"Hey?" I cried: but my Master turned on me sharply. To this day I know not how much of evil he suspected.
"I will summon you if I need you. For the present you will leave us here alone."
Nor can I tell what passed between them for the next half-an-hour. Only that when he came forth my Master's face was white and set beneath its dry smear of blood. Passing me, who waited at the end of the corridor, he said, but without meeting my eyes:
"Go to him. The end is near."
I went to him. He lay pretty much as I had left him, in a kind of stupor; out of which, within the hour, he started suddenly and began to rave. Soon I had to send for a couple of our stablemen; and not too soon. For by this he was foaming at the mouth and gnashing, the man in him turned to beast and trying to bite, so that we were forced to strap him to his bed. I shall say no more of this, the most horrible sight of my life. The end came quietly, about six in the evening: and we buried the poor wretch that night in the orchard under the chapel wall.
All that day, as you may guess, I saw nothing of the strange lady. And on the morrow until dinner-time I had but a glimpse of her. This was in the forenoon. She stood, with her hound beside her, in an embrasure of the wall, looking over the sea: to the eye a figure so maidenly and innocent and (in a sense) forlorn that I recalled Gil Perez' tale as the merest frenzy, and wondered how I had come to listen to it with any belief. Her seaward gaze would be passing over the very spot where we had laid him: only a low wall hiding the freshly turned earth. My Master had ridden off early: I could guess upon what errand.
He returned shortly after noon, unhurt and looking like a man satisfied with his morning's work. And at dinner, watching his demeanour narrowly, I was satisfied that either he had not heard the prisoner's tale or had rejected it utterly. For he took his seat in the gayest spirits, and laughed and talked with the stranger throughout the meal. And afterwards, having fetched an old lute which had been his mother's, he sat and watched her fit new strings to it, rallying her over her tangle. But when she had it tuned and, touching it softly, began the first of those murmuring heathenish songs to which I have since listened so often, pausing in my work, but never without a kind of terror at beauty so far above my comprehending—why, then my Master laughed no more.
He had met Godolphin that morning and run him through the thigh. And that bitterest enemy of ours still wore a crutch a month later, when we faced Master Porson before the Commissioner in Saint Aubyn's house at Clowance. At that conference (not to linger over the time between) the Commissioner showed himself pardonably suspicious of us all. He was a dry, foxy-faced man, who spoke little and at times seemed scarce to be listening; but rather turning over some deeper matters in his brain behind his grey-coloured eyes. But at length, Mr. Saint Aubyn having twice or thrice made mention of the Lady Alicia and her presence on the beach, this Sir Nicholas looked up at me sharply, and said he—"By all accounts this lady was a passenger shipped by the master at Dunquerque. It seems she was a foreign lady of birth, bearing letters commendatory to the Court of Lisbon."
"That was his story of it," Master Porson assented. "I was below and busy with the cargo at the time, and knew nothing of her presence on board until we had cleared the harbour."
"And at this moment she is a guest of Mr. Milliton's at Pengersick?" pursued Sir Nicholas, still with his eyes upon mine. I bowed, feeling mightily uneasy. "It is most necessary that I should take her evidence—and Mr. Milliton's. In all the statements received by me Mr. Milliton bears no small part: his house lies at no distance from Gunwallo Cove: and I have heard much of your Cornish courtesy. It appears to me singular, therefore, that although I have been these four days in his neighbourhood no invitation has reached me to visit his house and have audience with him: and it argues small courtesy that on coming here to-day in full expectation of seeing him, I should be fobbed off with a deputy."