CHAPTER V.

To his surprise, within a few seconds a faint light shone through the chink by the door-jamb, and he heard a footstep coming down the passage. A bolt was withdrawn, very softly—the door opened—and Mrs Tresize herself confronted him.

She stood just within the threshold, holding a lamp high: and its rays, while they fell full on the doctor, causing him to blink, crossed the rays of his gig-lamp which showed him that, late though the hour was, she had as yet made no preparations for going to bed, even to the extent of taking off her jewellery. The base of the lamp, as its flames flickered in the draught, cast a waving shadow over the widow's cap perched on her neatly coiled black tresses, and the same shadow danced across her jet-black eyes and left them staring at him, very bright and inquisitive. She wore a dress of stiff black silk with a somewhat coquettish apron; and about her neck a solid gold chain, thrice coiled, with a massive locket pendant at her bosom. Above the locket was fastened a large memorial brooch with a framework of gold, a face of crystal and, behind the crystal, a weeping willow designed in somebody's hair. Altogether the widow's attire and array suggested that she had recently dismissed, or was even now expecting, company.

'Doctor Unonius?'

'You may well be surprised, madam—at this hour—'

'I did not send for you.'

'No, madam; and you will be surprised when you learn the reason of this call—surprised but not (I beg) alarmed. To begin with, I have a pistol here and can, at the worst, protect you.'

'Protect me?'

'I had best tell you my story, which is a sufficiently extraordinary one. I have been dining at Penalune—nay, madam, do not misunderstand me: I am as sober as a judge. On my homeward road I overtook a suspicious character, and certain evidence I managed to wrest from him leaves little doubt that robbery is intended here to-night, as it has actually been achieved elsewhere. The man, I should tell you—a powerful fellow—was dressed in woman's apparel.'

'Oh!' said Mrs Tresize shortly, and called down the passage behind her—'Tryphena, come here!'

Without delay a middle-aged maid-servant appeared from a doorway that (as the doctor knew) led out of an inner kitchen. Two sheep dogs followed her growling, but at her command grew tractable and made no demonstration beyond running around the doctor and sniffing at his legs.

Tryphena, too—who, like her mistress, was fully dressed—betrayed no surprise. She had, in fact, been sent upstairs at the sound of wheels, and from behind a curtain had recognised Doctor Unonius as he examined the paper by the light of his gig-lamp.

'Tryphena, here's Doctor Unonius, and he brings word we're to be robbed and murdered in our beds.'

'The Lord preserve us!' said Tryphena.

'Amen,' said Mrs Tresize; 'and meanwhile you'd best go and stable the horse while I hear particulars.'

Tryphena slipped out into the yard, the sheep dogs following. The doctor would have helped her, but she took the lamp from his hand, replaced it in its socket and set about unharnessing without further to-do, coaxing Dapple the while to stand steady.

'Tryphena understands horses,' said Mrs Tresize. 'Come indoors, please, and tell me all about it.'

Doctor Unonius lifted out the incriminating bag and followed her along the passage. She paused at the door of the best kitchen and pushed it wide. He looked in upon a bare but not uncheerful room, where a clean wood fire blazed on an open hearth and over the fire a kettle sang cosily. Gun-racks lined the walls, and dressers laden with valuable china, and these were seasonably adorned with sprigs of holly, ivy, and fir. A kissing-bush, even, hung from the bacon-rack that crossed the ceiling, with many hams wrapped in bracken, a brace of pheasants, and a 'neck' of harvest corn elaborately plaited: and almost directly beneath it stood a circular table with a lamp and a set of dominoes, the half of them laid out in an unfinished game. The floor was of slate but strewn with rugs, some of rag-work others of badgers' skins. A tall clock ticked sedately in a corner. On one side of the chimney a weather-glass depended, on the other a warming-pan—symbols, as it were, of conjugal interests, male and female, drawing together by the hearth.

Doctor Unonius felt an unwonted glow at the sight of this interior. He could not but admire, too, the widow's self-possession. Instead of trembling and demanding explanations she suggested that a glass of hot brandy and water would do him no possible harm after his drive, and stepped to the corner cupboard without waiting for an answer. It was a piece of furniture of some value, lacquered over with Chinese figures in dusky gold. But the doctor's gaze travelled rather to the gun-racks. He counted a dozen firearms, antique but serviceable, and suggested that, with powder and shot, Landeweddy was capable of standing a pretty stiff siege.

'I keep but two of them loaded,' said the widow, and indicated them— a large blunderbuss and a fowling-piece with an immensely long barrel; 'but there's powder and three sizes of shot in the right-hand drawer, there, below the dresser. You can charge the others, if you've a mind.'

'My warning would hardly seem to have impressed you, madam.'

'Oh yes, it has,' answered Mrs Tresize, measuring out the brandy. 'But you see, doctor, one gets accustomed to fears, living in this lonely place; and with a man as protector one feels as safe as with a regiment.'

'You flatter my ability, I fear,' said the doctor. 'I will do my best, of course: but I ought to warn you that I am no expert with firearms.'

'I can help you with the loading,' said Mrs Tresize. 'But tell me the worst of the danger, please.'

Doctor Unonius set the bag on the table, and unloaded its contents one by one while he told his story. The sight of the money-bags did not produce quite the thrill he had looked for, but she evinced a lively interest in the paper pinned to the map.

