CHAPTER XXII.
Sir Neville Bax had no idea of letting his admiration of Nell Claris’s pretty face save her from the terrors of a most rigorous examination.
When she had made the admission upon which the whole matter hinged, and had broken down into tears as a consequence, he gave her very little time to recover her composure, before he went on in a loud, pompous voice:
“Well, and so you admit there was a person in the house, at the time Mr. King was robbed, of whose presence there nobody but yourself knew anything. Now, what was the name of that person?”
Nell looked at him reproachfully. He knew who it was, and he might have spared her the pain of having to state it herself. But as he waited, she said in a whisper which was a strong contrast to the magistrate’s tones:
“Miss Theodora.”
“Miss Theodora Bostal?”
“Yes.”
“And how came she to be there, without anybody’s knowledge?”
Nell, seeing there was no hope for it, dried her eyes and gave the following account with composure:
Miss Bostal had for some months been in the habit of asking Nell, from time to time, to let her sleep with Nell for the night, on the plea that the Colonel had stayed at Stroan, and that she was afraid of sleeping at Shingle End all by herself. She had begged Nell not to mention the fact even to her uncle, alleging that if it were to become known that her father’s house was sometimes left unprotected, it would certainly be broken into. Nell had seen nothing extraordinary in this, and had readily given shelter to her friend on half a dozen different occasions.
“I believe you were in the habit of going to Shingle End every morning and evening; that you were on intimate terms with her father and herself, and that you would chat with her about everything that happened at the inn?”
“Yes,” said Nell.
“And is it a fact that the robberies at the Blue Lion always took place when Miss Bostal was sleeping under the roof?”
“Only at first,” said Nell, earnestly. “The last time she slept there was the night Mr. King was robbed.”
“How was it that you did not, on that occasion, mention to your uncle that she had been sleeping with you?”
“How could I? But indeed I did think of mentioning it, and refrained because it would have looked like throwing suspicion upon my best friend.”
“Your best friend?”
“Yes, sir. She had been very kind to me; and it was she who got my uncle to send me to such a good school.”
“Oh, oh! I see. Artful all round. Doesn’t look much like insanity,” muttered Sir Neville to himself. And he continued his interrogatories: “And did not the fact that the robberies always took place when she was there excite your suspicion?”
“No, oh, no! I never thought of such a thing!” protested the young girl, earnestly.
“You say Miss Bostal was not in the house, to your knowledge, on the occasion of the subsequent robberies?”
“She was not sleeping in the house, sir,” answered Nell, looking down.
“Now, my dear Miss Claris, be candid, and tell me all you know.”
With a sigh Nell obeyed. She admitted that on the morning when her uncle was found in a state of insanity, she had made a careful search of the house and had found out a circumstance which had escaped her notice, that a spare key of the back door, which had formerly hung on a nail in the passage, had disappeared.
“How was it you had not found that out before?” asked Sir Neville, rather dryly.
“I had forgotten all about the key, which was never used, until we had to leave the house on account of my poor uncle. Then I went over the keys to the different doors by an old list we had left by the man who had the place before my uncle; and it was then I missed the key, and remembered that I had not seen it for a long time.”
Sir Neville made a few notes before he went on.
“Before you missed the key you had had suspicions, of course?”
Nell bowed her head in assent.
“You need not think,” said the magistrate, sharply, “that your making a frank admission of your suspicions can do the lady any harm. We should get at the truth somehow, you may be quite sure.”
“I am telling you all I know,” said Nell, simply.
She herself saw that no concealment was possible any longer. And surely if Miss Bostal were really found guilty of such unlikely crimes, she must have been mad when she committed them.
“When did the idea that Miss Bostal committed the thefts come into your mind for the first time?”
Even now the remembrance of the terrible sensation she had experienced on that memorable occasion caused a frown of pain and distress to contract Nell’s pretty features.
“Jem Stickels—the fisherman who—” She stopped.
“Who was murdered. Yes, yes.”
“He told me he—had seen the thief.”
“Yes. That came out at the inquest. Well?”
“He told me that the thief was Miss Bostal; that he had seen her come out of the inn on the night that an attempt was made to rob Mr. Hemming.”
“When did he tell you this?”
“On the afternoon of the next day.”
“Why did you not say this at the inquest? Why did you let it be thought he meant that he had seen you?”
Nell looked up with tears in her eyes.
“I was in a great difficulty. I didn’t know what to think, even then. I had always thought Miss Theodora so good, and besides she had been so kind to me, that I didn’t know what to believe myself. It was all so dreadful, and I asked myself what she could do such things for. Besides, her manner when I told her Jem Stickels had threatened to tell the police was so cool. She didn’t seem to be in the least concerned about it. How could I suppose it was because she meant to get him out of the way? Oh! I can’t believe it even now, I can’t, I can’t. Why should she do it, unless she was mad? And there never seemed to be a trace of madness about her. I always thought she was very clever.”
