CHAPTER XII.

LADY SARAH’S DUPLICITY

If Rhoda could have followed Lady Sarah into the study, she would have discovered that her suspicions and forebodings were amply justified.

Sir Robert was deep in his studies when she entered like a whirlwind, with bright eyes and voluble tongue, bearing in her arms a roll in which the baronet altogether failed to recognise his lost picture.

“Bertie, Bertie, look here, I’ve news, good news for you!” she cried with excitement, as she dashed across the floor and plunged her burden into the midst of his letters and papers, his books and his writing materials.

“Good gracious, my dear, what is it?”

She sprang up, clapped her hands, nodded her head, and beamed upon him.

“See for yourself,” said she.

He rose from his chair with a troubled look on his face. Although he now guessed what the surprise was which was in store for him, and although he had spent the night and morning in lamenting his loss, instinct told him that there was something to learn which he would rather not have known, in connection with the recovery of his treasure.

“What is it?” he asked hoarsely, as he touched the roll, and looked at her.

“I believe you know what it is,” replied she, “but if not, I’ll show you.”

Her hands were wet and trembling, for all her affectation of gaiety and unconcern, and it was with difficulty she performed the simple task of tearing the paper from the roll, and exhibiting its contents to her husband.

“There!” she said, rather tremulously, as she unrolled it, “Your picture! Back again, and quite safe and unharmed, I believe.”

But he looked at her with a frown.

“What does it mean?” he said hoarsely. “Who brought it back? Where does it come from?”

She glanced at him quickly. He was staring at the roll with a look of intense distress in his grave eyes. She drew her breath quickly, and glanced at him once more anxiously as she laughed, and said:

“I wish you would just take your luck, Bertie, without asking any questions.”

“How can I? I must know.”

“You’ll be sorry, and--and you’ll be angry,” faltered she, her colour coming and going.

“Never mind. I think you can trust me to be just.”

She suddenly made a spring at him, and held his arms, looking up with a bewitching air of entreaty into his face.

“Suppose some one you knew, and liked, and trusted, should have fallen a victim to a temptation too strong, under pressure of friends who wanted help badly. What then?”

“Well, who is it?”

His voice was stern, almost hard. Lady Sarah, frightened, began to weep.

“I can’t tell you,” she said quickly, “while you look like that. I daren’t.”

He patted her shoulder kindly.

“Nonsense,” he said. “You can trust me to be just.”

“I don’t ask you to be just, I want you to be merciful. I want you to promise that you will accept this act of restitution without any questions, and that you will be satisfied not to speak of the matter again. The thief has repented, as you see, and has proved repentance.”

“I must know who it is,” said Sir Robert, with more sternness than he had ever used to his wife before.

“Yes, if you will promise to forgive and--forget.”

“I promise,” said Sir Robert after a pause.

He was looking pale and anxious in his turn, as he sat down, after placing a chair for his wife, and folding his hands, kept his head bent, as he waited for her promised revelation.

“What would you say if you were to learn that it was a lady in your employment, one who has proved herself very useful, very devoted, who yielded to a temptation she couldn’t resist?” said she.

Sir Robert looked up sharply.

“I should say,” said he quietly, “that it wasn’t true.”

Lady Sarah bit her lip, disconcerted.

“I swear to you,” said she earnestly, after a short pause, “that it was she who gave me back the picture and begged me to give it to you and to ask you to say nothing, to ask nothing, but to be content to have recovered it.”

He turned round to face his wife.

“Ask her to come and speak to me,” said he quickly.

“If I do, she will leave the house at once. She told me so,” said she sharply.

Sir Robert rose from his chair, and paced up and down the room.

“There is something more in this,” said he with decision.

“Do you doubt my word?”

“Not for a moment, of course. But what I mean is that what she has told you is not the whole of the truth. She is shielding some one else, the guilty person.”

Lady Sarah drew herself up.

“What is the divinity that hedges Miss Pembury,” she asked haughtily, “that she must be considered incapable of any sort of error?”

He stopped and answered her steadily.

“She is a perfectly noble and irreproachable lady,” he said, “and as incapable of a mean and despicable theft as you are yourself.”

His wife looked down, with the blood rising in her cheeks.

“You will then be satisfied with her message. You won’t try to find out anything more?” she said in a low voice.

“I will say nothing to any one at present,” he said quietly. “I think, Sarah, you must be satisfied with that.”

She looked at him doubtfully, but affected to think that he had given her the promise she wanted; and then she kissed him and tripped out of the room.

