"Zounds! You shall tell me all about it, Sis, on the way home, and we'll see what's to be done. Come away from this inn! It seems there's been the devil to pay here, in more matters than one. Good day, sir!" Sir Hilary thereupon led his sister quickly out, with barely a thought of the apparent absence of Squire Bullcott, who indeed might have slipped off while the baronet was engrossed with his sister.
The Squire now rose into view, very red and very much perturbed. He glanced first at his man and the landlord, who both had been keeping in the background during Miss Englefield's presence, then at Dick, who still guarded the bedchamber door.
"Then, since it ain't his sister, by God, it must be my wife!" whined Bullcott, who, like many another person capable of doing any wrong, was quick to whimper on supposing himself injured. "I'll expose her, I'll kill her, that will I! Landlord, send for constables! Oh, the faithless woman, and the vile seducer! To think a gentleman can't go off to attend to—a little business, but his wife must take a dirty, low advantage of his absence, to run off with a base-born rascal! Send for constables, landlord, to force a way into that room!"
"The landlord well knows," put in Dick, thinking of another ruse of Catherine de St. Valier's in Quebec, "that there is no lady in this room. Why, if a lady had been there, don't you suppose she'd have gone out long ago by the other door" (Dick remembered here that the other door was locked and the key in his own hand), "or by the window, from which even a woman could easily descend by the trellis to the garden?"
But the Squire continued to cry for constables, and Dick continued to detain the landlord by one remark and another. Keeping his ear on the alert, he presently heard the window in the bedchamber softly open, and he inferred that Amabel had taken his loud-spoken hint as he himself had once vainly accepted that of Catherine de St. Valier. By keeping his sword-point constantly in evidence, he deterred the Squire and the latter's man from a rush. The landlord, considering this guest was the friend of a lord, would take no step whatever, and Bullcott chose to keep his own man with him for protection, so there was none to summon the minions of the law.
At last Dick, fearing that Miss Thorpe might at any moment enter, and her presence certify to that of Amabel, said he had played with the Squire long enough, and would now let the latter scan the bedchamber from the threshold. Dick, confident that Amabel would have acted promptly at so important a crisis, supposed she had some time ago reached the garden, whence she might have gone to her own chamber. He therefore flung wide the door, and disclosed—Amabel in the centre of the chamber, and the squire's man, Curry, perched on the window-ledge, to which he had climbed by the trellis from the garden, whither Bullcott had sent him to watch the chamber window.
The Squire, almost black with rage, started towards the bedroom. Dick interposed in time to stay the burly figure's rush. The Squire stepped back and gathered strength for another effort, growling inarticulately.
"Well, sir," said Dick, with assumed resignation, "I see the jig is up. The lady has refused to save me by flight. She remains, I see, as evidence against me. So, it seems, your wife was running away from you, Squire Bullcott? Well, I can't blame her, though I didn't know that when I took her into my room by force."
"By force?" gasped the Squire.
"How can I deny it, when the lady herself is here to accuse me?" said Dick. "You'll admit the temptation was strong,—my door open, the lady passing in the corridor, no one in sight, a devil of a noise in the tap-room to drown her screams,—not to mention that I threatened to kill her if she cried out."