"Your Excellency" (the letter ran), "according to the promise made to you, the lugger _Bloomendahl_, of Walchern, Captain Vandam, has been cleared of cargo and is exclusively reserved for your Excellency"s use.
It will be well, therefore, to dispatch your remaining business in Scotland, as it is impossible to send back the _Golden Hind_ or a vessel of similar size without causing remark. At the old place, then, a little after midnight of Thursday the 18th, a boat will be waiting for you at the eastern port or the western of Portowarren according to the wind.
The tide is full about one."
"How came you by this?" the Fiscal demanded.
"Shall I tell ye in bits, sorr?" said Boyd, "or will ye have her from the beginning?"
"From the beginning," said the Fiscal, "only with as few digressions as possible."
"Sure," said Boyd innocently, "I got none o" them about me. Your honour can saarch me if ye like!"
"The Fiscal means," said the Doctor, "that you are to tell him the story as straightly and as briefly as possible."
"Straightly, aye, that I will," said Boyd, "there was never a crooked word came out of my mouth; but briefly, that"s beyond any Irishman"s power--least of all if he comes from County Donegal!"
"Go on!" cried the Fiscal impatiently.
"As all things do in our house, it began with Bridget," said Boyd Connoway; "ye see, sorr, she took in a man with a wound--powerful sick he was. The night after the "dust-up" at the Big House was the time, and she nursed him and she cured him, the craitur. But, whatever the better Bridget was, all that I got for it was that I had to go to Portowarren at dead of night, and that letter flung at me like a bone to a dog, when I told him that I might be called in question for the matter of my wife."
""Aye, put it on your wife," says he, "they will let you off. _You_ have not the pluck of a half-drowned flea!"
"But when I insisted that I should have wherewith to clear me and Bridget also, he cast the letter down, dibbling it into the pebbles and sand with his heel just as he was going aboard.
""There," he cried, "now you can put it on me!""
"Lalor Maitland," said the Fiscal, ruminating, with his brow knit at the letter in his hand. "Where is that maid? Bring her here!"
I sprang away at once to knock on Irma"s door, and bid her come, because the great folk were wanting her. And it seemed as if she had been expecting the summons too, for she was sitting ready close by little Louis. She cast a white shawl about her shoulders, crossed the kitchen and so into the room where the four gentlemen were sitting about the table--the Fiscal with his papers at the end, and behind the curtains drawn close about the press-bed where lay that which it was not good for young eyes to see.
"Miss Maitland, will you describe to us your cousin, Lalor Maitland, of whom you have already spoken to me?"
It was the Doctor who took her hand, while on the other side Boyd Connoway in his flapping clothes of antique pattern with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons stood waiting his turn. Irma took one look about which I intercepted.
And I think my nod together with the presence of my grandmother gave her courage, for she answered--
"Lalor Maitland? What has he to do with us? He shall not have us. We would kill ourselves if we could not run away. You would never think of giving us up to him----?"
"Never while I am alive!" cried my grandmother, but Dr. Gillespie signed to her to be silent.
"Will you describe him to us?" suggested the Doctor suavely, "what sort of a man, dark or fair, stout or spare, how he carries himself, what he came over to this country for, and where he is likely to have gone, if we find that he has left it?"
Irma thought a moment and then said, "Perhaps I shall not be quite just because I hated him so. But he was a man whom most call handsome, though to me there was always something dreadful about his face. His hair was dark brown mixed with grey. His features were cut like those of a statue, and his head small for his height. He was slender, light on his feet, and walked silently--_ugh_--yes, like a cat."
The Fiscal looked an interrogation at Boyd Connoway.
"That is the man," he answered unhesitatingly, "though most of the time while he stayed with Bridget and me he kept his bed. Only from the way he got along the cliff by Portowarren, I judge he was only keeping out of sight and by no means so weak with his wound as he would have had us believe."
"And tell us what you saw of him yesterday, Wednesday?"
It was the Fiscal who asked the question, but I think all of us held our breaths to catch Boyd Connoway"s answer. He shook his head with a disconcerted air like a boy who is set too hard a problem.
"I was from home most of the day, and when I came in, with a hunger sharp-set with half-a-dozen hours struggling with the wind, Bridget bade me be off at once to the Dutchman"s Howff, which is in Colvend, just where the Boreland march d.y.k.e comes down to the edge of the cliff. I was to wait there on the edge of the heugh till one came and called me by name. When I complained of hunger, she put some dry bread into my hand, crying out that I might seek meat where I had worked my work.
"I saw that the "ben" room was empty, and the blankets thrown over the three chair backs. But when I asked where the sick man was, Bridget stamped her foot and bade me attend to my business and she would take care of hers. But Jerry, my oldest boy, had a word with me before I left for the march d.y.k.e. He told me that the man "down-the-house" had gone that morning as soon as my back was turned, after paying his mother in gold sovereigns, which she had immediately hidden.
