He whispered to Herries to take such steps as would ensure that no one whosoever should be allowed to leave the castle, and to shut the three accomplices up together in the North Keep if that could be done quietly, without any scandal. Then, having got rid of Captain Dove and the other two, he was left in the banquet-hall with only the Marquis of Ingoldsby, in a state of apparent coma, old Janet M'Kissock, grief-stricken to the very verge of endurance, and her unfortunate brother, still standing motionless, with bent head and hands clasped, staring down at the dead man—so near in semblance and yet so far beyond reach of his animosity.
The grey-haired housekeeper was pleading with Farish M'Kissock to come away, but he resisted all her attempts to get him to leave that spot.
"Let me bide where I am," he answered her querulously. "In a very little, Janet, I'll be away off after his foolish lordship there, that thinks he has slipped through my feckless fingers again—as he did once before. But I'll soon be on his track again, for they'll have to streek me on the same stretching-board that serves him. Let me bide beside him till then."
Carthew looked anxiously across at the Marquis of Ingoldsby. There was nobody who might better serve as a witness to whatever M'Kissock might still be induced to tell concerning that nightmare past in which the poor corpse on the floor and the girl who had gone away weeping and he himself had all been involved.
"There's somethin' doosid fishy about all these goin's-on," Lord Ingoldsby commented with a good deal more candour than tact, when Carthew made that suggestion to him. "And I'm for Lady Josceline, right through from start to finish. I don't believe a word of that goat-bearded fellow's yarn. He's been and caught sunstroke somewhere—that's what's the matter with him, eh? He's mad as a hatter.
"But, all the same, I'm willin' to listen to anything more he has to say—and take a mental note of it, so to speak. I want to know who's who and what's what myself."
Carthew turned to Farish M'Kissock then, and the latter looked him over with a frown as of dim remembrance which gradually changed to a scowl of hate.
"And so," said the ex-Emir in a rancorous voice, "you have come to your own at last amid it all. Is there no end to your ill race? My men told me that you were safely buried and dead—they showed me the mound that they said covered you. How—"
"Come away from here," said Carthew steadily, "and I'll tell you how I escaped." And Farish M'Kissock, leaning heavily on his sister's shoulder, at last allowed her to lead him to her own room.
Carthew told him then, in few words, while Lord Ingoldsby, listening gloomily, scowled over it, the story of Sallie's daring and his own escape from death, on the African coast.