The Lady of the Barge - W. W. Jacobs (speld decodable readers .txt) 📗

waved them to silence, and again gave way to deep thought. Three times he took up his pencil, and laying it down again, sat and drummed on the table with his fingers. Then he arose, and with bent head walked slowly round and round the room until he stumbled over a stool.

“Nobody came to the house this morning, I suppose?” he said at length, resuming his seat.

“Only Mrs. Driver,” said his niece.

“What time did she come?” inquired Mr. Bodfish.

“Here! look here!” interposed Mr. Negget. “I’ve known Mrs. Driver thirty year a’most.”

“What time did she come?” repeated the ex-constable, pitilessly.

His niece shook her head. “It might have been eleven, and again it might have been earlier,” she replied. “I was out when she came.”

“Out!” almost shouted the other.

Mrs. Negget nodded.

“She was sitting in here when I came back.”

Her uncle looked up and glanced at the door behind which a small staircase led to the room above.

“What was to prevent Mrs. Driver going up there while you were away?” he demanded.

“I shouldn’t like to think that of Mrs. Driver,” said his niece, shaking her head; “but then in these days one never knows what might happen. Never. I’ve given up thinking about it. However, when I came back, Mrs. Driver was here, sitting in that very chair you are sitting in now.”

Mr. Bodfish pursed up his lips and made another note. Then he took a spill from the fireplace, and lighting a candle, went slowly and carefully up the stairs. He found nothing on them but two caked rims of mud, and being too busy to notice Mr. Negget’s frantic signalling, called his niece’s attention to them.

“What do you think of that?” he demanded, triumphantly.

“Somebody’s been up there,” said his niece. “It isn’t Emma, because she hasn’t been outside the house all day; and it can’t be George, because he promised me faithful he’d never go up there in his dirty boots.”

Mr. Negget coughed, and approaching the stairs, gazed with the eye of a stranger at the relics as Mr. Bodfish hotly rebuked a suggestion of his niece’s to sweep them up.

“Seems to me,” said the conscience-stricken Mr. Negget, feebly, “as they’re rather large for a woman.”

“Mud cakes,” said Mr. Bodfish, with his most professional manner; “a small boot would pick up a lot this weather.”

“So it would,” said Mr. Negget, and with brazen effrontery not only met his wife’s eye without quailing, but actually glanced down at her boots.

Mr. Bodfish came back to his chair and ruminated. Then he looked up and spoke.

“It was missed this morning at ten minutes past twelve,” he said, slowly; “it was there last night. At eleven o’clock you came in and found Mrs. Driver sitting in that chair.”

“No, the one you’re in,” interrupted his niece.

“It don’t signify,” said her uncle. “Nobody else has been near the place, and Emma’s box has been searched.”

“Thoroughly searched,” testified Mrs. Negget.

“Now the point is, what did Mrs. Driver come for this morning?” resumed the ex-constable. “Did she come⁠—”

He broke off and eyed with dignified surprise a fine piece of wireless telegraphy between husband and wife. It appeared that Mr. Negget sent off a humorous message with his left eye, the right being for some reason closed, to which Mrs. Negget replied with a series of frowns and staccato shakes of the head, which her husband found easily translatable. Under the austere stare of Mr. Bodfish their faces at once regained their wonted calm, and the ex-constable in a somewhat offended manner resumed his inquiries.

“Mrs. Driver has been here a good bit lately,” he remarked, slowly.

Mr. Negget’s eyes watered, and his mouth worked piteously.

“If you can’t behave yourself, George⁠—” began began his wife, fiercely.

“What is the matter?” demanded Mr. Bodfish. “I’m not aware that I’ve said anything to be laughed at.”

“No more you have, uncle,” retorted his niece; “only George is such a stupid. He’s got an idea in his silly head that Mrs. Driver⁠—But it’s all nonsense, of course.”

“I’ve merely got a bit of an idea that it’s a wedding-ring, not a brooch, Mrs. Driver is after,” said the farmer to the perplexed constable.

Mr. Bodfish looked from one to the other. “But you always keep yours on, Lizzie, don’t you?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” replied his niece, hurriedly; “but George has always got such strange ideas. Don’t take no notice of him.”

Her uncle sat back in his chair, his face still wrinkled perplexedly; then the wrinkles vanished suddenly, chased away by a huge glow, and he rose wrathfully and towered over the matchmaking Mr. Negget. “How dare you?” he gasped.

Mr. Negget made no reply, but in a cowardly fashion jerked his thumb toward his wife.

“Oh! George! How can you say so?” said the latter.

“I should never ha’ thought of it by myself,” said the farmer; “but I think they’d make a very nice couple, and I’m sure Mrs. Driver thinks so.”

The ex-constable sat down in wrathful confusion, and taking up his notebook again, watched over the top of it the silent charges and countercharges of his niece and her husband.

“If I put my finger on the culprit,” he asked at length, turning to his niece, “what do you wish done to her?”

Mrs. Negget regarded him with an expression which contained all the Christian virtues rolled into one.

“Nothing,” she said, softly. “I only want my brooch back.”

The ex-constable shook his head at this leniency.

“Well, do as you please,” he said, slowly. “In the first place, I want you to ask Mrs. Driver here to tea tomorrow⁠—oh, I don’t mind Negget’s ridiculous ideas⁠—pity he hasn’t got something better to think of; if she’s guilty, I’ll soon find it out. I’ll play with her like a cat with a mouse. I’ll make her convict herself.”

“Look here!” said Mr. Negget, with sudden vigour. “I won’t have it. I won’t have no woman asked here to tea to be got at like that. There’s only my friends comes here to tea, and if any friend stole anything o’ mine, I’d be one o’ the first to hush it up.”

“If they were all like you, George,” said his wife, angrily, “where would the law be?”

“Or the police?” demanded Mr. Bodfish, staring at him.

“I won’t have it!” repeated the farmer, loudly.