“Go on,” he said to Sir Joseph, when he had got to the end of his excuses; “I never heard such an interesting story in my life.  Pray go on!”

The request was not an easy one to comply with.  Sir Joseph’s ideas had been thrown into confusion.  Miss Lavinia’s contradictions (held in reserve) had been scattered beyond recall.  Both brother and sister were, moreover, additionally hindered in recovering the control of their own resources by the look and manner of their host.  He alarmed, instead of encouraging the two harmless old people, by fronting them almost fiercely, with his elbows squared on the table, and his face expressive of a dogged resolution to sit there and listen, if need be, for the rest of his life.  Launce was the person who set Sir Joseph going again.  After first looking attentively at Richard, he took his uncle straight back to the story by means of a question, thus: 

“You don’t mean to say that the captain of the ship threw the man overboard?”

“That is just what he did, Launce.  The poor wretch was too ill to work his passage.  The captain declared he would have no idle foreign vagabond in his ship to eat up the provisions of Englishmen who worked.  With his own hands he cast the hen-coop into the water, and (assisted by one of his sailors) he threw the man after it, and told him to float back to Liverpool with the evening tide.”

“A lie!” cried Turlington, addressing himself, not to Sir Joseph, but to Launce.

“Are you acquainted with the circumstances?” asked Launce, quietly.

“I know nothing about the circumstances.  I say, from my own experience, that foreign sailors are even greater blackguards than English sailors.  The man had met with an accident, no doubt.  The rest of his story was a lie, and the object of it was to open Sir Joseph’s purse.”

Sir Joseph mildly shook his head.

“No lie, Richard.  Witnesses proved that the man had spoken the truth.”

“Witnesses?  Pooh!  More liars, you mean.”

“I went to the owners of the vessel,” pursued Sir Joseph.  “I got from them the names of the officers and the crew, and I waited, leaving the case in the hands of the Liverpool police.  The ship was wrecked at the mouth of the Amazon, but the crew and the cargo were saved.  The men belonging to Liverpool came back.  They were a bad set, I grant you.  But they were examined separately about the treatment of the foreign sailor, and they all told the same story.  They could give no account of their captain, nor of the sailor who had been his accomplice in the crime, except that they had not embarked in the ship which brought the rest of the crew to England.  Whatever may have become of the captain since, he certainly never returned to Liverpool.”

“Did you find out his name?”

The question was asked by Turlington.  Even Sir Joseph, the least observant of men, noticed that it was put with a perfectly unaccountable irritability of manner.