“I am not here to answer your questions!” he said, bending his brows. “But you mine! You mine!” he repeated, rapping the table sharply. “Do you hear? Now, you will at once tell me——”
He broke off. The clerk had touched his sleeve and was whispering in his ear. He frowned impatiently, but listened. And after a moment he shrugged his shoulders.
“Very well,” he said. “Tell her!”
The clerk, a shabby man with a scratch wig and a little glass ink-bottle at his buttonhole, raised his eyes, and looking at her over his glasses, spoke:
“You are not yet charged,” he said; “but if you cannot give a satisfactory account of yourself you will be charged with receiving, harbouring, and assisting one William Walterson the younger, otherwise Stewart, otherwise Malins, against whom indictments for various felonies and treason felonies have been found. And with aiding and abetting the escape of the said William Walterson, in whose company you have been found. And with being accessory after the fact to various felonies——”
“To murder!” said Mr. Hornyold, cutting him short emphatically. “To murder! amongst other things. That is the charge, if you must know it. So now”—he rapped the table sharply—“answer at once, and the truth. What is your name? And where was your last place of abode?”
But Henrietta, if she were willing to answer, could not. At the sound of that dreadful word “murder!”—they hanged lightly, so lightly in those days!—the colour had fled from her face. The darkness that had confused her a while before hid all. She kept her seat, she even retained her erect posture; but the hands which she raised before her as if to ward off something groped idly in the air.
Murder! No wonder that she lost consciousness for a moment, or that Hornyold, secretly relishing her beauty, thought that he had found the weapon that would soon bring her to her knees! or that the little audience by the door, listening awestruck, held their breath. The wonder was that only one of them judged from the girl’s gesture that she was fainting. Only one acted. Mrs. Gilson stepped forward and shook her roughly by the shoulder.
“Words break no bones!” the landlady said without ceremony—and not without an angry look at the clerk, who raised his pen as if he would interpose. “Don’t you make a fool of yourself. But do you tell them what they want to know. And your friends will settle with them. Murder, indeed! Pack of boddles!”
“Very good advice,” said the magistrate, smiling indulgently. “But——”