CHAPTER XXIV.
As soon as the altercation between Goodhare and Rees grew warm, Deborah, hearing the tramp of footsteps on the pavement outside the house, had crept to the cellar window, and, unheard by the two men in their excited discussion, had torn away one of the boards from the nail which fastened it, and succeeded in attracting the attention of a passer-by, who proved to be policeman.
“Get in! break in! get in somehow!” she cried, “there are two men quarrelling here, and I’m afraid they will do each other harm.”
By that time the voices in the lower cellar were growing louder, and she stumbled across the floor, called to the men, and beat against the door. But they were too much excited to heed her. She heard upstairs the sound of knocking; and climbing up the ladder as fast as she could in the darkness, she groped her way to the front door. There was, however, nothing that she could do to help. She could only wait, sick with terror, while they hammered in the nailed-up door from the outside. Before the first board gave way, she heard someone pass her in the darkness and spring up the staircase. From the agility with which he mounted she thought it must be Rees.
“Rees, is it you? Are you safe? Hide, hide yourself,” she called to him in a hissing whisper.
Amos Goodhare heard her voice and recognised it. It flashed through his mind instantly that it must have been to her that Sep had given the jewels. If he could only get possession of them, the day’s work which had rid him of a troublesome confederate and satisfied his appetite for revenge on two men he hated, would be indeed well done.
He descended the stairs as softly and rapidly as he had mounted them.
“Yes, Deborah, it is I, Rees,” he said, in a whisper which was only just audible in the noise of knocking, both at the front and the back of the house. “Where are you? Give me your hand. You have the jewels?”
“Yes,” she answered, hesitatingly.
“Where are you? where are you?” he repeated impatiently. “Quick; I must be off.”
But he had betrayed himself. Deborah, shocked, alarmed, crept along the wall away from him, uttering no sound. He groped about for her, muttering to himself, until, with a crash, one of the boards of the door fell. By the light which was thus let in, he saw where the girl was, and sprang at her. But she pushed him off with a piercing shriek, avoided nimbly a second attack, and got back to the front door just as it was quivering on its hinges. Goodhare saw that he had no more time to lose.
“Good-bye, my dear; my love to Rees,” he said, as he re-mounted the staircase rapidly, and disappeared from view just as the front-door fell down with a crash on to the rotten flooring, and four policemen rushed in.
“Upstairs, upstairs, he’s escaped upstairs,” panted out Deborah.
Two out of the four men mounted the staircase in pursuit; the other two remained with her and wanted to know what had happened.
“I don’t know myself yet,” she answered. She was still breathless and trembling from her recent encounter with Goodhare, and feverish with anxiety on Rees Pennant’s account.
The officers seemed inclined to look upon her with suspicion. Deborah noticed this, and tried hard to compose herself.
“I want you to go downstairs—into the cellars,” she cried. “They were quarreling there, and one of them ran upstairs past me while I was standing here.”
“And what might you be doing here, miss?” asked one of the men, not uncivilly, but in a tone of cautious inquiry, which woke Deborah suddenly to a full knowledge of the dangerous thing she was doing in letting the servants of the law into this busy little nest of villainy. She had thought only of summoning help for Rees when she fancied that he was physically at the mercy of a savage and unscrupulous man; now she saw that by so doing she had perhaps betrayed Rees into the clutches of the law.
There was no help for it now, however.
“My name is Deborah Audaer,” said she. “I live at Carstow, in Monmouthshire. I will give you any particulars you want later.”
“What was it you said about the cellars, miss?” asked the other constable, as the lady paused.
Deborah turned desperately towards the ladder.
“This way down,” said she briefly, as she led the way herself.
It was quite dark, and the constables were unprovided with any light except matches, which they struck from time to time as they blundered down. It occurred to her that if Rees were unharmed and had failed to take warning by the noise of the policemen’s forcible entrance, she might find a chance of aiding his escape. So she hurried down as fast as she could, and stood with her back to the door of the lower cellar, so as to hide the fire-light which showed through the hole made by the old lock.
“Search this place first, please,” said she.
“I’ll light my lantern,” said one of the men.
The other struck a match, and examined the den as well as he could by its feeble light.
“What’s that in the corner?” said the first man.
Deborah was not paying much heed to their discoveries. She was watching for an opportunity, when their backs were turned, of slipping down into the adjoining cellar to find out what had become of Rees. But an exclamation from both men at once, as they crossed with their heavy tread to the corner indicated, riveted her attention.
“Look here, miss,” called one of them.
Deborah crept forward, prepared for some horrible sight, and thinking still of Rees.
On the damp, muddy floor, with a piece of old and frayed matting wrapped around it, lay the body of a man. As Deborah drew near, the flickering match held by the policeman went out, and while he struck another his companion laid his hand on the lady’s arm with evident suspicion. Deborah did not resent the touch; she stood in a dumb agony of dread.
When the lantern was lighted, she dared not look; the policeman drew her forward.
“Will you besergood as to tell us whether you know the gentleman?”
She glanced down, and utterly unable to restrain herself, almost shrieked:
“Lord St. Austell! Dead! Murdered!”
