"He must have thrown it through the window."
They shook their heads.
On that she jumped up, and looked at me with a cold spite in her face that made me shiver. "Then I will tell you what it is," she said, "he has given it to that hussy, and she has taken it! But I will have it out of him; where the money is, and she is, and how he got in! Mr. D----, when you have done standing there like a gaby, fetch your stoutest cane; and do you, my friends, lay him across that bed! And if we do not cut it out of his skin, his name is not Richard Price. I wish I had the wench here, and I would serve her the same!"
I screamed, and fell on my knees as they laid hands on me; but Mrs. D---- was a woman without bowels, and the men were complaisant and not unwilling to see the cruel sport of the usher flogged, and the schoolmaster disciplined; and it would have gone hard with me, in spite of my prayers, if the constable had not arrived at that moment, and requested with dignity to see his prisoner. Introduced to me, he stared; and, moved I believe by an impulse of pity, said I was young to hang.
"Ay, but not too good!" Mrs. D---- answered shrilly, her head trembling with passion. "He and the hussy, that is gone, have robbed me of eighty guineas in a green bag, as I am prepared to swear!"
"Sixty, Mrs. D----," said her husband, looking a warning at her and then askance at his neighbours.
"Rot take the man, does it matter to a guinea or two?" she retorted--but her sallow face flushed a little. "At any rate," she continued, pressing her thin lips together, and nodding her head viciously, "sixty or eighty, they have taken them."
It seemed, however, that even to that one of the neighbours had a word to say. "As to the girl, I am not so sure, Mrs. D----," he struck in ponderously. "If she is the wench that has been carrying on with the gentleman at the 'Rose,' she has had other fish to fry. Though I don't say, mind you, that she has not been in this. Only----"
But Mrs. D---- could restrain herself no longer. "Only! only! Gentlemen at the 'Rose'!" she cried. "Why, man, are you mad? What do you think has my maid--though maid she is not, but a dirty drab, and more is the pity I took her out of charity from the parish--she was Kitty Higgs's base-born brat as you know--what has she to do with gentlemen at the 'Rose'?"
"Well, that is not for me to say," the man answered quietly. "Only I know that for a week or more a wench has been walking with the gentleman in the roads and so forth, by night as well as by day. I came on them twice myself hard by here; and though she was dressed more like a fine madam than a serving girl, I watched her into your house. And for the rest, Mrs. Harris must know more than I do."