“Yes?” enquired Raoul, with an odd light in his eyes.
“Sir Francis suspects—now pray don’t run away with the idea that I suspect it—he imagines that you had gone into Fawley Copse to meet some escape agent or other.”
Raoul gave a short, angry laugh. “He has an imagination, that one! Certainly I had a meeting with a man in the copse . . . and I think he will remember the fact, but not pleasantly. I myself also.” He showed his grazed knuckles.
Mr. Bannister got up. “Well, I am only too glad that you can give me such a satisfactory explanation. And as Sir Francis must by now have received from the lady concerned her account of your chivalrous conduct, I hope we may think of the incident as closed. But till he formally withdraws his charge—which, as he is a magistrate, I am bound to take rather seriously—you would make things easier for me if you would engage not to leave your rooms till I tell you that you are free to do so.”
“But with pleasure,” agreed Raoul, “I will constitute myself the prisoner of Miss Hitchings.”
“I will see Sir Francis and get the matter cleared up with him—to-morrow morning if possible. You have taken a weight off my mind, des Sablières. I have so much to try me, one way and another, between your countrymen and my own. But I have always felt that you were one of those whom I could fully trust,” concluded Mr. Bannister.
“Thank you,” said his charge. “I shall try always to deserve that opinion.” They shook hands, and the Agent departed, leaving the young Frenchman to reflect with indignation upon Sir Francis’s action. He saw his game quite well: he had seized on this opportunity to do him an injury because—as yesterday’s collision had made abundantly plain—he resented his presence in Wanfield society. However, when he knew the truth he would find this weapon broken in his hand. Moreover, as Raoul’s own conscience was clear, and the Agent did not—could not—regard the matter seriously, there was nothing that need cloud his and Lieutenant Lamotte’s enjoyment of the commemorative hare, upon which they very cheerfully supped, nor of their game of cards afterwards, in which Raoul lost with equal cheerfulness (since to-morrow was pay-day) the whole of his remaining weekly income, namely, one shilling sterling. And his mimicry of an imaginary scene in which he, Raoul, went on his knees to Sir Francis Mulholland to beseech him to sing “Rule, Britannia,” and Sir Francis condescendingly sang it—out of tune—while the Francophobe Mr. Ramage played the accompaniment at sight, reduced Lieutenant Lamotte to such helpless laughter, and Miss Hitching’s old spinet to such a condition of discord, that Miss Hitchings herself appeared, to deprecate the holding up of that patriotic air to ridicule lest the neighbours should hear; and had to be calmed by Raoul’s assuring her, with his hand on his heart, that no disrespect was intended to the majestic lady who rose from out the azure main, only to those who murdered so fine a song. But he did not tell Lieutenant Lamotte why he had selected Sir Francis Mulholland as the murderer.
CHAPTER V
“BROKE-PAROLE”
“The suddenness of the event struck me with surprise, and I was at first rather stupefied than agitated.”—Rasselas, chap. xxxviii.
“Shall you be going out this morning, Mr. Rowl?” enquired Miss Hitchings of her lodger not long after breakfast next morning.
“Yes, I expect so,” responded Raoul rather vaguely, not raising his head from Rasselas.
“At what time, then, Sir, if I may make so bold?”
“What time?” repeated the young man. “Oh, about—no, truly, I cannot tell you just when. Does that inconvenience you, Miss Hitchings?”
“Not in the least, Sir,” responded Miss Hitchings, in a tone signifying exactly the opposite. “I suppose that one more day for the carpet to lie there, so full of dust as it is, don’t signify.”
“Mon Dieu, were you going to take the carpet up?” cried Raoul, with every symptom of alarm. “Is it one of those days when everything is dessus dessous—one of the days of tornado? I am desolated, chère Miss Hitchings, for truly I cannot tell you when I shall be able to——I mean,” he pulled himself up firmly, “when it will suit me to go out.”
For he was not going to confess to her that he was a prisoner in the house, though he had mentioned the fact to Lamotte over the hare the night before, adding that his confinement need not be taken very seriously.
Indeed, he hoped that it would not be long now before Mr. Bannister sent word that he was at liberty. Time to read some more Rasselas—though, as the book was now his own, he had plenty of leisure for that pursuit. And to think that Miss Forrest had not shown him her favourite passages yesterday, after all! They had been too much immersed in conversation, he and she. As he returned to his reading he recalled the look in her beautiful eyes up in the copse—that thrilling look of deep, deep gratitude and admiration. . . .
Ciel! it was already half-past eleven, and still no word from Mr. Bannister! Perhaps he had not been able to get hold of Sir Francis. Raoul rose, and sat himself down at the table with pen and paper and began a letter home—one of those letters whose composition never failed to irritate him a little, for one reason because it was so difficult to find anything new to say, for another, because no letter was private. To-day he was writing to his sister.
“Ma chère Adrienne: As-tu pensé à moi hier, car j’ai un peu parlé de toi? Ah, si tu étais ici, je m’ennuierais moins; nous attrapperions des truites ensemble, comme autrefois. Nous lirions aussi le chef-d’œuvre du célèbre docteur Johnson, l’Histoire de Rasselas, que je suis en train d’étudier pour perfectionner mon anglais. . . . Mais un jour, sans doute, nous le lirons ensemble, car on m’a fait cadeau du volume.”
He broke off to mend his pen, beginning softly to whistle, “Since First I Saw Your Face,” while he did so. And before he had finished he was singing the second verse under his breath:
“ ‘The sun, whose beams most glorious are,
Rejecteth no beholder;
And your sweet beauty, past compare,
Made my poor eyes the bolder.
When beauty moves, and wit delights,
And signs of kindness bind me,
There, oh, there, where’er I go,
I’ll leave my heart behind me.’
“Ah non! je suis trop prudent pour celà!” he observed aloud, shaking his head. . . . Yet if he were not poor, and an enemy, and a foreigner, and a prisoner . . . and Miss Forrest were not rich, and English, and affianced to “le Roi Soleil” . . . but in the existing circumstances (though he admired her and was grateful to her for her friendly kindness) there was no use in contemplating impossibilities. He returned to his letter.
“Pour le reste, rien de neuf. Je suis, comme toujours, en bonne santé, mais aussi, comme toujours, fixé ici, aussi immuable qu’une épée rouillée dans son fourreau, ou une statue dans sa niche, figé comme du lait caillé——”
“Mr. Bannister has sent word to say would you kindly go round to his office at once, Mr. Rowl,” came the voice of Miss Hitchings.
“With all my heart,” exclaimed Raoul, springing up. “In fact, I fly.” He hastily put aside his unfinished letter, snatched up his hat, cried, at sight of the bandanna tied round his landlady’s head and the broom in her hand: “Now you can do your worst in here, Britannia!” and went down the stairs two at a time.
Mr. Bannister’s office was full in the High Street, and a very short distance away. Yet by the time that Raoul reached its respectable columned entrance he had already wondered why the Agent had required him to come there instead of merely sending him a line of release. Perhaps he had been too busy to put pen to paper.
Raoul knew