A pregnant pause fell between the two.
“Now,” said the master presently, “give me the whole history as plain as you can speak.”
The man looked up appealingly. Some strange knowledge or emotion was impeding his every effort at an explanation. But at last he forced himself to speech.
“I have noticed her very strange of late—ever since—I have noticed her very strange, sir. Her soul seemed caught in a deeper thrall than she had known before. Somehow there has appeared more of the woman in her eyes and less of madness. To-day, in the dusk afternoon, she came upon me out of your library, sir, where she was at work. ‘Dennis,’ she said, all in a moment, ‘isn’t there a love that can be bribed with gifts of jewels?’ I answered the poor wench laughing—‘Oh, yes; no doubt there was.’ ‘Tell him,’ she said—‘tell him, your master, that I know where the great ruby is hid. I said so once to him before; but then it was for hate and he should know nothing. Now he shall learn the truth if he will.’”
“I remember something of it. Go on.”
“‘Tell him I said to you,’ she went on, ‘that the chalky dead eye of the skull is the jewel itself, and that the eye-socket is its hiding-place.’”
Tuke drew himself back, uttered a great sigh, and stood staring.
“Oh, sir,” continued the man, “I was as wildly incredulous of it as you. Much more she said, and that I am fain not to injustice the poor wench by repeating. But on the main point she was firm.”
“That the very dead eye of the horror was the ‘Lake of Wine’ itself?”
“Yes. And—oh! sir, when at last I came to think of the living highwayman as I knew him; of his resourceful cunning and ingenuity; of how, in my memory of him, this fixed and protruding eye, painted into the semblance of a real one, stood out horribly, under the nerveless lid, I was forced to the conclusion that she spoke right, and had been all these years the solitary warder of the secret.”