For some distance on the road to Stroan the delicious glow cast upon
him by this stimulating conversation lasted and made Clifford as happy
as a bird.
But when the irregular outline of the old-fashioned town grew more
defined under the September sky, and the meeting with Jordan and
Conybeare grew nearer, he had to concern himself with the manner in
which he should get out of the difficulties which his stay under the
roof of the Blue Lion had brought upon him.
What had they heard and what would they believe?
He had not to ask himself these questions long, for before he reached
the town he came upon Jordan with an easel, a sketch-book and a pipe,
and Conybeare with a strapful of books and a white umbrella.
Their demeanor was not kindly toward the errant Clifford. A garbled
version of the story of the robbery had, indeed, reached them already,
and they had both made up their minds that Nell was the thief.
Willie Jordan, of course, was the more inclined to this view from his
resentment at having been “cut out” by Clifford, who, on his side, was
reticent and entirely silent on the subject of the sudden infatuation
which had led him to propose marriage to the girl.
Very soon the subject of the Blue Lion and its inhabitants was tacitly
tabooed among the friends, and it was not until ten days later that any
of them found their way to the little inn by the shore.
When they did so, however, they were disappointed in the object of
their visit. Nell was never to be seen, and not one of the three young
men ever dared to ask for her, as George Claris, looking upon them
apparently as fellow-conspirators against the fair fame of his house,
was curt to the verge of rudeness to them all.
Now this invisibility on the part of Nell, far from cooling Clifford’s
quickly sprung-up passion, served only to inflame it further. But
it was in vain he wrote--in vain he hung about the neighborhood.
Although on two or three occasions he caught sight of her, she always
disappeared before he could come near.
The last day of the stay of the three friends arrived, and they made
one despairing attempt to bid her good-by. Clifford had preserved his
reticence concerning the girl, but the other two more than suspected
him. Willie had softened in his views of the mysterious affair, and
it was now only Conybeare who persisted in a harsh judgment of the
innkeeper’s niece.
She was just the sort of girl, he said, to attract young fools and make
them lose their wits and their money. He, however, was as anxious for a
farewell peep at the mysterious beauty as his companions.
This time they were fortunate. When they had gone past the inn, they
caught sight of the pretty figure whom they all had in their thoughts,
and they all pretended to view it with indifference. Willie was the
first to break down in this assumption.
“There she is!” he said, in quite a tremulous voice. “It’s no use
pretending we don’t see her. Do you think she’ll run away if we get
over the fence?”
Clifford had already made the experiment.
To the great relief of the whole party, Nell turned slowly and waited
for their approach without a smile, with, indeed, a sort of quiet
defiance.
“I suppose,” she said to Clifford, as soon as he came up, “you have
come to say good-by, you and your friends, before you go back to town?”
She had remembered the date he had given her for that event, then. This
was a ray of consolation, but she gave him no other. She was cold,
reserved, almost hard. He felt so angry with her for her contemptuous
disregard of his feelings that he thought for the moment that his
passion was extinguished by it. However, she unbent so far as to invite
them all in to tea, and the three young men were much puzzled as to
which of them it was who had procured them this favor. Conybeare seemed
to be, on the whole, the one to whom she talked the most; Clifford was,
without any doubt, the one of whom she took the least notice.
The meal, on the whole, was a pleasant one, although Claris himself was
more taciturn than he had been on that unlucky day when he and Nell and
Clifford had spent such a merry hour in the little sitting-room.
Now the weather had changed; the autumn winds were whistling about
the little inn, and the blue sea had become a dark-gray line, flecked
with white crests. There was a fire in the little grate, and it was
when Otto Conybeare moved quickly forward to poke it for Nell that the
incident occurred which was to throw a shadow over the meeting.
In passing a side-table upon which stood a wicker work-basket, Otto
dragged the cloth off, and brought the basket and all the rest of the
things on the table with a crash to the floor. Willie, who was near
him, went down on his knees with apologies for Otto’s clumsiness.
“He thinks it’s manly, you know, to show a contemptuous indifference
to such feminine trifles. A sure sign of genius, you know, Miss
Claris, and you must excuse it, as it’s the only sign he’s got. Oh,
and just look at the pretty things he’s been trampling under his great
intellectual feet!”
And Willie held up to the astonished gaze of the rest a glittering
jewel which sparkled in the fire-light.
For a moment there was an oppressive silence. Then Nell, pale and
agitated, snatched it from him with fingers so unsteady that the
trinket fell to the floor again. It was Clifford who picked it up this
time and gave it to the girl without a word. Nell would have put it
back into her basket, but George Claris, on whom the appalled silence
of the young men had not been lost, told his niece in a rough tone to
give it to him.
