Belasez was silent, but not in the least convinced.
“Thou seest now, my Belasez, why I was so much afraid of thy visits to Bury. I well know thou art a discreet maiden, and entirely to be trusted so far as thine ability goes: but what can such qualities avail thee against magic? I have heard of a grand-aunt of mine, whom a Christian by this means glued to the settle, and for three years she could not rise from it, until the wicked spell was dissolved. I do not mistrust thee, good daughter: I do but warn thee.”
And Licorice rose with a manner which indicated the termination of the interview, apparently thinking it better to reserve the religious question for another time.
“May I ask one other question, Mother?—what became of the maiden Beatrice and her brother?”
Licorice’s eyes twinkled again. Belasez listened for the answer on the principle of the Irishman who looked at the guide-post to see where the road did not lead.
“The squire was killed fighting the Saracens, I believe. I do not know what became of the maiden.”
Licorice disappeared.
“The squire was not killed, I am sure,” said Belasez to herself. “It is Father Bruno.”
Left alone, Belasez reviewed her very doubtful information. Anegay was not her sister, and probably not her aunt. That she had loved Bruno was sure to be true; and that she had been forcibly separated from him was only too likely. But her subsequent marriage to Aaron, and the very existence of Beatrice, were in Belasez’s eyes purely fictitious details, introduced to make the events dovetail nicely. Why she doubted the latter point she could hardly have told. It was really due to that gleam in her mother’s eyes, which she invariably put on when she was launching out rather more boldly than usual into the sea of fiction. Yet there seemed no reason for the invention of Beatrice, if she were not a real person.
But was the story which Belasez had heard sufficient to explain all the allusions which she had overheard? She went over them, one by one, as they recurred to her memory, and decided that it was. She had heard nothing from her parents, nothing from Bruno, which contradicted it in the least. Why, then, this uncomfortable, instinctive feeling that something was left behind which had not been told her?