"Yes, sir," rejoined the girl again; "just in there: he locks the door upon her, the old vermin!" she added, not at all approving such an abridgment of female liberty, and looking upon Mr. Dry as little better than a Turk in the garb of a Calvinist.
"Ah! he be de monstrous big rogue!" replied Barecolt. "I tought I see him before; I know him, Nancee; I know him vell for one extravagant great tief."
"He is not very extravagant here," answered the maid; "but I must go, sir, upon my word;" and, whisking round, she descended the stairs, at the foot of which her mistress called her into the little parlour, and inquired what that man had been saying to her.
"Oh, he was asking about the gentleman in the chamber, ma'am," was Nancy's reply; "and he says that he is an extravagant thief, that he has seen him before, and knows him."
Mrs. White looked at Mr. O'Donnell, and Mr. O'Donnell at Mrs. White, and then the landlady murmured, "He is not far wrong, I fancy;" to which Mr. O'Donnell assented by a nod.
In the mean while Captain Barecolt entered his bedchamber, set down the candle, and stretched his long limbs upon a chair, after which he fell into a fit of thought, not gloomy, but profound. He was a man who loved adventures, as the reader is aware, and he saw a wonderful provision of them before him, in which he hoped and expected to have an opportunity of developing many of those vast and important qualities which he attributed to himself.
Wit, courage, cunning, presence of mind, dexterity of action, together with his wonderful powers of strategy, were all likely to have full means of displaying themselves in the twofold enterprise of delivering Arrah Neil from the hands of Mr. Dry, of Longsoaken, and Lord Beverley from the clutches of Sir John Hotham. He was well contented with what he had done already. To have cheated a governor of Hull, to have obtained his liberty in five minutes, to have passed for a Frenchman, to have cast off the companionship of the embarrassing Mr. Jenkins, were feats of no light merit in his eyes; and he now proposed to go on, step by step, till he had reached the climax of accomplishment; first using art, then daring, and crowning the whole by some brilliant display of courage, which would immortalize him in the eyes of the royalist party.
After he had thus continued to think for about a quarter of an hour, and had arrived at the point of doubting whether he was in fact Julius Cæsar or Alexander the Great, with some slight suspicion that he might be neither, but Henry IV. of France instead, he opened the door quietly, and, without taking the candle, advanced to the head of the stairs, where, bending down his head, he listened for a moment. There was a dull, heavy sound of people talking, however; and a man's voice was heard, though the words he used could not be made out.
"Ay, that d--d fellow is there still!" murmured Captain Barecolt: "if he does not go soon, I'll walk down and cut his throat." But, just as he was turning to go back to his own room, he heard the door of the little parlour--which, as it closed with a pulley and weight, announced its movements by a prodigious rattle--give indications of its being opened, and the voice of Mr. O'Donnell could be distinguished, as he marched out, saying--
"The first thing to be done, however, Mrs. White, is to get her out of this man's hands."