Courthope opened the shutters of his window to look out upon the night;
they were heavy wooden shutters clasped with an iron clasp. A French
window he could also open; outside that a temporary double window was
fixed in the casement with light hooks at the four corners. The wind was
still blustering about the lonely house, and, after examining the
twilight of the snow-clad night attentively, he perceived that snow was
still falling. He thought he could almost see the drifts rising higher
against the out-buildings.
Two large barns stood behind the house; from these he judged that the
fields around were farmed.
It was considerations concerning the project of his journey the next day
which had made him look out, and also a restless curiosity regarding
every detail of the _ménage_ whose young mistress was at once so
child-like and so queenlike. While looking out he had what seemed a
curious hallucination of a dark figure standing for a moment on the top
of the deep snow. As he looked more steadily the figure disappeared. All
the outlines at which he looked were chaotic to the sight, because of
the darkness and the drifting snow, and the light which was behind him
shimmering upon the pane. If half-a-dozen apparitions had passed in the
dim and whirling atmosphere of the yards, he would have supposed that
they were shadows formed by the beams of his lamp, being interrupted
here and there by the eddying snow where the wind whirled it most
densely. He did not close his shutters, he even left his inner window
partially open, because, unaccustomed to a stove, he felt oppressed by
its heat. When he threw himself down, he slept deeply, as men sleep
after days among snowfields, when a sense of entire security is the
lethargic brain's lullaby.
He was conscious first of a dream in which the sisters experienced some
imminent danger; he heard their shrieks piercing the night. He woke to
feel snow and wind driving upon his face, to realise a half-waking
impression that a man had passed through his room, to know that the
screams of a woman's voice were a reality. As he sprang for his clothes
he saw that the window was wide open, the whole frame of the outer
double glass having been removed, but the screams of terror he heard
were within the house. Opening the door to the dark hall he ran, guided
by the sound, to the foot of the staircase which the girls had ascended,
then up its long straight ascent. He took its first steps in a bound,
but, as his brain became more perfectly awake, confusion of thought,
wonder, a certain timidity because now the screaming had ceased, caused
him to slacken his pace. He was thus hesitating in the darkness when he
found himself confronted by Madge King. She stood majestic in grey
woollen gown, candle in hand, and her dark eyes blazed upon him in
terror, wrath and indignation.
It seemed for a moment that she could not speak; some movement passed
over the white sweep of her throat and the full dimpling lips, and
then--
'Go down!' She would have spoken to a dog with the same authority, but
never with such contemptuous wrath. 'Go down at once! How dare you!'
Abashed, knowing not what he might have done to offend, Courthope fell
back a step against the wall of the staircase. From within the room Eliz
cried, 'Is he there? Come in and lock the door, Madge, or he'll kill
you!' The voice, sharp, high with terror, rose at the end, and burst
into one of those piercing shrieks which seemed to fill the night, as
the voices of some small insects have the power to make the welkin ring
in response.
Before Courthope could find a word to utter, another light was thrown
upon him from a lamp at the foot of the stair. It was held by Jacques
Morin, grey-haired, stooping, dogged. The Morin family--man, wife and
daughter--were huddling close together. They, too, were all looking at
him, not with the wrath and contempt to which Madge had risen, but with
cunning desire for revenge, mingled with the cringing of fear. There was
a minute's hush, too strong for expression, in which each experienced
more intensely the shock of the mysterious alarm.
It was Madge who broke the silence. Her voice rang clear, although
vibrating.
'Jacques Morin, he came into our room to rob!' She pointed at
Courthope.
The thin voice of Eliz came in piercing parenthesis: 'I saw him in the
closet, and when I screamed he ran.'
Madge began again. 'Jacques Morin, what part of the house is open? I
feel the wind.' All the time Madge kept her eyes upon Courthope, as upon
some wild animal whose spring she hoped to keep at bay.
That she should appeal to this dull, dogged French servant for
protection against him, who only desired to risk his life to serve her,
was knowledge of such intense vexation that Courthope could still find
no word, and her fixed look of wrath did actually keep him at bay. It
took from him, by some sheer physical power which he did not understand,
the courage with which he would have faced a hundred Morins.
When Jacques Morin began to speak, his wife and daughter took courage
and spoke also; a babel of French words, angry, terrified, arose from
the group, whose grey night-clothes, shaken by their gesticulations,
gave them a half-frenzied appearance.
In the midst of their talking Courthope spoke to Madge at last. 'I ran
up to protect you when I heard screams; I did not wake till you
screamed. Some one has entered the house. He has entered by the window
in my room; I found it open.'
With his own words the situation became clear to him. He saw that he
must hunt for the house-breaker. He began to descend the stairs.
The Morin girl screamed and ran. Morin, producing a gun from behind his
back, pointed it at Courthope, and madam, holding the lamp, squared up
behind her husband with the courage of desperation.
It was not this fantastic couple that checked Courthope's downward rush,
but Madge's voice.
'Keep still!' she cried, in short strong accents of command.
Eliz, becoming aware of his movement, shrieked again.
Courthope, now defiant and angry, turned towards Madge, but, even as he
waited to hear what she had to say, reflected that her interest could
not suffer much by delay, for the thief, if he escaped, could make but
small speed in the drifting storm over roads which led to no near place
of escape or hiding.
