Chapter 10

Courthope opened the shutters of his window to look out upon the night; they were heavy wooden shutters clasped with an iron clasp. A French window he could also open; outside that a temporary double window was fixed in the casement with light hooks at the four corners. The wind was still blustering about the lonely house, and, after examining the twilight of the snow-clad night attentively, he perceived that snow was still falling. He thought he could almost see the drifts rising higher against the out-buildings.

Two large barns stood behind the house; from these he judged that the fields around were farmed.

It was considerations concerning the project of his journey the next day which had made him look out, and also a restless curiosity regarding every detail of the _ménage_ whose young mistress was at once so child-like and so queenlike. While looking out he had what seemed a curious hallucination of a dark figure standing for a moment on the top of the deep snow. As he looked more steadily the figure disappeared. All the outlines at which he looked were chaotic to the sight, because of the darkness and the drifting snow, and the light which was behind him shimmering upon the pane. If half-a-dozen apparitions had passed in the dim and whirling atmosphere of the yards, he would have supposed that they were shadows formed by the beams of his lamp, being interrupted here and there by the eddying snow where the wind whirled it most densely. He did not close his shutters, he even left his inner window partially open, because, unaccustomed to a stove, he felt oppressed by its heat. When he threw himself down, he slept deeply, as men sleep after days among snowfields, when a sense of entire security is the lethargic brain's lullaby.

He was conscious first of a dream in which the sisters experienced some imminent danger; he heard their shrieks piercing the night. He woke to feel snow and wind driving upon his face, to realise a half-waking impression that a man had passed through his room, to know that the screams of a woman's voice were a reality. As he sprang for his clothes he saw that the window was wide open, the whole frame of the outer double glass having been removed, but the screams of terror he heard were within the house. Opening the door to the dark hall he ran, guided by the sound, to the foot of the staircase which the girls had ascended, then up its long straight ascent. He took its first steps in a bound, but, as his brain became more perfectly awake, confusion of thought, wonder, a certain timidity because now the screaming had ceased, caused him to slacken his pace. He was thus hesitating in the darkness when he found himself confronted by Madge King. She stood majestic in grey woollen gown, candle in hand, and her dark eyes blazed upon him in terror, wrath and indignation.

It seemed for a moment that she could not speak; some movement passed over the white sweep of her throat and the full dimpling lips, and then--

'Go down!' She would have spoken to a dog with the same authority, but never with such contemptuous wrath. 'Go down at once! How dare you!'

Abashed, knowing not what he might have done to offend, Courthope fell back a step against the wall of the staircase. From within the room Eliz cried, 'Is he there? Come in and lock the door, Madge, or he'll kill you!' The voice, sharp, high with terror, rose at the end, and burst into one of those piercing shrieks which seemed to fill the night, as the voices of some small insects have the power to make the welkin ring in response.

Before Courthope could find a word to utter, another light was thrown upon him from a lamp at the foot of the stair. It was held by Jacques Morin, grey-haired, stooping, dogged. The Morin family--man, wife and daughter--were huddling close together. They, too, were all looking at him, not with the wrath and contempt to which Madge had risen, but with cunning desire for revenge, mingled with the cringing of fear. There was a minute's hush, too strong for expression, in which each experienced more intensely the shock of the mysterious alarm.

It was Madge who broke the silence. Her voice rang clear, although vibrating.

'Jacques Morin, he came into our room to rob!' She pointed at Courthope.

The thin voice of Eliz came in piercing parenthesis: 'I saw him in the closet, and when I screamed he ran.'

Madge began again. 'Jacques Morin, what part of the house is open? I feel the wind.' All the time Madge kept her eyes upon Courthope, as upon some wild animal whose spring she hoped to keep at bay.

That she should appeal to this dull, dogged French servant for protection against him, who only desired to risk his life to serve her, was knowledge of such intense vexation that Courthope could still find no word, and her fixed look of wrath did actually keep him at bay. It took from him, by some sheer physical power which he did not understand, the courage with which he would have faced a hundred Morins.

When Jacques Morin began to speak, his wife and daughter took courage and spoke also; a babel of French words, angry, terrified, arose from the group, whose grey night-clothes, shaken by their gesticulations, gave them a half-frenzied appearance.

In the midst of their talking Courthope spoke to Madge at last. 'I ran up to protect you when I heard screams; I did not wake till you screamed. Some one has entered the house. He has entered by the window in my room; I found it open.'

With his own words the situation became clear to him. He saw that he must hunt for the house-breaker. He began to descend the stairs.

The Morin girl screamed and ran. Morin, producing a gun from behind his back, pointed it at Courthope, and madam, holding the lamp, squared up behind her husband with the courage of desperation.

It was not this fantastic couple that checked Courthope's downward rush, but Madge's voice.

'Keep still!' she cried, in short strong accents of command.

Eliz, becoming aware of his movement, shrieked again.

Courthope, now defiant and angry, turned towards Madge, but, even as he waited to hear what she had to say, reflected that her interest could not suffer much by delay, for the thief, if he escaped, could make but small speed in the drifting storm over roads which led to no near place of escape or hiding.