Sir Neville smiled a little at her ingenuousness. Nell herself might not be very clever, but assuredly she was a loyal-hearted friend, to bear the obloquy which the affair had cast upon her, without a thought of clearing herself by betraying her friend.
But this was not, of course, the official view, which was the view he was bound to take. He coughed severely, and gave her a keen look.
“Don’t you think,” he said, “that you were bound, in the interests of justice, to be more frank?”
“Oh, sir, does one help the interests of justice against one’s friends?”
“One ought to,” was the prompt reply.
“And then, too, nobody asked me any questions implying any doubts of her. They took it for granted that I was the thief, the jury did, and everybody. You remember that, don’t you?”
Yes, Sir Neville did remember that. And looking at the candid and sweet face in front of him, he wondered how his brother magistrates had been such asses, and he forgot that he had been one of those asses himself.
“Well,” he said, in a more pompous manner than ever, “you really gave your evidence so very badly, with such an apparent absence of straightforwardness, that there was some excuse for their mistake.”
“It was because I was so miserable, sir, more miserable than anybody, because in a sort of way I knew the truth.”
“You should have let the jury know it, too.”
“Sir, if it had been only the thefts I would have done so,” answered she, earnestly. “I was in so much trouble with my suspicions that I had asked one of my friends”—her blush betrayed her—“to come and see me, that I might ask his advice about it. But before I had time to tell him what I was afraid of, the murder happened. And then I didn’t dare.”
“Well, well, it was a great pity,” said Sir Neville. “You would have saved yourself a lot of misery, and it would have done the lady no harm, as you see. And now I want some information, if you please, as to the night of the murder. Did you, or did you not, hear any one go out of the house or come in, when you had come back with Miss Bostal from your visit to Jem Stickels at his lodgings?”
“I—did hear something,” faltered Nell.
“What was it?”
“Almost as soon as Miss Bostal left me in the kitchen, I heard the back door open and shut.”
“Ah! Did you go to see who it was that had opened the door?”
“No.”
“I suppose you had some idea in your mind about the sounds. What was it?”
“I thought it was Miss Theodora. She was always running in and out of the garden, feeding the chickens or looking for eggs or fetching wood from the stack at the side of the house or water from the well.”
“So that you just thought it was she, and then troubled yourself no more about it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear, or think you heard, her come in again?”
There was a pause. Then Nell whispered:
“Yes.”
“When was it?”
“It was—a long while after, just before I took the tea into the dining-room.”
Sir Neville laid down the pen which he had been holding, clasped his hands and looked over his writing-table at her, with an air of exasperation.
“Now, my dear girl, why on earth didn’t you tell the coroner that?”
“I couldn’t have told them that in my answers to their questions,” answered Nell, earnestly. “Don’t you remember that all they asked me was whether I had been outside the house, not whether I had heard anybody else go in or out?”
Sir Neville did remember. He asked one more question.
“I have heard a report that a canvas bag containing the money collected for the shipwrecked sailors, on the night before your uncle went out of his mind, was found in your room. Is that true?”
“No, sir. Meg, my uncle’s servant, and I found it on the mat at the foot of the stairs. And that is really all I have to tell, sir,” said Nell, with an air of relief at having finished the odious recital.
“Well, that is enough for our purpose, fortunately,” said Sir Neville, as he rose to ring the bell. “And now you must come into the drawing-room and let Lady Neville give you a glass of wine. You are a little bit of a heroine, although you have certainly not done much to facilitate the course of justice,” he wound up, with a dignified shake of the head.
But Nell refused to go to be shown off in the drawing-room, refused even to have a glass of wine or a cup of tea brought to her in the study before she went. She was white, trembling, miserable. But she felt that she wanted to be alone, to cry her eyes out at the terrible fact that she had been forced at last to assist the justice which she would have diverted from the criminal if she could. One question, however, she had to put in her turn before she left the presence of the magistrate.
“They will bring it in that she was mad, of course, will they not?” she asked, anxiously, but with an attempt to appear quite sure of his answer.
Sir Neville’s answer was not reassuring, and the look which accompanied it was still less so.
“That is a matter for after consideration.”
Nell walked to the door with staggering feet. Miss Theodora a murderess! In danger of penal servitude, if not of hanging! The thought was too overwhelmingly horrible.
Nell tottered to the cab and was driven back to her lodging at Courtstairs in an almost fainting condition, a few minutes before the police-sergeant who had been her escort to Sir Neville’s started for Shingle End with a warrant for Miss Bostal’s apprehension.