“What is the thing?” he asked, sharply.
“Only one of a pair of old-fashioned earrings, uncle,” answered Nell,
with emotion, which no efforts on her part could hide.
“Earrings! I didn’t know you had any! Where did you get them? Who gave
them to you?”
For one moment the girl fenced with him, trying to treat the matter
lightly, as she got upon a chair and placed the work-basket at the top
of the high cupboard by the fireplace. But George Claris was not a man
to be trifled with. Seizing the girl by the shoulder so roughly that he
almost dragged her to the ground, he tore the work-basket out of her
hands, flung back the lid, and turned out the contents upon the table,
the chairs, anywhere, until he had found both the earrings.
Then he held them up to the light critically; then he looked at Nell
with a puzzled frown.
“Who gave ’em to you?” he asked, sharply.
The young men, trying to hide their interest in her answer by talking
among themselves, yet listened eagerly. She blushed, stammered, then
turned white as she said:
“The colonel gave them to me--Colonel Bostal. At least, he and Miss
Theodora.”
George Claris rubbed one of the earrings on his sleeve, and then rather
quickly thrust them both out of sight under a little pile of old papers
and magazines which had been replaced upon the side-table.
“Well, I don’t know what folks want spending money on jew’lry for,
when you can get just as good to look at for next to nothing. And next
to nothing must be the vally of anything as Miss Theodora gives away,”
he added, with a rather forced attempt at jocularity.
Clifford, who was much perturbed by this incident, on account of the
construction his two friends were sure to put upon it, made haste to
turn the talk into another channel. He knew that he had not heard the
last of it. And he was not surprised to see Otto, at a later period of
the evening, when the rest were in the garden, draw the earrings from
the place where they had been put, and examine them carefully by the
light of the lamp.
While Clifford lingered behind for a few last words with Nell, the
other two, having taken their leave, walked on together.
Willie spoke first. Puffing at the pipe he had just lit, he glanced up
at Otto.
“Well, and what is your opinion of our fair friend now?” he asked.
“My opinion is that she is a thief, and a very daring, if not a very
skillful, one. Those earrings were pearls and rubies, real ones, very
old-fashioned, but worth something.”
“And you don’t think they may have been given to her?”
“My dear fellow, look at the story. Is there anything to blush about in
the fact of receiving a present from an old man and his old daughter?
Yet, undoubtedly, she did blush. Then look at the improbability of the
thing. The Bostals are as poor as church mice. Would they have such a
thing as these earrings? Well, perhaps they might have. But would they
give them away? The old man might, infatuated with her pretty face, but
not the starchy, elderly-young lady.”
“You had better not tell Clifford what you think.”
“I don’t mean to. But I mean to try to save him from this entanglement;
and in order to carry out my plan, he must not suspect that I have
one. He won’t say much about her, you bet; he will be afraid of our
raillery. And we shall say no more than he does. And, of course, if he
asks me my opinion about the earrings, I shall say they were worthless.
See?”
Willie nodded. He no longer bore Clifford malice for cutting him out;
he was only too thankful that he had been himself saved from a deep
tumble into the same pitfall.
It was about a fortnight after the return to town of the three friends
that there drove up to the Blue Lion, one bitter evening, a hired
dog-cart from Stroan, in which sat a gentleman who told the landlord
that he was on the way to Courtstairs, but that he found the weather
too severe, and should be glad to put up at the inn until the following
morning. He was a pleasant, talkative young fellow, and George Claris,
who had been growing rather moody and reserved of late, thawed under
the influence of the stranger’s genial manners, and passed the evening
smoking and talking by the fire in the little bar-parlor. Only once in
the course of the evening did he catch sight of Nell.
She was passing through the passage on her way upstairs, and she
appeared at the door of the room for an instant only, to give a
message to her uncle. As she stood there, the young man took occasion
to mention that he must try to push on to-morrow, as he was carrying
property of some value for a firm in whose employment he was, which was
expected by another firm to whom he was commissioned.
And he noticed that, as he said this, the girl’s bright color left her
cheeks.
“Why don’t you push on to-night, then?” she said, brusquely, advancing
a step into the room and fixing her eyes earnestly upon him. “The
weather may be worse to-morrow, and if you are afraid of a little wind,
you should have gone by rail, and not by road.”
The young man rose politely, and looked at her curiously as she spoke.
But before he had had time to utter a word in answer, her uncle
dismissed her from the room with a by no means gentle reminder that it
was no business of hers.
The visitor, in spite of the importance of his commission, seemed to
be in no great hurry to push on with his journey; for on the following
day, as the wind was still cold, and the sky still gloomy, he remained
at the Blue Lion.