It was the judge's daughter which Courthope now saw in Madge--the desire
to estimate evidence, the fearless judgment.
'We took you in last night, a stranger; and now we have been robbed,
which never happened before in all our lives. My sister says it was you
she saw in our room. As soon as I could get the candle lit I found you
here, and Jacques Morin says that you have opened your window so that
you would be able to escape at once. What is the use of saying that you
are not a robber?'
He made another defiant statement of his own version of the story.
The girl had given some command in French to Morin; to Courthope she
spoke again in hasty sentences, reiterating the evidence against him.
Her manner was a little different now--it had not the same
straightforward air of command. He began to hope that he might persuade
her, and then discovered suddenly that she had been deliberately
riveting his attention while the command which he had not understood was
being obeyed. A noose of rope was thrown round his arms and instantly
tightened; with a nimbleness which he had not expected Morin knotted it
fast. Courthope turned fiercely; for a moment he struggled with all his
force, bearing down upon Morin from his greater height, so that they
both staggered and reeled to the foot of the stair. At his violence the
voices of the Morin women, joined by that of Eliz, were lifted in such
wild terror that a few moments were sufficient to bring Courthope to
reason. He spoke to Madge with haughty composure.
'Tell him to untie this rope at once. There is some villain about the
house who may do you the greatest injury; you are mad to take from me
the power of arresting him.'
Madam Morin, seeing the prisoner secured, hastened with her lamp to his
bedroom.
Madge, feeling herself safer now, came a little way down the stair with
her candle. 'How can we tell what you would do next?' she asked. 'And I
have the household to protect; it is not for myself that I am afraid.'
The anger that he had felt toward her died out suddenly.
It was not for herself that she was afraid! She stood a few steps above
him; her little candle, flashing its rays into the darkness of the upper
and lower halls, made walls and balustrades seem vast by its flickering
impotence to oust the darkness. Surely this girl, towering in her
sweeping robe and queenly pose, was made to be loved of men and gods!
Hero, carrying her vestal taper in the temple recesses, before ever
Leander had crossed the wave, could not have had a larger or more noble
form, a more noble and lovely face.
Well, if she chose to tie his arms he would have preferred to have them
tied, were it not for the maddening thought that more miscreants than
one might be within reach of her, and that they would, if skilled, find
the whole household an easy prey.
Madam Morin came back from the room with the open window, making
proclamation in the most excited French.
'What do they say?' asked Courthope of Madge.
The Morin girl was following close to her mother, and Jacques Morin was
eagerly discussing their information.
Madge passed Courthope in silence. They all went to the window to see;
Courthope, following in the most absurd helplessness, trailing the end
of his binding-cord behind him, brought up the rear of the little
procession. Madge walked straight on into his room, where Madam Morin
was again opening the window-shutters.
'They say,' said Madge to Courthope, 'that you have had an accomplice,
and that he is gone again; they saw his snow-shoe tracks.'
He begged her to make sure that the man was gone, to let him look at the
tracks himself and then to search the house thoroughly. Outside the
window the same chaotic sweep and whirl of the atmosphere prevailed. It
was difficult, even holding a lantern outside, to see, but they did see
that a track had come up to the window and again turned from it. After
that they all searched the house, Courthope allowed to be of the
company, apparently because he could thus be watched. The thief of the
night had come and gone; some silver and jewellery which had been
stored in a closet adjoining the bedroom of the sisters had been taken.
Courthope understood very little of the talk that went on. At length, to
his great relief, Madge gave her full attention to him in parley.
'Won't you believe that I know nothing whatever of the doings of this
sneak-thief?'
Some of her intense excitement had passed away, succeeded by distress,
discouragement, and perhaps perplexity, but that last she did not
express to him. She leaned against the wall as she listened to him with
white face.
'We never took in any one we didn't know anything about before, and we
never were robbed before.' She added, 'We treated you kindly; how could
you have done it? If you did it'--his heart leaped at the 'if' as at a
beam of sunshine on a rainy day--'you must have known all about us,
although I can't think how; you must have known where we kept things,
and that mamma had taken our other man-servant away. You must have
brought your accomplice to hide in the barn and do the work while you
played the gentleman! That is what Jacques Morin says; he says no one
but a child would have taken you in as I did, and that you might have
murdered us all. They are very angry with me.'
There was conflict in her manner; a few words would be said haughtily,
as to some one not worthy of her notice, and then again a few words as
to a friend. He saw that this conflict of her mind was increasing as she
stood face to face with him, and with that consolation he submitted, at
her request, to be more securely bound--the rope twisted round and
round, binding his arms to his sides. It was a girl's device; he made no
complaint.
It seemed that Morin had no thought of following the thief; his
faithfulness was limited to such service as he considered necessary, and
was of a cowardly rather than a valiant sort. Courthope, when his first
eagerness to seek passed off, was comforted by reflecting that, had he
himself been free, it would have been futile for him to attempt such a
quest while darkness lay over the land in which he was a stranger.
He was allowed to rest on the settle in the large inner kitchen,
securely locked in, and so near Morin's room that his movements could be
overheard. There, still in bonds, he spent the rest of the night.