“Now, sir,” roared Claris, barely leaving Lowndes the time to get downstairs before beginning his attack, “what have you got to say for yourself? It seems you had the —— impudence to batter in the door of my niece’s room, and that you went flying out through the window like a madman. Now, what have you got to say for yourself? Do you remember anything about it, or not?”
And George Claris, who had lit a candle, the pale rays of which looked sickly in the struggling light of the dawn, peered curiously into the haggard face of Jack Lowndes.
“Remember? Of course I remember. How should I know it was your niece’s room? I only came into the house last night for the first time. I followed the woman, and she went in there. She turned the key in the lock, so I had to burst it open.”
As he mentioned the word “woman,” a cry burst from Nell’s lips, a cry so piteous that Lowndes turned to look at her, and was struck with bewilderment. Believing thoroughly in her guilt as he did, having come down as he had come to unmask her, he was at that moment converted to an absolute belief in her innocence. And yet he could not have explained how it was that the sight of her face, the sound of her voice as she uttered the cry, had this instantaneous and decided effect upon him. So deeply absorbed was he in contemplation of this new aspect of the matter, that at first he did not hear, or did not heed, the innkeeper’s next words.
“Woman! What woman? You said nothing about a woman.”
“I don’t know myself what woman it was,” answered Lowndes, in a tone in which a change to doubt and hesitancy could be detected. “But some woman came into my room in the night”—George Claris moved impatiently. “I don’t say I was unprepared for this, but I can swear that she came; and when she took up my clothes and I heard the chink of the loose money in my pockets, I started up, and she ran out of the room. I was not unprepared, as I say, and I ran after her, saw her go into the back room at the top, heard her lock it, burst it in, and saw her getting out of the window just as I got into the room. I got out after her, saw her once more when I got to the ground, and the next thing I knew was that I was in the water.”
“Well, it sobered you, at any rate,” said George Claris, shortly. “And now there’s nothing left to do but to tell us how much money she took. Don’t be bashful; make it a hundred, or say two. We’ve been bled before; no doubt we can stand bleeding again.”
There seemed to Lowndes to be something pathetic in the rough irony of the man’s tone; he began to feel heartily sorry and ashamed that he had allowed himself to be persuaded into this adventure. The pretty, pale girl, standing mute behind her uncle; the uncle himself with the dull perplexity in his eyes, seemed to him in the ghostly light of the early morning so utterly broken down, so bewildered, so miserable, that he wanted to slink away without exchanging a further word with them. But this, of course, was out of the question.
“I have had nothing taken,” he said, hurriedly. “Nothing whatever.”
“You think the woman was maybe only taking a look round by way of passing the time?” suggested Claris, still in the same grim tone.