JACK ROTHERFIELD’S EFFRONTERY
Lady Sarah was nothing if not versatile. She had scarcely whispered
these warning words to Jack Rotherfield when she danced across the
room to Minnie, and laughingly said:
“You lazy girl! You’re always curled up in a chair or a couch, and you
never take any exercise. Come out and race me to the end of the grass
path. I don’t believe you’ve been out all day.”
The ruse was not a very subtle one, and Rhoda and the sharp-eyed
Minnie knew at once that Lady Sarah desired to leave the other two
together.
Rhoda, however, walked at once quickly towards the door, with the
intention of avoiding an unpleasant _tête-à-tête_.
But of course Jack Rotherfield was far too much accustomed to getting
his own way with the ladies not to know how, in the most charming and
winning manner, to frustrate her purpose.
Springing across the room with the agility of a boy, he stood,
laughing, before the door, and said:
“No, no, you shan’t run away like that, as if I were an ogre. I have
forgiven you your unkindness to me this morning, and in return you
must forgive me if I was not very civil.”
But his effrontery, instead of succeeding with her, made her angry.
Looking him steadily in the face, she said, her eyes flashing the
steely fire that only blue eyes can show:
“You may be able to forgive me, Mr. Rotherfield, but it’s too late to
ask me to forgive _you_.”
For a moment he was confounded, but he quickly recovered himself.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Must I say it? Remember, I shall have a good deal to say,” said she,
below her breath.
He cast at her a look which frightened her, so full of undisguised
malice was it.
“Say it and let us have it out,” he said defiantly.
“Well, you stole the picture; you were taking it up to town--to sell.
And it was you, no doubt, who robbed Sir Robert of his snuff-boxes
also. There is no injustice in taking that for granted.”
“Indeed! Now _I_ should have thought there was the cruellest injustice
in accusing any man of a theft which you couldn’t prove up to the
hilt.”
“Very well. We will leave out the matter of the snuff-boxes then. You
can’t deny that you stole the picture.”
“I do deny it. If I had a hand in it, you know for whom it was done.
You know whose extravagance has to be paid for, somehow or other; and
that a man, placed in such a position as I, is forced to choose
between betraying one of his friends or the other. I stood by the
woman. What else could I do?”
Rhoda was aghast at the effrontery of this confession. There might be
some truth in it, though she could not but think that his extravagance
was quite as likely to have led up to the robbery as that of Lady
Sarah.
In any case, his excuse was, of course, thoroughly bad.
“You presume to tell me you were in the right in helping a wife to rob
her husband!” she cried.
“In the circumstances, what else could I do?”
“Anything else, of course,” Rhoda retorted contemptuously. “Sir Robert
is the most generous man in the world.”
Jack raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, have you found him so?” sneered he.
Rhoda grew red, but did not affect to notice the sneer.
“He is quite unable to deny his wife anything she asks for. If she had
gone to him with a full statement of the amount she wanted, he would
have given it to her at once.”
“Your experience of him, unfortunately, scarcely tallies with that of
his wife,” said Jack coolly. “She begged him to let her have some
money, and he refused.”
“I don’t believe it. At least he would ask her for the amount of her
debts and then undertake to pay them.”
“And is that what you call confidence, generosity. To treat her like a
child, to make her give an account of every penny?”
It struck Rhoda forcibly, as she listened to this indictment of the
baronet, that Jack had been trying to get money for his own expenses
out of his late guardian by means of Lady Sarah: it was a shrewd
guess, and Jack saw what was in her mind.
“I think it is quite permissible, with a wife inclined to
extravagance,” said Rhoda. “In any case, for an outsider to interfere,
and to try to take by stealth from a husband what cannot be got from
him openly, is an infamous thing. You profess to love Sir Robert, and
you show your gratitude by leading his wife into crime. It is
frightful, disgraceful.”
“And you have told Sir Robert this extraordinary story?”
“Of course not. But I am thankful to see that he knows at last that he
has trusted Lady Sarah too much, and I hope he will make it impossible
for her to stoop to such conduct in the future.”
