‘You’ve no business whose pistol it is, or where I got it,’ said Vivian defiantly, driven to bay by this unexpected retort; ‘and, besides, you have no right to be in my uncle’s garden, and I’ll tell him about you as soon as he comes home from church.’
The man laughed unpleasantly.
‘All very good, young sir,’ he said; ‘but what if I take the first step, and go in and volunteer to tell him all about those blessed windows, and about how nearly you shot me; and, to prove that I am speaking the truth, what if I let him see that nice little hole up there behind, and show him what is hid in it?’
Now, as his mother had said to him on Christmas morning, Vivian had plenty of physical courage, and under other circumstances he would have been quite brave enough to have watched the man until some one either came into the garden or passed outside on the Heath, to whom he might have shouted for help; but, as she had also told him, he was sadly wanting in that other kind of courage which ‘grown-ups’ call ‘moral,’ and the mere threat of exposure made him cringe and beg for mercy from this unwashed, unshaved, evil-looking stranger.
‘Oh, don’t tell—please don’t tell,’ he entreated. ‘It was really a mistake; but I will be punished if it is found out. If you will not tell, and will go quietly away, I’ll give you five shillings. They are in the house, but I can soon get them and they are my very own; my father gave them to me when I came here, and I have never spent them.’
The man laughed again, with a look that was not good to see.
He had lain concealed in the summer-house all morning with an object in view which seemed as if it would be very difficult to carry out, and things had played into his hands in a manner that he had little expected. From his place of concealment he had watched all Vivian’s movements from the time he had come out of the house, and he knew that he had the frightened boy in his power, and could work on his feelings as he would.
‘Five shillings!’ he said contemptuously; ‘five shillings aren’t enough to shut my mouth. You might have killed me with that blooming pistol of yours; more than likely you would have, had I not seen how you were aiming, and lain down on the floor. No, no; you wouldn’t be hiding that pistol if you had come by it in any right way, and I’ll consider it my dooty to report to the master of the house, no matter what the consequences be to myself.’
The man spoke in such a tone of virtuous indignation that Vivian felt that his uncle would believe his word at once, in spite of his ragged clothes and the dirty green patch over his eye.