"Murderess," he shrieked. "If there is a law in England you shall have justice done upon you."
Madame swung round, the automatic in, her hand.
"And you, John Clifford, robber and man destroyer, shall have justice here and now."
The pistol cracked, and the bullet, passing within an inch of his head, smacked up against the wall. He leaped for the door, both Ching and Ewing jumped out of the way, and the crowd beyond scattered down the corridor. Crack went the pistol again, and a second bullet banged with the impact of a hammer on the doorpost. Clifford reached the opening, and was through. They heard his feet pattering down the alley way.
"Steady, lass," warned Ewing. "Ye might have killed him."
"No," said Madame. "I shot to frighten, not to kill. And I have done what I intended. We shall not hear much more of Clifford and his law. With all my heart I wish that he lay here now at my feet, and that poor Willatopy, safe and ignorantly happy, were still in Tops Island. Fate is very cruel, Sandy; it might have spared upon my hand the blood of Willatopy."
The Captain of a British ship is every kind of civil authority, from magistrate and chaplain to hangman. In his capacity as coroner, Robert Ching held an enquiry in the saloon on the morning which followed the death of Willatopy. He was supported by those of his officers who were not on duty above and below deck. Marie, sore and grievously bruised from shoulder to knee, was carried in and laid at length upon a sofa. Her bones were unbroken, and though she suffered much pain, she was a very happy Marie Lambert. Madame Gilbert had passed the sponge of forgiveness over the maid's disreputable past; her one act of self-forgetting courage had blotted out the treachery in France, and the fatal amour in Tops Island. Marie had won her final reprieve.
John Clifford, broken down by days of drunkenness and by the collapse of his professional ambition, attended the inquest as the legal adviser of the slain Baron of Topsham. His spirit of the night before had faded out of him with the alcohol which stimulated it. It was a very miserable and draggled Hedge Lawyer who met for the last time his fellow voyagers in the _Humming Top_.
I will not trouble the reader with the whole enquiry, which was long and tedious. Ching, foreseeing scandal and legal complications when the tragic story came to be told in England, wrote down in his round, slow sailor's hand, every word that was spoken, and obtained the signatures of all present, even that of the reluctant John Clifford, to the evidence as given on oath.