It appeared, however, that Lizzy Dene was to have that. She came in at the moment, asked leave to speak, and began a recital of a second visit she had paid the gipsies the previous night, in which she had accused them of having attacked Mr. Chandos. The recital was a long one, and delivered curiously, very fast and in one tone, just as if she were repeating from a book, and imparting the idea that it had been learnt by heart. She wound up with saying the gipsies quitted the common in the night; and therefore no doubt could remain that one of the women had been the assailant. Mr. Chandos regarded her keenly.
"Lizzy Dene, what is your motive for pursuing these gipsies in the way you do? No one accuses them but you."
"Motive, sir?" returned the woman.
"Ay; motive," he pointedly said. "I shall begin to suspect that you know more about the matter than you would like made public. I think it is you to whom we must look for an explanation, not the gipsies."
Did you ever see a pale face turn to a glowing, fiery red?—the scarlet of confusion, if not of guilt? So turned Lizzy Dene's, to my utter amazement, and I think to that of her master. Could she have had anything to do with the attack upon him? She stammered forth a few deprecatory words, that, in suspecting the gipsies, she had only been actuated by the wish to serve Mr. Chandos, and backed out of the parlour.
Backed out to find herself confronted by a tall swarthy man, who had made his way into the hall without the ceremony of knocking for admittance. One of the gipsies unquestionably. Lizzie Dene gave a half shriek and flew away, and the man came inside the room, fixing his piercing eyes upon those of Mr. Chandos.
"It has been told to me this morning that you and your people accuse us of having assaulted you," he began, without prelude. "Master, I have walked back ten miles to set it right."
"I have not accused you," said Mr. Chandos. "The assault upon me—if it can be called such—proceeded from a woman; but I have no more cause to suspect that it was one of your women, than I have to suspect any other woman in the wide world."
"'Twas none of ours, master. We was 'camped upon your common, and you let us stop there unmolested; some lords of the soil drive us off ere we can pitch our tent, hunt us away as they'd hunt a hare. You didn't; you spoke kind to us, more than once in passing; you spoke kind to our little children; and we'd have protected you with our own lives, any of us, had need been. Do you believe me, master?"
The man's voice was earnest, and he raised his honest eyes, fierce though they were, to Mr. Chandos, waiting for the question to be answered.