England -- Fiction; France -- Fiction; Governesses -- Fiction; Orphans -- Fiction
"Ah, I should have known you anywhere, Mrs. Penn. What had I or my
horse done to you that you should attack us?"
She turned and faced him. It really seemed as though she believed
herself in the right in all the past acts, and felt proud to have done
so well. All this while, it must be remembered, she supposed George
Heneage was alive in the west wing, and would soon be taken from it to
a criminal prison. She could afford to make concessions now.
"It was not you or your horse I attacked intentionally. I mistook you
for another. For that brother of yours, Mr. Chandos, whose liberty will
soon be put beyond jeopardy, and his life after it. Your great likeness
to George Heneage, as he looked in those old days at Hallam, is
unfortunate. For one thing, it has caused me to hate you; when, to
speak candidly, I think in yourself there is not much to hate.
You"—turning her flashing eyes on the men—"are seeing me out of the
house because I have acted my part effectually in it; a part that Sir
Richard Mayne himself would say I was justified in; but there is a
greater criminal concealed above, for whom a warrant is, as I expect,
already in force."
"You are wrong," said Mr. Chandos. "Were the whole establishment of
Scotland Yard to make their appearance here, each with a warrant in his
hand, they would scarcely execute it. It has been a long, a weary, and
a wearing battle: Edwin Barley against George Heneage: but God has
shown himself on the side of mercy."
The words puzzled her a little. "Has he escaped?" she fiercely asked.
"Has he left the house?"
"He has not left it, Mrs. Penn; he is in the west wing." She threw up
her head with a glow of triumph, and walked rapidly away down the broad
walk, the policemen escorting her.
Standing at the back of the hall in utter amazement, partly at seeing
Mrs. Penn go forth at all, partly at the object she presented in the
grey cloak, was Lizzy Dene. "Miss," she said to me, as I stood just
inside the great dining-room, "I should say she must have been the one
to frighten Black Knave that night."
"Perhaps she was, Lizzy. Her cloak is grey."
An impulse came over me that I would ask Lizzy Dene the motive of her
suspicious conduct in the past. Now that the culprit had turned out to
be Mrs. Penn, Lizzy Dene must have been innocent. Stepping within the
large dining-room, I asked her there and then.
"Ah," said she, with a sort of fling out of the hands, habitual to her
when annoyed or in pain, "I don't mind telling now. I was in trouble at
that time."
"What do you mean, Lizzy?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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