“What do you mean?”
“Well, sir, what I mean is this. When I came down from Miss Eleanore and told Mr. Robbins, as he called himself at that time, that my mistress was ill and unable to see him (the word she gave me, sir, to deliver) Mr. Robbins, instead of bowing and leaving the house like a gentleman, stepped into the reception room and sat down. He may have felt sick, he looked pale enough; at any rate, he asked me for a glass of water. Not knowing any reason then for suspicionating any one’s actions, I immediately went down to the kitchen for it, leaving him there in the reception room alone. But before I could get it, I heard the front door close. ‘What’s that?’ said Molly, who was helping me, sir. ‘I don’t know,’ said I, ‘unless it’s the gentleman has got tired of waiting and gone.’ ‘If he’s gone, he won’t want the water,’ she said. So down I set the pitcher, and up-stairs I come; and sure enough he was gone, or so I thought then. But who knows, sir, if he was not in that room or the drawing-room, which was dark that night, all the time I was a-shutting up of the house?”
I made no reply to this; I was more startled than I cared to reveal.
“You see, sir, I wouldn’t speak of such a thing about any person that comes to see the young ladies; but we all know some one who was in the house that night murdered my master, and as it was not Hannah——”
“You say that Miss Eleanore refused to see him,” I interrupted, in the hope that the simple suggestion would be enough to elicitate further details of his interview with Eleanore.
“Yes, sir. When she first looked at the card, she showed a little hesitation; but in a moment she grew very flushed in the face, and bade me say what I told you. I should never have thought of it again if I had not seen him come blazoning and bold into the house this evening, with a new name on his tongue. Indeed, and I do not like to think any evil of him now; but Molly would have it I should speak to you, sir, and ease my mind,—and that is all, sir.”
When I arrived home that night, I entered into my memorandum-book a new list of suspicious circumstances, but this time they were under the caption “C” instead of “E.”
XIX. IN MY OFFICE
“Something between an hindrance and a help.”
Wordsworth.