“But Miss Audley was his own niece! Basset? He was no relation to him!”
“They were very old friends.”
“That’s no reason why he should leave him thirty thousand pounds of Audley money! Money taken straight out of the Audley property! Thirty thousand——”
“Not thirty, my lord,” Stubbs ventured. “Not much above twenty, I should say. If you put it——”
“If I put it that you were—something of a fool at times,” the angry man cried, “I shouldn’t be far wrong! But there, there, never mind! Good-night! Can’t you see I’m dead tired and hardly know what I am saying? Come to-morrow! Come at eleven in the morning.”
Stubbs hardly knew how to take it. But after a moment’s hesitation, he made the best of the apology, muttered something, and got out of the room. On the stairs he relieved his feelings by a word or two. In the street he wondered what had taken the man so suddenly. Surely he had not expected to get the money!
CHAPTER XXX
A FRIEND IN NEED
Basset had obtained the missing Bible very much in the way the lawyer had indicated—partly by purchase and partly by pressure. Shocked as Toft had been by his master’s sudden death, he had had the presence of mind to remember that he might make something of what they had discovered could he secrete it; and with every nerve quivering the man had fought down panic until he had hidden the parcel which had caused John Audley’s collapse. Then he had given way. He had turned his back on the Great House, and shuddering, clutched at by grisly hands, pursued by phantom feet, he had fled through the night and the Yew Walk, to hide, for the present at least, his part in the tragedy.
Basset, however, had known too much for him, and the servant, shaken by what had happened, had not been able to persist in his denials. But to tell and to give were two things, and it is doubtful whether he would have released his plunder if Basset had not in the last resort disclosed to him Miss Audley’s engagement to her cousin.
The change which this news wrought in Toft had astonished Basset. The man had gone down under it as under a blow on the head. The spirit had gone out of him, and he had taken with thankfulness the sum which Basset, as John Audley’s representative, had offered him—rather out of pity than because it seemed necessary. He had given up the parcel on the night before the funeral.