The wine cheered him a little, and he told his story, in a
voice that was creaky from disuse, while Tom held my hand under
the table.
He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a
closet in one of the maids' rooms--the one where we had put Jim.
It was Jim waking out of a nap and declaring that the closet door
had moved by itself and that something had crawled under his bed
and out of the door, that had roused the suspicions of the men in
the house--and he slept at night on the coal in the cellar. He
was actually tearful when he rubbed his hand over his scrubby
chin, and said he hadn't had a shave for a week. He took
somebody's razor, he said, but he couldn't get hold of a portable
mirror, and every time he lathered up and stood in front of the
glass in the dining room sideboard, some one came and he had had
to run and hide. He told, too, of his attempts to escape, of the
board on the roof, of the home-made rope, and the hole in the
cellar, and he spoke feelingly of the pearl collar and the
struggle he had made to hide it. He said that for three days it
was concealed in the pocket of Jim's old smoking coat in the
studio.
We were all rather sorry for him, but if we had made him
uncomfortable, think of what he had done to us. And for him to
tell, as he did later in court, that if that was high society he
would rather be a burglar, and that we starved him, and that the
women had to dress each other because they had no lady's maids,
and that the whole lot of us were in love with one man, it was
downright malicious.
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