Viola was silent. He stood lost in deep and gloomy thoughts. At last he raised his head, and asked that the attendants might be sent away, adding, "I am in chains, and there are no less than six of you. You are safe, I assure you."
The room was cleared. Viola looked at Mr. Catspaw, and said:—
"What I have to tell you, will astonish you all, except Mr. Catspaw. I never wished to mention it, and I would not now allow the servants to hear it, for my wife and children live at Tissaret, and the Retys may perhaps be induced to pity the poor orphans. But if it is asked what reason the attorney can have for not producing the notary's papers, I will simply say that Mr. Catspaw is most likely to know his own mind and his own reasons, and good reasons they must be, to induce him to bribe somebody to steal the papers,—for, to tell you the truth, it was he who planned the robbery."
The attorney trembled.
"Really, this man is malicious!" cried he. "I am curious to know what can induce him to accuse an honest man of such a thing?"
"Don't listen to his nonsense!" said Baron Shoskuty.
But Mr. Völgyeshy insisted on the prisoner's being heard, and Viola told them the history of the robbery, from the evening on which he listened to the attorney's conversation with Lady Rety, to the night in which he seized the Jew in Tengelyi's house, knocked him down, and fled with the papers. The only circumstances which he did not mention were, the fact of his having been hid in the notary's house when Messrs. Catspaw and Skinner pursued him in Tissaret, and his conversations with the Liptaka and Peti. Mr. Catspaw listened with a smile of mingled fear and contempt; and when Viola ceased speaking, he asked for permission to put a few questions to the prisoner.
"Not, indeed," said he, "for the purpose of defending myself or Lady Rety against so ridiculous an accusation, but merely to convince this fellow of the holes, nay, of the large gaps, in his abominable tissue of falsehoods." And turning to Viola, he asked:—
"Did you inform anybody of the conversation which you pretend to have overheard between me and Lady Rety?"
"No, I did not."