[CHAPTER XXXIII.]
A STARTLING AVOWAL.
Cuff Court, Fleet Street; and a frosty day in December. The year has gone on some six or seven weeks since the last chapter, and people are beginning to talk of the rapidly-advancing Christmas.
Over the fire, in the little room in Cuff Court, where you once saw him by gas-light, sits Mr. Butterby. The room is bright enough with sunlight now; the sunlight of the cold, clear day; a great deal brighter than Mr. Butterby himself, who is dull as ditch-water, and in a sulky temper.
"I've been played with; that's what I've been," said Butterby in soliloquy. "Bede Greatorex bothers me to be still, to be passive; and when I keep still and passive, and stop down at Helstonleigh, taking no steps, saying nothing to living mortal, letting the thing die away, if it will die, he makes a mull of it up in town. Why couldn't he have kept his father and Parson Ollivera quiet? Never a lawyer going, but must be sharp enough for that. Not he. He does nothing of the sort, but lets one or both of 'em work, and ferret, and worry, and discover that Godfrey Pitman has turned up, and find out that I knew of it, and go to headquarters and report me for negligence I get a curt telegram to come to town, and here's the deuce to pay."
Mr. Butterby turned round, snatched up a few papers that lay on the table, glanced over the writing, and resumed his soliloquy when he had put them down again.
"Jelf has it in hand here, and I've not yet got to see him. Not of much use my seeing him before I've heard what Bede Greatorex has to say. One thing they've not been sharp enough to discover yet--where Godfrey Pitman is to be found. Foster in Birmingham holds his tongue, Johnson shows Jelf the door when he goes to ask about Winter: and there they are, Jelf and the Parson, or Jelf and Mr. Greatorex--whichever of them two it is that's stirring--mooning up and down England after Pitman, little thinking he's close at home, right under their very noses. I and Bede Greatorex hold that secret tight; but I don't think I shall feel inclined to hold it long. 'Where is Pitman?' says the sergeant to me yesterday, at headquarters. 'Ah!' says I, 'that's just the problem we are some of us trying to work out.'"
Mr. Butterby stopped, cracked the coal fiercely, which sent up a blaze of sparks, and waited. Resuming after a while.
"And it is a problem; one I can't make come square just yet. There's Brown--as good call him by one alias as another--keeping as quiet as a mouse, knowing that he is being looked after for the murder of Counsellor Ollivera. What's his motive in keeping dark? The debts he left behind him in Birmingham are paid; Johnson and Teague acknowledge his innocence in that past transaction of young Master Samuel's; they are, so to say, his friends, and the man knows all this. Why, then, don't he come forward and reap the benefit of the acquittal, and put himself clear before the world, and say--Neither am I guilty of the other thing--the counsellor's death? Of course, when Jeff and Jeff's masters know he is hiding himself somewhere, and does not come forward, they assume that he dare not, that he was the man who did it. I'd not swear but he was, either. Looking at it in a broad point of view, one can't help seeing that he must have some urgent motive for his silence--and what that motive is, one may give a shrewd guess at: that he is screening himself or somebody else. There's only one other in the world that he would screen, I expect, and that's Alletha Rye."
A long pause. A pause of silence. Mr. Butterby's face, with all his professional craft, had as puzzled a look on it as any ordinary mortal's might wear.