It was the judge's daughter which Courthope now saw in Madge--the desire to estimate evidence, the fearless judgment.

'We took you in last night, a stranger; and now we have been robbed, which never happened before in all our lives. My sister says it was you she saw in our room. As soon as I could get the candle lit I found you here, and Jacques Morin says that you have opened your window so that you would be able to escape at once. What is the use of saying that you are not a robber?'

He made another defiant statement of his own version of the story.

The girl had given some command in French to Morin; to Courthope she spoke again in hasty sentences, reiterating the evidence against him. Her manner was a little different now--it had not the same straightforward air of command. He began to hope that he might persuade her, and then discovered suddenly that she had been deliberately riveting his attention while the command which he had not understood was being obeyed. A noose of rope was thrown round his arms and instantly tightened; with a nimbleness which he had not expected Morin knotted it fast. Courthope turned fiercely; for a moment he struggled with all his force, bearing down upon Morin from his greater height, so that they both staggered and reeled to the foot of the stair. At his violence the voices of the Morin women, joined by that of Eliz, were lifted in such wild terror that a few moments were sufficient to bring Courthope to reason. He spoke to Madge with haughty composure.

'Tell him to untie this rope at once. There is some villain about the house who may do you the greatest injury; you are mad to take from me the power of arresting him.'

Madam Morin, seeing the prisoner secured, hastened with her lamp to his bedroom.

Madge, feeling herself safer now, came a little way down the stair with her candle. 'How can we tell what you would do next?' she asked. 'And I have the household to protect; it is not for myself that I am afraid.'

The anger that he had felt toward her died out suddenly.

It was not for herself that she was afraid! She stood a few steps above him; her little candle, flashing its rays into the darkness of the upper and lower halls, made walls and balustrades seem vast by its flickering impotence to oust the darkness. Surely this girl, towering in her sweeping robe and queenly pose, was made to be loved of men and gods! Hero, carrying her vestal taper in the temple recesses, before ever Leander had crossed the wave, could not have had a larger or more noble form, a more noble and lovely face.

Well, if she chose to tie his arms he would have preferred to have them tied, were it not for the maddening thought that more miscreants than one might be within reach of her, and that they would, if skilled, find the whole household an easy prey.

Madam Morin came back from the room with the open window, making proclamation in the most excited French.

'What do they say?' asked Courthope of Madge.

The Morin girl was following close to her mother, and Jacques Morin was eagerly discussing their information.

Madge passed Courthope in silence. They all went to the window to see; Courthope, following in the most absurd helplessness, trailing the end of his binding-cord behind him, brought up the rear of the little procession. Madge walked straight on into his room, where Madam Morin was again opening the window-shutters.

'They say,' said Madge to Courthope, 'that you have had an accomplice, and that he is gone again; they saw his snow-shoe tracks.'

He begged her to make sure that the man was gone, to let him look at the tracks himself and then to search the house thoroughly. Outside the window the same chaotic sweep and whirl of the atmosphere prevailed. It was difficult, even holding a lantern outside, to see, but they did see that a track had come up to the window and again turned from it. After that they all searched the house, Courthope allowed to be of the company, apparently because he could thus be watched. The thief of the night had come and gone; some silver and jewellery which had been stored in a closet adjoining the bedroom of the sisters had been taken.

Courthope understood very little of the talk that went on. At length, to his great relief, Madge gave her full attention to him in parley.

'Won't you believe that I know nothing whatever of the doings of this sneak-thief?'

Some of her intense excitement had passed away, succeeded by distress, discouragement, and perhaps perplexity, but that last she did not express to him. She leaned against the wall as she listened to him with white face.

'We never took in any one we didn't know anything about before, and we never were robbed before.' She added, 'We treated you kindly; how could you have done it? If you did it'--his heart leaped at the 'if' as at a beam of sunshine on a rainy day--'you must have known all about us, although I can't think how; you must have known where we kept things, and that mamma had taken our other man-servant away. You must have brought your accomplice to hide in the barn and do the work while you played the gentleman! That is what Jacques Morin says; he says no one but a child would have taken you in as I did, and that you might have murdered us all. They are very angry with me.'

There was conflict in her manner; a few words would be said haughtily, as to some one not worthy of her notice, and then again a few words as to a friend. He saw that this conflict of her mind was increasing as she stood face to face with him, and with that consolation he submitted, at her request, to be more securely bound--the rope twisted round and round, binding his arms to his sides. It was a girl's device; he made no complaint.

It seemed that Morin had no thought of following the thief; his faithfulness was limited to such service as he considered necessary, and was of a cowardly rather than a valiant sort. Courthope, when his first eagerness to seek passed off, was comforted by reflecting that, had he himself been free, it would have been futile for him to attempt such a quest while darkness lay over the land in which he was a stranger.

He was allowed to rest on the settle in the large inner kitchen, securely locked in, and so near Morin's room that his movements could be overheard. There, still in bonds, he spent the rest of the night.