could see, also, although he could hear nothing, that Nell was pouring out some narrative in an excited manner, and that the elder lady was quietly listening.
“Ah! ah! ah!”
The hoarse sound of Jem Stickels’s derisive laughter suddenly startled the two ladies, who sprang apart and glanced at the window.
“Ah! ah! ah!” roared the young fisherman again.
The detective was on the point of leaping the fence, with the intention of addressing Jem, when the back door of the house was suddenly opened, and Miss Bostal, well muffled up in a thick woolen shawl, so that only her little, thin pinched nose and gentle light eyes could be seen, addressed the fisherman in kindly tones from out of the woolly depths of her covering.
“Jem Stickels, is that you? What are you doing out there, frightening us out of our lives? If you have anything to say to us, come inside.”
But the lady’s voice, kindly yet imperious, seemed to render the surly young fellow somewhat abashed. He would have slunk away and got back over the fence into the field again, but that there was a tone of command in the prim little lady’s voice which made him pause.
“I haven’t got nothin’ to say to neither of you,” grumbled he, sullenly. “Who said as I had? I haven’t said nothin’ to nobody, barrin’ just this: That I don’t see why Miss in there should treat me as if I was dirt, and that if she goes on treatin’ me that way, I’ve got the means of being even with her.”
The little prim lady could be heard to sigh. She seemed genuinely concerned about this matter.
“But haven’t you heard,” said she, with a prim little affectation of sprightliness, “‘that faint heart never won fair lady?’ How is it that you are so sure that Miss Claris means to treat you badly?”
“How am I sure?” bellowed Jem, flaming up into wrath. “Why, I’m sure of it because she does it—because she never meets me but what she turns her head away as if I was beneath my lady’s notice. That’s why I am sure, an’ that’s why,” went on Jem, casting a glance at the kitchen window, and raising his voice still higher, in the hope of being heard by Nell, “that’s why I say I’ll be even with her.”
“Dear, dear!” bleated Miss Bostal, as she drew her shawl more closely about her. “I shouldn’t have expected a brave fellow like you to threaten a lady.”
Jem only grunted.
“I should have expected you to have more patience. Come, now, shall I speak to her for you? I don’t know, mind, that I can do any good; but if any word of mine can help the path of true love run smooth, why, I’ll say it with pleasure.”
But Jem only replied by a jeering laugh.
“I mean it,” chirped the lady. “I’ll speak to her myself. And now will you come into the kitchen and hear me speak to her? Perhaps that will satisfy you.”
After a few minutes’ hesitation Jem slouched into the passage; and Miss Bostal was about to close the door, when the detective, who had taken care to hear every word of this colloquy, appeared suddenly before her, and put his hand upon the door.
“Beg pardon, ma’am, but I should like a few words with you, if you’ll be so good as to see me for a few minutes privately. My name’s Hemming, ma’am; and I dare say it’s got to your ears that I’m here about this robbery business at the Blue Lion.”
Miss Bostal, who had uttered a little shrill scream of fright on the first appearance of the stranger, now recovered herself and gave a little gasp of acquiescence.
“Oh, yes, I know—I’ve heard. You are the—Yes, come in.”
He entered, waited while she shut the door, and then followed, by her direction, not into the kitchen, but to a cold, dark room on the right, which smelt as if it were little used. Miss Bostal wisely kept her shawl wrapped tightly round her, and politely begged him to take a seat, while she lit one of the two candles which stood on the mantelpiece. The detective gave one comprehensive look around the room, and quite understood why the lady preferred to spend her time in the kitchen, where it was, at least, warm.
“And now,” asked the lady, as she seated herself on a prim, stiff-backed chair covered with faded needle-work, “what is it you want to ask me?”
“Well, ma’am,” said the detective, who sat on the edge of his chair, and felt surprise at the amount of dignity there was about the little prim, shabby lady, “it’s just this: I want to know if any little accident happened to a young lady who spent the morning with you—Miss Claris?”
He saw his breath and hers on the cold air of the little room, and thought it was much warmer in the fields outside. The lady was evidently astonished at the question.
“Little accident?” she repeated. “Not that I remember.”
“Was she doing any sort of work for you, ma’am? She said something about ironing, I think.”
“She didn’t do any ironing,” answered the lady, promptly, “but I did.”
“She told me she was ironing and burned her hand.”
The lady shook her head.
“It was I who had the iron all the time,” she said, decidedly.
But then the detective noticed that the lady gave him a quick look, and that she then, as if recollecting herself, altered her tone. He instantly decided that she was making up a story for the benefit of her protégée.
“I recollect, now I think of it,” said she, “that I did come very near her with the iron, and that I was afraid I had burned her, though she said it was nothing, and, indeed, I could see nothing.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said the detective, rising at once. “And now would you be so good as to let me see her and the man Jem Stickels together, at once, before they leave this house?”
“If they are here, you can, certainly,” said Miss Bostal, as she at once left the room and went down the passage toward the kitchen.
In a few minutes, however, she returned with a blank expression.
“I’m sorry to say,” said she, “that they have both left the house. Whether together or no,” she added, with a demure and pinched little smile, “I can’t say.”
The detective took his leave, not in the best of humor.
Jem Stickels was the person to be “got at,” that was certain. But Hemming’s fear was that he had been “got at” already.