Jack shot at her a look so full of active malevolence that Rhoda was
startled. A low cry escaped her lips, and instinctively she glanced
down at his scarred right hand, which Jack as instinctively concealed.
Her knowledge that the affair they were discussing was only a part,
and the least important part, of an ugly maze of wrong-doing which she
did not dare even to allude to, suddenly seized her imagination so
vividly that she sank into a chair, feeling faint and sick with the
weight of guilt which seemed to be pressing down upon herself.
For was not this man guilty also of the death of the butler Langton?
And what was the guilty secret that lay under that outrage?
For a moment they were both silent, Jack looking askance at her with
an expression of intense malignity on his handsome countenance, and
Rhoda for the time incapable of speech, and almost of movement.
Then there struck upon their ears the sound of deliberate footsteps in
the hall, and both became aware, at the same moment, that the
footsteps were those of Sir Robert, and that there was an unwonted
firmness in his tread.
The next moment, as Jack glanced apprehensively at the door, it
opened, and Sir Robert came in.
He was as white as the dead, and his mild eyes were burning with a
strange and sombre fire. Rhoda held her breath, for she knew that, in
the short time that had elapsed since he left them, he had made some
momentous discovery.
“Miss Pembury,” said he, in a voice which hurt her, so cold and
cutting were its tones, “will you leave us for ten minutes?” And then
he looked full in her face with an expression which told her more than
words could have done. She knew that he was in possession, if not of
the worst there was to be known, at any rate of enough to break a
man’s heart.
She hesitated a moment; she would have liked to try to say some word
to mitigate the horror of the shock he had received. But what could
she say?
Closing her lips, and casting at him one look full of reverence and
sympathy and pity, she went, tottering, out of the room, and left the
two men together.
With a swift movement, altogether unlike his usual leisurely actions,
Sir Robert flung upon a little table near him a folded piece of paper.
“We have some notes to take, both of us,” he said, in a steady voice
which sounded quite unlike his own. “Here is a pencil for you, and
here is mine. I’ll give you half this paper, and I’ll keep half. Lend
me your penknife.”
He was bending down over the paper, and holding out his hand, not
looking at Jack.
There was a moment’s hesitancy on the part of the young man, and then
he produced his penknife from his pocket. It was a neat little
gold-cased affair, very flat, and with two blades. He opened one of
these, and handed the knife to Sir Robert.
The baronet took it from him, but instead of using it as a
paper-knife, as he had appeared to wish to do, he turned his back to
Jack, and taking something from his own pocket, looked down earnestly
at what he held in his hands. Then he turned without a word or a cry,
and held under Jack’s eyes the penknife, with the second blade opened.
This second blade was broken, having lost about half an inch. In Sir
Robert’s other hand was the missing piece of steel.
Holding the penknife in one hand and the piece of broken blade in the
other, the baronet looked up steadily into the eyes of the young man,
and said:
“I picked up this broken blade under the space in the wall where my
Romney used to hang.” Jack started violently, in spite of all his
caution. The baronet went on in an awful voice: “It was your penknife
which cut the picture out of its frame. It was you who stole it. Deny
it if you can.”
For a moment Jack was too much overwhelmed to speak.
Then, recovering himself, he stammered out:
“I don’t understand. Some one must have stolen my penknife. I--I am
sur--prised that you can accuse me of stealing your picture.”
But he had scarcely got to the end of his stammering, halting speech
when Sir Robert, with a vigour and muscular strength of which the
younger man would never have dreamt him to be possessed, flung himself
upon him, and dragging him across the floor, threw him violently upon
the couch by the fireplace, and holding him down, in a grip that grew
tighter every moment, stared into his face with eyes that blazed like
those of an enraged lion.
“The picture! The picture! What do I care for the picture? What would
a thousand pictures matter? What I want to know, what I _will_ know
is--what have you robbed me of besides? You are a thief, a pitiful
thief, but I could forgive you that. But you didn’t do this thing
alone: you had a companion, an accomplice. Who was it? Who was it?
Tell me, tell me!”
And as he spoke, with a terrible look, he clutched Jack Rotherfield by
the throat and forced the guilty eyes to meet his own.