"So I went and waited by the Boreland march d.y.k.e--a wild place where even the heather is laid flat by the wind. The gulls and corbies were calling down the cliff, and at the foot the sea was roaring through a narrow gully and spreading out fan-shaped along the sands of the Dutchman"s Howff.
"I waited long, having nought to eat except the sheaf of loaf bread I gat with such an ill grace from Bridget, and at the end I was beginning to lose patience, when from the other side of the gully I heard a crying and a voice bade me follow the d.y.k.e upwards and stand by to help.
"So upon the top of the wall I got, and there beneath me was the man I had last seen lying in Bridget"s best bed, cossetted and cared for as if he were a prince. But for all that he was short and angry, bidding me dispatch and help him or he would lose his tide."
"And did he wear the same clothes as when last you saw him?" said Shepstone Oglethorpe, with a shrewd air.
At which Boyd Connoway laughed for the first time since he had come into the presence of his betters.
"No," he said, "for the last time I saw him he was under the sheets with one of my sarks on, and Bridget"s best linen sheet tied in ribbons about his head."
"And how, then, was he dressed?" said the Fiscal, with a glance of scorn at Shepstone.
"Oh," answered Boyd Connoway, "just like you or me. I took no particular notice. More than that, it was an ill time for seeing patterns, being nigh on to pit mirk. He bade me lead the way. And this, to the best of my knowledge and ability, I did. But the track is not canny even in the broad of the day. Mickle worse is it when the light of the stars and the glimmer o" the sea three hunder feet below are all that ye hae to guide ye! But the man that had been hidden in our "ben" room was aye for going on faster and faster. He stopped only to look down now and then for a riding light of some boat. And I made so bold, seeing him that anxious, as to tell him that if it were a canny cargo for the Co"en lads, waiting to be run into Portowarren, never a glim would he see."
""You trust a man that kens," I said to him, "never a skarrow will wink, nor a lantern swing. The Isle o" Man chaps and the Dutchmen out yonder have their business better at their fingers" ends than that. But I will tell ye what ye may hear when we get down the hill by the joiner"s shop--and that"s the clink o" the saddle irons, and the waff o" their horses" lugs as they shake their necks--them no liking their heads tied up in bags."
""Get on," he said, "I wish your head were tied up in a bag!" And he tugged at my tail-coat like to rive it off me, your honour. "Set me on the sh.o.r.e there at Portowarren before the hour of two, or maybe ye will get something for your guerdon ye will like but ill."
"This was but indifferent talk to a man whose bread you have been eating (it is mostly porridge and saps, but no matter) for weeks and weeks!
"We climbed down by the steep road over the rocks--the same that Will of the Cloak Moss and Muckle Sandy o" Auchenhay once held for two hours again the gaugers, till the loaded boats got off clear again into deep water. And when we had tramped down through the round stones that were so hard on the feet after the heather, we came to the edge of the sea water. There it is deep right in. For the tide never leaves Portowarren--no, not the shot of a pebble thrown by the hand. Bending low I could see something like the sail of a ship rise black against the paler edge of the sea.
"Then it was that I asked the man for something that might clear me if I was held in suspicion for this night"s work--as also my wife Bridget.
"After at first denying me with oaths and curses, he threw down this bit paper that I have communicated to your worship, and in a pet trampled it into the pebbles among which the sea was churning and lappering. He pushed off into the boat, sending it out by his weight.
""There," he cried back, "let them make what they will of that if ye be called in question. And, hear ye, Boyd Connoway, this I do for the sake of that hard-working woman, your wife, and not for you, that are but a careless, idle good-for-nothing!""
"Deil or man," broke in my grandmother, who thought she had kept silence long enough, "never was a truer word spoken!"
Boyd Connoway looked pathetically about. He seemed to implore some one to stand up in his defence. I would have liked to do it, because of his kindness to me, but dared not before such an a.s.sembly and on so solemn an occasion.
"I put it to the honourable gentlemen now a.s.sembled," said Boyd Connoway, "if a man can rightly be called a lazy good-for-nothing when he rose at four of the morning to cut his wife"s firewood----"
"Should have done it the night before," interrupted my grandmother.
"And was at Urr kirkyard at ten to help dig a grave, handed the service of cake and wine at twelve, rung the bell, covered in the corp, and sodded him down as snug as you, Mr. Fiscal, will sleep in your bed this night----!"
"That will do," said the Fiscal, who thought Boyd Connoway had had quite enough rope. "Tell us what happened after that--and briefly, as I said before."
"Why, I went over to Widow McVinnie"s to milk her cow. It calved only last Wednesday, and I am fond of "beesten cheese." Besides, the scripture says, "Help the widows in their afflictions"--or words to that effect."
"After this man Lalor Maitland had got into the boat, what happened?"