“Don’t you see, little woman,” said Harry, “what it all meant? The inspector did in a minute. These gentlemen aren’t murderers. They’ve come down here to write a play, and they’re going to make the Silent Pool their big sensation scene.”
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I didn’t take it all in for a minute; but when I did I laughed till I cried. Everything was explained at once. But how on earth were we to know that those two eccentric gentlemen were play-writers, and that they had come down to our inn so as to study the Silent Pool as a sensation scene for a drama.
I wasn’t a bit afraid of them after that, and I let them turn their own gas out at all hours of the night, for they generally sat and wrote till the small hours, and a nice noise they made sometimes, shouting at each other—“trying the dialogue,” they called it. They stayed with us nearly a fortnight, and we got to like them very much. Harry called them Mr. Lampost and Mr. Waterbutt; but, of course, not to their faces. They used to come into our parlour and tell us funny stories, and we were quite sorry when they went. They told us what they were doing at last, when they found we could be trusted, and they had a gentleman down from London, who was going to paint the scene.
When the play was brought out, Harry and I had two beautiful seats sent us to go and see it, and we enjoyed it tremendously. The Silent Pool was as real as though it had come from our wood; and there was the murder and everything. And fancy our thinking that two play-writers were two murderers! How they would have laughed if they had known! I noticed two or three little things in the play that they had picked up in our place; and one room in one of the acts was our bar-parlour exactly.
When I saw it, I said, “Oh, Harry, I do believe they’ve put us in it!”—and it was quite a relief when the landlady came on and wasn’t me at all, but a comic old lady who made everybody scream every time she opened her mouth.
Mr. Lampost and Mr. Waterbutt promised us that when they were writing another play they would come and stay with us again, and I hope they will. Whenever I hear their play spoken about I always say, “Ah, that play was written in our house.” But I never say that we thought they were murderers, and had them watched by the police.
One thing I was very thankful for, and that is that Mr. Wilkins didn’t get hold of them to tell them about the murder in the Silent Pool. If he had, he’d have gone about and told everybody that he’d collaborated in the drama.
As it is, if anybody could claim the credit of having had a hand in it, it was not Mr. Wilkins, but me.
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