Mr. Verner looked glad when Lionel appeared. The ageing man, enfeebled with sickness, had grown to lean on the strong young intellect. As much as it was in Mr. Verner’s nature to love anything, he loved Lionel. He beckoned him to a chair beside himself.
“Yes, sir, in an instant,” nodded Lionel. “Matthew,” he whispered, laying his hand kindly on the old man’s shoulder as he passed, and bending down to him with his sympathising eyes, his pleasant voice, “I am grieved for this as if it had been my own sister. Believe me.”
“I know it; I know you, Mr. Lionel,” was the faint answer. “Don’t unman me, sir, afore ’em here; leave me to myself.”
With a pressure of his hand on the shoulder ere he quitted it, Lionel turned to Frederick Massingbird, asking of him particulars in an undertone.
“I don’t know them myself,” replied Frederick, his accent a haughty one. “There seems to be nothing but uncertainty and mystery. Mr. Verner ought not to have inquired into it in this semi-public way. Very disagreeable things have been said, I assure you: there was not the least necessity for allowing such absurdities to go forth, as suspicions, to the public. You have not been running from the willow-pool at a strapping pace, I suppose, to-night?”
“That I certainly have not,” replied Lionel.
“Neither has John, I am sure,” returned Frederick, resentfully. “It is not likely. And yet that boy of Mother Duff’s—”
The words were interrupted. The door had opened, and John Massingbird appeared, marshalling in Dinah Roy. Dinah looked fit to die, with her ashy face and her trembling frame.
“Why, what is the matter?” exclaimed Mr. Verner.
The woman burst into tears.
“Oh, sir, I don’t know nothing of it; I protest I don’t,” she uttered. “I declare that I never set eyes on Rachel Frost this blessed night.”
“But you were near the spot at the time?”
“Oh, bad luck to me, I was!” she answered, wringing her hands. “But I know no more how she got into the water nor a child unborn.”
“Where’s the necessity for being put out about it, my good woman?” spoke up Mr. Bitterworth. “If you know nothing, you can’t tell it. But you must state what you do know—why you were there, what startled you, and such like. Perhaps—if she were to have a chair?” he suggested to Mr. Verner in a whisper. “She looks too shaky to stand.”
“Ay,” acquiesced Mr. Verner. “Somebody bring forward a chair. Sit down, Mrs. Roy.”
Mrs. Roy obeyed. One of those harmless, well-meaning, timid women, who seem not to possess ten ideas of their own, and are content to submit to others, she had often been seen in a shaky state from very trifling causes. But she had never been seen like this. The perspiration was pouring off her pinched face, and her blue check apron was incessantly raised to wipe it.
“What errand had you near the willow-pool this evening?” asked Mr. Verner.
“I didn’t see anything,” she gasped, “I don’t know anything. As true as I sit here, sir, I never saw Rachel Frost this blessed evening.”
“I am not asking you about Rachel Frost. Were you near the spot?”
“Yes. But—”
“Then you can say what errand you had there; what business took you to it,” continued Mr. Verner.
“It was no harm took me, sir. I went to get a dish o’ tea with Martha Broom. Many’s the time she have asked me since Christmas; and my husband, he was out with the Dawsons and all that bother; and Luke, he’s gone, and there was nothing to keep me at home. I changed my gownd and I went.”
“What time was that?”
“’Twas the middle o’ the afternoon, sir. The clock had gone three.”
“Did you stay tea there?”
“In course, sir, I did. Broom, he was out, and she was at home by herself a rinsing out some things. But she soon put ’em away, and we sat down and had our teas together. We was a talking about—”
“Never mind that,” said Mr. Verner. “It was in coming home, I conclude, that you were met by young Broom?”
Mrs. Roy raised her apron again, and passed it over her face: but not a word spoke she in answer.
“What time did you leave Broom’s cottage to return home?”
“I can’t be sure, sir, what time it was. Brooms haven’t got no clock: they tells the time by the sun, and that.”
“Was it dark?”
“Oh, yes, it was dark, sir: except for the moon. That had been up a good bit, for I hadn’t hurried myself.”
“And what did you see or hear, when you got near the Willow-pond?”
The question sent Mrs. Roy into fresh tears; into fresh tremor.
“I never saw nothing,” she reiterated. “The last time I set eyes on Rachel Frost was at church on Sunday.”
“What is the matter with you?” cried Mr. Verner with asperity. “Do you mean to deny that anything had occurred to put you in a state of agitation, when you were met by young Broom?”
Mrs. Roy only moaned.
“Did you hear people quarrelling?” he persisted.
“I heard people quarrelling,” she sobbed. “I did. But I know no more than the dead who it was.”
“Whose voices were they?”
“I couldn’t tell, sir. I wasn’t near enough. There were two voices, a man’s and a woman’s; but I couldn’t catch a single word, and it did not last long. I declare, if it were the last word I had to speak, that I heard no more of the quarrel than that, and I wasn’t no nearer to it.”
She really did seem to speak the truth, in spite of her shrinking fear, which was evident to all. Mr. Verner inquired, with incredulity