George Claris had a shrewd suspicion that it was the blue eyes of his
pretty niece which made the stranger so dilatory, and he took care that
the girl should be invisible throughout the whole of the day. As he
had expected, the young man grew evidently uneasy, and presently found
occasion to ask if the young lady had left the house.
“No,” answered George, shortly, “she’s in the house right enough, but
you won’t see no more of her. My niece is a lady, sir, for all she is
my niece, and she don’t ’ave nothin’ to do with my business.”
The young man, rather to the landlord’s surprise, appeared entirely
satisfied with this explanation.
Indeed, he had every reason to be so, for he was a friend of Otto
Conybeare’s, whom that young gentleman had sent down to do a little
amateur detective work in the supposed interest of Clifford King, but
without, of course, informing Clifford of his benevolent intention.
The young man had been much disappointed that the first night of his
stay under the roof of the Blue Lion had passed off uneventfully. The
second, however, fully made up for this lack of excitement. So fearful
was he of missing a possible visitor by oversleeping himself, that he
never closed his eyes at all; and he was rewarded for his vigilance
when, between two and three o’clock, he heard a slight noise at his
door, and a moment later saw dimly that there was a figure moving in
his room.
He held his breath while the intruder went softly toward the head of
the bed, making no noise, feeling about, stooping, searching. At last,
when the figure, which could now be discerned as that of a woman,
reached his clothes, and began hunting in them, the amateur detective,
allowing his excitement to get the better of him, sat up in bed,
making, in doing so, just enough noise to arouse the attention of the
watchful thief. The next moment she had darted across the room, and out
at the door. But the young man, being prepared for such a contingency
as this, sprang out of bed half-dressed, and dashed out on to the
landing in pursuit. The woman had got the start of him, and was by
this time halfway up the attic staircase. He followed, saw her open
the door of the room on the right and close it. He heard the key turn
in the lock. Without a second’s hesitation, he flung himself with all
his strength against the door. It shook, it creaked; another such blow
and the rickety old frame-work would give way. Just as he hurled all
his weight against the door for the second time, however, he heard the
unmistakable sound of the throwing open of the window of the room.
The next instant, the door gave way under the force of his blows, and
he dashed into the room just in time to see a head disappear behind the
sill of the open window.
Dashing through the room without a moment’s hesitation, the young
fellow reached the window, and looked out. There was the sloping roof
of an outhouse underneath, and although he could see no one, he flung
himself out, slid down the tiles and found himself precipitated quickly
if not very gently to the ground. Then he saw a dim something moving in
front of him, under the trees, and he followed.
The shadowy something paused. A cry escaped him, a low cry of triumph,
as he found that he was gaining on the creature he was pursuing. But
the next moment he uttered a cry of a different sort, and a much louder
one, as he found himself precipitated with great suddenness into a bath
of ice-cold water.
Not being acquainted with the geography of the place, he had walked
straight into the little river. Cries and shouts quickly brought him
assistance, for the landlord, who had been already awakened by the
hammering in of the upstairs door, came out in his night-shirt and
rescued him with a boat-hook.
“The thief!” sputtered the amateur detective with chattering teeth.
“The thief! I’ve found her out! I’ve found her!”
“What thief?” said Claris, surlily, as he dragged the shivering man
towards the back door of the inn with no gentle hand. “Who do you mean
by thief, you addle-pated rascal?”
“You’ll see, you’ll see to-morrow,” replied the other, undaunted, not
heeding his own pitiful plight in his excitement. “Whose is the bedroom
upstairs at the back on the right?”
“That’s my niece’s room,” said Claris, sullenly, “and if you dare to
say that she had anything to do with your fool’s outing to-night, I’ll
shake such brains as you’ve got out of yer!”
[Illustration: “SPEAK OUT, MAN, OR BACK YOU SHALL GO INTO THE RIVER
AGAIN.”--_See Page 84._]
“Well, you may, and welcome, if you don’t find that she’s left her
room and got away by the window. Ah!” he stopped short suddenly in the
middle of the cabbage-garden, through which they were walking, and
pointed to a white figure which was stealing its way into the house:
“Is that your niece, or is it not?” roared the young man excitedly, as
he pointed with a shaking finger in the direction of the disappearing
woman.
For answer George Claris sprang forward, and seized the girl’s wrist
just as she reached the shelter of the doorway.
“Nell!” cried the man, in tones so hoarse, so terrible that they
sounded like those of a stranger. “Tell me, lass, what were you doing
out there?”
But the girl only stammered and shook, and he waited in vain for an
answer.