The men looked at each other and at her. By her tone they knew that the sight was for her a ghastly surprise, and the man who had held her arm at once let it go. Lord St. Austell was a well-known and popular peer, and, looking closer, one of the policemen recognised his face.
“She’s right. The lady’s right, Bill,” said he more respectfully.
And the men looked at each other and at Deborah again. The dead earl’s character was so well-known that their first thought was of an ambush laid, with a handsome woman as decoy.
“Do you know who’s done this, ma’am?” asked one, bluntly.
“Yes, the man who escaped upstairs; his name is Amos Goodhare,” she answered promptly. “But come into the inner cellar. There may be another murdered man lying there,” she cried, rousing herself suddenly out of the numb apathy into which the horrible sight had cast her.
“You go, Fred; I’ll stay here.”
The other nodded and accompanied her to the door of the inner cellar, where Deborah fumbled for a minute with weak, wet fingers.
“Open it,” said she hoarsely.
The man did so, and leapt down at once into the den. The fire was getting low now, but the air was still as hot as a furnace, and there was enough light for him to find his way to the prostrate form of Rees.
“By Jove! Another!” he muttered.
Deborah got down with difficulty, and tottered with swimming brain across the floor.
“Rees, Rees!” she whispered. “Dead, too!”
“No, miss, not quite—this one,” said the policeman, trying to speak re-assuringly, but growing every moment more perplexed by the whole affair. “This poor chap may come round, I think, if he ain’t bled too much. Let’s try to stop the bleeding if we can.”
Scarcely knowing what she did, Deborah lent her aid. Pressing her fingers to the wound, she said imploringly:
“Go and fetch a doctor as quickly as you can, please. It is his only chance.”
“All right, miss,” said the man.
And, quite satisfied that she would not move from the side of the handsome young fellow, he went out at once. Although, in the close, stifling atmosphere of the cellar, absorbed in grief and anxiety of the most bitter kind, Deborah fancied that she passed an hour kneeling by the side of the unconscious man, with her fingers tightly pressing together the sides of the ghastly wound in his chest, it was really not more than seven minutes before the policeman came back with a doctor.
“There’s a gentleman just got into the house from the back, miss,” said the constable. “He doesn’t seem to know anything of what’s been going on, and I haven’t told him, but he asked if there was a lady here, and I told him there was.”
“A gentleman!” echoed Deborah, as she rose from the floor, and staggered, overcome by the stifling heat.
She glanced down at Rees. He was in the doctor’s hands now; she could do no more for him. She was glad to escape out of this horrible den, and she climbed up the ladder to the ground floor without further question. A short, fair man, with a strong sense of his own importance apparent in his face and bearing, but evidently suffering for the time from some deep anxiety, was waiting in the passage. He carried a lamp which Deborah had seen on the table at Rees Pennant’s lodgings, and by its light she recognised the Honorable Charles Cenarth, keeper of the regalia.
“My niece, Marion, followed her father and you to a house in St. Martin’s-lane, and then she drove to my house and brought me here. She was afraid of coming alone, lest he should be angry. And a young man who was hovering about outside showed me the way to this place——”
“Sep Jocelyn,” murmured Deborah.
“And told me he thought my brother had come here. Perhaps you, Miss Audaer, can tell me where Lord St. Austell is.”
Deborah paused. She had no fear of inflicting a very severe wound on this deliberate gentleman by informing him of his elder brother’s death. It was pretty well known that the Honorable Charles looked upon the earl chiefly as the man who stood between him and the title.
“You are Lord St. Austell now,” she said, gently.
He honored the announcement with a start of surprise, but made no show of being deeply affected. There was a pause.
“How was it?” he asked, trying to keep his hands out of the pockets to which they instinctively felt their way.
“He was murdered, I think, by Amos Goodhare,” she answered in a whisper.
“Dear me, how very stupid of him to trust himself with Amos,” said the new earl, fretfully. “Have they caught him yet?”
“Not yet, I think.”
“Then I hope they won’t! I hope to God they won’t! It’s an awkward position, don’t you see? And the fellow does say such unpleasant things.”
Deborah was disgusted. But she had something of importance to say to this phlegmatic gentleman, and it was perhaps fortunate in one way that he was unemotional.
“I have a favor to ask of you,” she said.
He pricked up his ears. “A favor! It’s of no use asking favors of me, Miss Audaer. I’m not my unfortunate brother, you know,” he said hastily.
“You need not trouble yourself on that point. Nobody is likely to mistake you for him.”
“So much the better. I’m a poor man. The estates are very heavily encumbered, owing to my unhappy brother’s extravagance, his lamentable extravagance, I repeat. So that it is quite out of my power to grant favors—quite.”
“Even when they put money into your pocket?” said Deborah, who thought he deserved this plain-speaking.
He was not in the least offended.
“Tell me what it is?” said he at once.
At that moment the noise of a scuffle and men’s cries, “I’ve got you, my lad.” “Hold him, Jim!” in the upper part of the house reached their ears.
“They’ve caught him!” cried Deborah, with excitement.
The new Lord Austell gave an exclamation of impatience.
“Well, well, tell me at once what you want, before we are interrupted.”
Deborah had known how to gain the ear of the generous nobleman.