"How can I tell? I was seldom in the house. I work in the garden, and because I am a cheap servant, asking no money, but making a pittance by what I can sell, Mr. Barty has kept me here where he found me. But when the old master came, he often sent for me. Before he became too ill, he sometimes crawled to my little cottage yonder for a bit of chat. He told me the doctors and leeches told him he had but to rest and live simply in the country for a few years to be a sound man again. But for all that he dwindled and dwindled away, and was gone in two months."
"Did no leech attend him here?" asked Grey breathlessly.
"Not till the very last, when they sent me to Edgeware to fetch one who could do naught. Mr. Barty professed to know many cures, and the master believed in him. He eased his pain, but he sank into an ever-increasing, ever-mastering drowsiness, and he shrank away to skin and bone. It went to my heart to see him. Many's the time when I have wondered whether it would have ended so if he had not taken Mr. Barty's simples and draughts."
"Was he poisoned, then?" asked Grey, between his shut teeth.
Jock looked nervously over his shoulder; the word seemed to frighten him. He shook his old head from side to side.
"Nay, nay, how can I tell—a poor old ignorant man like me? But he used to say that you would likely never come home again (travellers met such a deal of peril, he would say), and then his eyes would gleam and glisten, for there was but the old master's life and yours betwixt him and the title and all."
Grey ground his teeth, and his eyes flashed. Somehow he did not doubt for a moment that foul play had been used to compass his father's death. Had he not escaped assassination himself that night only by the skin of his teeth?
"Could any man living throw light upon this matter?" he asked. "The leech from Edgeware, or any other?"
"I misdoubt me if any could, save wall-eyed Peter, Mr. Barty's man; and I trow his master makes it worth while for him to hold his tongue and know nothing."
"Gold will sometimes unloose a miscreant's tongue."