"Well, miss, you begin," cried Nancy, suddenly firing up through her tears. "If the _Proserpine_ was scuttled, which I've your word for it, Miss Helen, and I never knew you tell a lie, why, your sweetheart is more to blame for it than mine."
Helen rose with dignity.
"You are in grief," said she. "I leave you to consider whether you have done well to affront me in your own house." And she was moving to the door with great dignity, when Nancy ran and stopped her.
"Oh, don't leave me so, Miss Helen," she cried; "don't you go to quarrel with me for speaking the truth too plain and rude, as is a plain-spoken body at the best; and in such grief myself I scarce know what to say. But indeed, and in truth, you mustn't go and put it abroad that the ship was scuttled; if you do, you won't hurt Joe Wylie; he'll get a ship and fly the country. Who you'll hurt will be your own husband as is to be--Wardlaws."
"Shall I, Mr. Penfold?" asked Helen, disdainfully.
"Well, madam, certainly it might create some unworthy suspicion.
"Suspicion?" cried Nancy. "Don't you think to throw dust in my eyes. What had poor Joe to gain by destroying that there ship? you know very well he was bribed to do it; and risk his own life. And who bribed him? Who should bribe him, but the man as owned the ship?"
"Miss Rouse," said Mr. Penfold, "I sympathize with your grief, and make great allowance; but I will not sit here and hear my worthy employer blackened with such terrible insinuations. The great house of Wardlaw bribe a sailor to scuttle their own ship, with Miss Rolleston and one hundred and sixty thousand pounds' worth of gold on board! Monstrous! monstrous !"
"Then what did Joe Wylie mean?" replied Nancy. "Says he, 'The poor man gets all the blame. If I was to tell you who tempted me,' says he, 'you'd hate me worse.' Then I say, why should she hate him worse? Because it's her sweetheart tempted mine. I stands to that."
This inference, thus worded, struck Helen as so droll that she turned her head aside to giggle a little. But old Penfold replied loftily:
"Who cares what a _Wylie_ says against a great old mercantile house of London City?"
"Very well, Mr. Penfolds," said Nancy, with one great final sob, and dried her eyes with her apron; and she did it with such an air, they both saw she was not going to shed another tear about the matter. "Very well; you are both against me; then I'll say no more. But I know what I know."
"And what do you know?" inquired Helen.
"Time will show," said Nancy, turning suddenly very dogged--"time will show."
Nothing more was to be got out of her after that; and Helen, soon after, made her a civil, though stiff, little speech; regretted the pain she had inadvertently caused her, and went away, leaving Mr. Penfold her address.
On her return home, she entered the whole adventure in her diary. She made a separate entry to this effect:
_Mysterious._--My letter to Mr. Penfold at the office intercepted.
Wylie hints that he was bribed by Messrs. Wardlaw.
Nancy Rouse suspects that it was Arthur, and says time will show.
As for me, I can neither see why Wylie should scuttle the ship unless he was bribed by somebody, nor what Arthur or his father could gain by destroying that ship. This is all as dark as is that more cruel mystery which alone I care to solve.