But she left her husband in a state of acute distress. It was not possible for him to believe that his wife had deliberately deceived him, although even that sometimes seemed more likely than that the patient, high-minded Rhoda should have been guilty of deception and ingratitude.

But he felt sure that he had only heard part of the story, and the conclusion to which he still clung, after turning the matter over in his mind, was that Rhoda was shielding some one else. Who that some one was, however, he had no idea. And that it could be the man who had been dear to him for so many years, in conjunction with his own wife, who had robbed him, never for one moment entered the baronet’s mind.

He was far too loyal himself to suspect disloyalty in his nearest and dearest, and his conjecture was that it was some member of his household, one of the under servants, and not one of those who had been in his service many years, who had committed the theft both of the picture and of the snuff-boxes.

Knowing, as he did, that Rhoda had been the first to discover the theft of the picture, he decided that she must have found out more than she confessed to have done, but that she held her peace until she had forced the thief to restore at least part of the plunder.

Withal he was hurt to think that she had not come straight to him herself. Surely she might have known that she could come to him without fear, and that he would temper justice with mercy.

The consequence of this slight feeling of injury was a certain coldness in his manner when he met her at luncheon; and the unhappy Rhoda at once jumped to the conclusion that he suspected her of the theft. She thus did less than justice to him, and more than justice to his wife. For she little thought that the artful Lady Sarah had done her very best to divert suspicion from herself and Jack Rotherfield by accusing the companion of her little son.

Rhoda was heartbroken. She was crying quietly by herself in a distant corner of the grounds, when she suddenly found two long lean arms put round her neck from behind, and heard Minnie Mallory’s voice in her ear, saying in tones of encouragement:

“Look here, don’t you cry. Aunt Sally’s been making mischief, I suppose, with Uncle Bertie?”

Rhoda was startled, and turning quickly, asked the girl what she meant.

By this time Minnie, with a battered and bent hat cocked over one eye, was squatting on the grass like a large-sized toad, looking up at her keenly out of her light eyes.

“What was in that gun-case?” she asked suddenly.

Rhoda dashed away her own tears and stared at the girl in dismay. Was Minnie a witch?

“W--w--what gun-case?” stammered she.

Minnie gave her a supercilious glance and a shrug.

“Oh, you know,” she said. “That gun-case you took out of Jack’s car just before he went away.”

“A gun, I suppose,” Rhoda replied quickly.

“Then what did you take it indoors for?”

There was a pause. Minnie shrugged her shoulders again.

“Oh, of course, you needn’t tell me unless you like, but I can’t help guessing, can I? And I can’t help wondering why Jack looked so awfully cross when he came out again.”

“You see quite enough, without being told anything,” was Rhoda’s comment.

Minnie nodded.

“Well, I do keep my eyes open, especially in a house like this, where there is so much to see. But I shouldn’t cry, if I were you. Because nobody will ever blame _you_ for anything that ever happens here.”

There was a weird air of prophecy about this remark which made Rhoda feel uncomfortable. But she only sighed, and said:

“Nothing that happens will matter to me, for I am going away.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” croaked the witch.

“You’ll see,” said Rhoda, as she rose with an air of determination, and started to walk back to the house.

The mocking laughter of Minnie sounded uncannily in her ears, as she disappeared into the yew path.

She went straight to the study and knocked at the door. Almost at the same moment she became aware that some one was talking inside the room, and she would fain have retired. But as Sir Robert called out “Come in,” she had to enter, blushing and apologetic, and then she found that Jack Rotherfield and Lady Sarah were both in the room with the baronet.

“I’m so sorry, I thought you were alone,” said Rhoda.

“And he will be alone in a moment,” cried Lady Sarah merrily. “Jack’s had a breakdown, and he had to come back, and he’s been telling us all about it.”

It flashed through Rhoda’s mind that, as Jack’s errand to town had probably been connected with the disposal of the Romney, the breakdown had not been a very serious nor a very inconvenient one. And then, rendered suspicious by circumstances, she noted that Lady Sarah, in spite of her statement that she was going, did not go. And it occurred to Rhoda that Lady Sarah wished to avoid the possibility of a _tête-à-tête_ between her husband and Rhoda.

Sir Robert turned to the girl courteously, and asked what he could do for her. In a low voice, striving to repress every sign of emotion, Rhoda said that she would be glad if she might leave the Mill-house at once, and return home to her parents.

The baronet did not seem surprised.

