“Fine talk!” cried Blunt; and Martin burst out, “You’ll pay nothing! Will you not? What if I go to old Sir Gavin? What if I give him the tale? He’d listen and he’d set you by the heels, as gladly as he’d set Roger Galt. Though you’re one of his kind—”
“You have it,” my uncle assented, “one of Sir Gavin’s kind. Do you threaten me, Martin Baynes, you, for all the repute of the Stone House and Mistress Baynes and her grandsons? Are there not strange tales of the Stone House—of travellers lost on the moors? Of a pedlar whose dog was heard wailing at the gates of the Stone House, as dogs wail for their dead masters? Do you threaten me, Martin Baynes? And you, Blunt? Did you never sail further than the coasts of France? Did you never plunder an English ship? Were you never more than smuggler?”
“Never more,” cried Blunt, “than Edward Craike, and never so much.”
“A gentleman of fortune,” said my uncle, “a voyager born a hundred years and odd after his time. Tush, that my father profited by his voyages is nothing, Blunt; he plundered no English ships; if his men spilt any blood, it was not English.”
“Barwise is just such a besotted fellow,” cried my uncle, “as should pitch you the tale you’d wish to hear, Blunt. Now ere you two presume to threaten me, think who’ll believe you? If I sought to keep John Howe out of the house, and have him shipped overseas—what of it? What should this count against me save with a few virtuous fools to whose praise or blame I am indifferent? D’ye think I’ve no credit with His Majesty’s Ministers? D’ye think that the Town would ever regard me as other than a man of birth and fashion? What if there be rumours of my father’s past, or scandal against me? Your words would avail you nothing. But you, you rogues; the word from me would hang you both. Tush, when you threaten me, you’re fools.”
“We want no more than payment,” Blunt growled.
“That I’d not have to give you, if you’d earned it.”
“There’s money in the house,” Blunt urged. “There’s plate. There’s talk of a great chest of gold and jewels.”
“I would,” said my uncle softly, “I might dip my hands into it.”
“D’ye not know of it?” Blunt asked. “D’ye not know it’s talk among all the folk of the house that the old man hid the richest stuff he ever took?”