“To examine—what?”
“Where the money is, mother,” he said, with another laugh.
She had herself closed the door before she had seen him. She was at his mercy.
“You think, then,” she said, “that I’ve told you a lie—about money?”
“Everybody tells lies about money, mother. I never knew one yet who did not declare he had none—until it was taken out of his pockets, or out of his boxes, or out of a nice little piece of furniture like this, which an old lady can keep in her bedroom—locked.”
She took her keys out of her pocket, a neat little bunch, shining like silver, and handed them to him without a word. He received them with a somewhat startled look. It was something like the sensation of having the other cheek turned to you, after having struck the first. He had been examining the lock with a view to opening by other methods. The keys put into his hand startled him; but again he carried it off with a laugh. “Plucky old girl!” he said. And then he turned round and proceeded to open the well-worn old secretary which had enclosed all Mrs Ogilvy’s little valuables, and the records of her thoughts since she was a girl. It opened as easily as any door, and gave up its little treasures, her letters, her little memorials, the records of an innocent woman’s evanescent joys and lasting sorrows. The rough adventurer, whose very presence here was a kind of sacrilege, stooped over the little writing-board, the dainty little drawers, like a bear examining a beehive. He pulled out a drawer or two, in which there were bundles of old letters, all neatly tied up, touching them as if his hands were too big for the little ivory knobs; and then he suddenly turned round upon her, shutting the drawers again hurriedly, and flung the keys into her lap.
“Hang it all! I cannot do it. I’ve not come to that. Rob a rogue by day or night; that’s fair enough: but turn to picking and stealing. No! take back your keys—you may have millions for me. I can’t look up your little drawers, d—n you!” he cried.
“No, laddie!” said Mrs Ogilvy, looking up at him with tears in her eyes, “you’re fit for better things.”
He looked at her strangely. She sat quite still beside him, not moving, not even taking up her keys, which lay in her lap.
“You think so, do you?” he said. “And yet I would have killed you last night.”