Therefore I’ll spare speech,
But—I know what I know.
I know what I know!” he repeated, blinking with doting astuteness,
“Therefore I’ll spare speech,
But—I know what I know!”
Henrietta stared. She would have given him the money, any money in her power. But imprudently prudent, she had brought none with her.
“I can’t give it you now,” she said. “But I will give it you to-morrow if you will do what I ask. Otherwise I shall go and you will get nothing.”
He did not reply, but he began to mumble with his jaws and dance himself up and down from his knees, as at her first entrance; with his monstrous head on one side and his red-lidded eyes peering at her. In the open, in the sunshine, she would not have feared him; she would have thought him only grotesque in his anger. But shut up in this hideous den with him, in this atmosphere of dimly perceived danger, she felt her flesh creep. What if he struck her treacherously, or took her by surprise? She had read of houses where the floors sank under doomed strangers, or the testers of beds came down on them in their sleep. He was capable, she was sure, of anything; even of murdering her for the sake of the two or three guineas’ worth of gold which she wore at her neck. Yet she held her ground.
“Do you hear?” she said with spirit. “If you do not tell me, I shall go. And you will get nothing!”
He nodded cunningly.
“Bide a bit!” he said in a different tone. “Sit ye down, lass, sit ye down! Bide a bit, and I’ll see.”