'Mrs Tresize at Landeweddy, 48,' she read, holding it under the lamp, and slightly puckering her handsome brows.

'That doesn't flatter you, ma'am.'

'Hey?' Mrs Tresize looked up sharply. 'You don't suppose that means my age?'

'I—er—fancied it might. It would be a guess, of course.'

'Nonsense,' said Mrs Tresize.

'It is nonsense,' the doctor agreed. 'The man was obviously misinformed.'

'It doesn't refer to my age at all,' said Mrs Tresize, positively. 'It—it alludes to something quite different. I was barely nineteen when I married.'

'If you can guess to what it alludes—'

'Reported good money, but near—' read the widow, paused, and uttered a liquid laugh. 'Oh, I am glad you showed me this. We'll punish him for that, doctor, if he dares to turn up.'

'If,' echoed the doctor, with a glance at the gun-racks.

'I ought to go and warn Tryphena.'

'Every moment may be precious,' he agreed again, while she went to the chimney-place and fetched the now boiling kettle.

She mixed the drink and set it close before him, where he leaned pondering a pile of gold he had poured upon the table from one of the canvas bags. The steam mounting from the glass bedimmed his spectacles. He took them off to wipe them, and perceived that she was smiling. She bit her lip at being thus caught.

'I was thinking,' she made haste to explain, 'what a funny situation 'twould be if by any chance the man was innocent, and you'd driven off with money that honestly belonged to him.'

'Honest men don't put on women's clothes to tramp the moors at night,' Doctor Unonius objected.

'Well, I don't see that it mightn't happen. A man having this money to carry, and afraid of being robbed, might put it to himself that rough characters—specially gipsies—often let a woman pass where they'd attack a man. Or suppose, now, the man was a gipsy?—he'd sold three horses, we'll say, at Tregarrick Christmas Fair, and was trudging it back to his camp somewhere on the moors. A gipsy would be the very man to hit on that kind of disguise, it being against his own principles to hurt any woman but his wife.'

'This man was a butcher, ma'am, and no gipsy.'

'O—oh!' cried the widow, with a little gasp. 'How do you know?'

'Never mind how I know, ma'am. He was a butcher, right enough; and, on your hypothesis that I've committed highway robbery upon an innocent man, I'd like you to explain how he comes to be carrying about this paper. "One large chest" he credits you with possessing; it is to be handled quickly and hidden in the orchard, if necessary— that is, I suppose, if he should be surprised; and to resist him you have nobody on the premises but your servant maid Tryphena. For what innocent purpose, pray, does he carry about this memorandum?'

''Myes, I suppose you are right,' Mrs Tresize assented with a little sigh, and forthwith shifted the conversation. 'But taste your brandy, please, and tell me how you like it—though, to be sure, it won't compare with Squire Peneluna's.'

It was, nevertheless, good sound brandy, genuine juice of the grape, soft and well-matured. The doctor after a sip nodded his approval.

'I dare say, now,' she went on, 'you're accustomed to this sort of thing? I mean, you must pass a good many nights, year's end to year's end, in other folk's parlours. . . .' She broke off, and this time with a genuine sigh. 'I used to wonder in days gone by, if ever you'd be sitting here. I used to picture you . . . and now it's for a robber you're waiting!' She ended with a laugh, yet turned her face away.

But either the doctor was nettled or his mind refused to be diverted by small talk from the business in hand. He somewhat curtly commanded Mrs Tresize to indicate on the gun-rack the weapons her late husband had commonly used, and to find him powder and shot. For a moment she pouted her lips mutinously, but ended by obeying him, with a shrug of her handsome shoulders.

She stood watching him while he carefully loaded the weapons and rammed home the wads. It is possible that she had a mind to relent, and suggest his whiling the time away with a game of dominoes. At any rate she went so far as to hazard—with a glance at the ivory tablets, and another at the hearth and the elbow-chairs—that he would find the waiting tedious.

'Not if you can supply me with a book, ma'am,' he answered, laying the two guns on the table, after sweeping the dominoes aside to make room for them.

Mrs Tresize left the room and returned bearing a volume—Blair's Grave. She understood (she said) that the doctor preferred serious reading.

'Among all the poets that ever wrote,' said Doctor Unonius blandly, 'with the possible exception of Young, I have the greatest contempt for Blair. He has the one unpardonable fault (not the one mentioned by Horace, though he has that, too): he is dishonest. The finest passage in the Grave is impudently stolen from Dryden, and marred in the stealing. But I thank Heaven, ma'am, that I can read any printed matter; and when Blair disgusts me I can always take a satisfactory revenge by turning him into Latin Elegiacs; by turning him, so to speak, in his Grave,' concluded the doctor grimly.

This routed the lady, but she managed to get in the last word. 'Well, I can't pretend to understand you and your learning,' she answered tartly; 'but since we seem to be thanking Heaven, I'll thank it that I have a fire lit in my bedroom. It's the room just overhead, and I'm going to ask Tryphena to sleep with me when she has put up the bolts. Or, maybe, we shall sit up there for a while and talk. But anyhow, we are light sleepers, the both of us, and if there's any trouble you have only to call. Good-night.'

'Good-night, ma'am!' said Doctor Unonius, and opened the door for her. Left alone, he went back to the table and began to turn the pages of Blair.