“And she was young, you say?”
“Much too young for the place. She couldn’t have been five and twenty when she left; and a girl like Miss Strangway, a motherless girl, wanted some one older and wiser to keep her in order.”
“Had the Squire’s wife been long dead at that time?”
“She died before I went to service at Cheriton. Miss Eva couldn’t have been much above seven years old when she lost her mother.”
Theodore asked no more questions, not seeing his way to extracting any further information from the bailiff. He had been acquainted with most of these facts before, or had heard them talked about. The handsome daughter who ran away from a foreign school with a penniless subaltern—the Strangway temper, and the pitched battles between the spendthrift father and the motherless unmanageable girl—the life-long breach, and then a life of poverty and an untimely death in a strange city, only vaguely known, yet put forward as a positive and established fact. He had heard all this: but the old servant’s recollections helped him to tabulate his facts—helped him, too, with the name of the governess, which might be of some use in enabling him to trace the story of the last of the Strangways.
“If there is any ground for Juanita’s theory, I think the man most likely to have done the deed would be the Colonel of Lancers, supposed to be drowned at Nice. If I were by any means to discover that the story of the drowning was a mistake, and that the Colonel is in the land of the living, I should be inclined to adopt Juanita’s view of the murder.”
He encouraged the bailiff to take a second glass of claret, and talked over local interests with him for ten minutes or so, while his dog-cart was being brought round; and then, Mr. Blake having withdrawn, he went to the drawing-room where Juanita was sitting at work by a lamp-lit table, and wished her good night.
“Did you find Jasper intelligent?” she asked, eagerly.
“Very intelligent.”
“And did you find out all you wanted from him?”