“Of course we can’t keep you against your will,” he said. “But I am very sorry, and we shall miss you very much. Have you spoken to Lady Sarah about it?”

She saw that he too was striving to speak more calmly than he felt.

“No. I thought I ought to come to you first.”

“I can only repeat that I am more sorry than can say. And as for Caryl----”

He broke off, deeply moved. There was a pause, during which Rhoda noticed that though Lady Sarah appeared to be chattering idly to Jack she was watching with the keenest attention what went on between her husband and Caryl’s companion.

“Thank you,” said Rhoda. “I will say good-bye to Caryl at once, if I may.”

“You are going to-day, then? It’s rather sudden? For your own sake, if I might suggest, I should say you had better wait till to-morrow. You look tired, and unfit for a journey.”

She raised her eyes to his face and gave him one swift glance. There was a world of feeling in her own sensitive face as she looked at him: gratitude, regret, affection, and even reproach, all expressed themselves in that one quick up-look of her tender blue eyes.

And the answering look which Sir Robert threw at her was hardly less eloquent. There was in his grave face a look of earnest affection, and an expression of almost childlike helplessness in the face of an unexpected blow.

Rhoda choked down a sob, and crossed the room quickly to Lady Sarah.

“I’m going away,” she said quickly; and without thinking it necessary to give any explanation to a lady who, she was sure, must understand her decision without it, she added: “I’m going upstairs to say good-bye to little Caryl.”

With Lady Sarah’s perfunctory regrets ringing in her ears, mingled with the polite expressions of surprise from Jack Rotherfield, she went out of the room.

She crept up the stairs with her heart beating very fast. If it was hard to leave Sir Robert, what would the parting with poor little Caryl be?

He was lying by the window of his sitting-room, which had once been the nursery, and he clapped his hands as she came in.

“Oh, Rhoda, Rhoda, what a long time you’ve been! I’d thought you had forgotten me!” he cried, as soon as he caught sight of her.

And as she looked at his thin face, and saw the flush of pleasure in his cheeks and the brightness which came into his eyes, as the nurse got up, and, smiling, gave her chair to the new-comer, Rhoda felt as if her heart would burst.

“My dear Caryl,” she said as she bent to kiss him, “I’m afraid you won’t like to hear something I’ve got to tell you.”

A look of vivid intelligence appeared on his face, and he glanced anxiously towards the nurse.

“Oh, is it what she says?” he asked tremulously. “Are you going away?”

Rhoda turned quickly. Had the possibility of her going been discussed, then, in the servants’ hall?

“Yes, I’ve been here such a long time that my father and mother want to see me,” she said, trying to speak brightly. “You wouldn’t begrudge them a sight of their own daughter, would you?”

“Not just a look at them, I wouldn’t begrudge you that,” he said. And then he called, “Nurse!”

The girl came back into the room.

“What is it, Master Caryl?”

“Ask my father to come and see me, please.”

Rhoda bent quickly to kiss him again, but he detained her, clinging to her.

“You must wait, you must wait a minute,” he said feverishly.

And the touch of his hot hands made her shiver.

“If you want me to say good-bye to Sir Robert and Lady Sarah, I have just done so,” said she.

But Caryl would say nothing about that.

“Sit down,” he said, “and tell me what you’ve been doing, and where you’ve been. You’ve never left me so long alone before.”

“Well, I’ve been in the grounds, Caryl.”

“Yes, I saw you go. And I thought it very unkind of you not to take me. But I know why you didn’t,” and he pressed her hand with his little thin fingers. “You wanted to cry, that’s why you wanted to be by yourself. And that’s why you want to go home. You’re not happy, Rhoda. You look so different from what you did at first, before mama came back.”

“It’s nothing to do with mama, Caryl,” said Rhoda quickly.

“Oh no. But you have been crying, though?”

“Perhaps I have. Perhaps I don’t like leaving you, Caryl.”

He sighed, and played with her fingers quietly, and said very little more till his father came into the room.

Sir Robert looked flushed and uneasy; he caught sight of Rhoda at once; and the presence of the lady seemed to make him graver than ever.

“Come here, papa.”

The baronet came and bent over his little couch.

“Give me your hand,” said the boy.

The baronet obeyed, still without looking at Rhoda, who was trying to withdraw her fingers from the tight clutch of the child.

“Papa,” said Caryl, “I sent for you because I want you to tell Rhoda not to go away and leave me.”

Sir Robert gazed down at his little son.

“When a lady makes up her mind to do a thing, Caryl, it’s not kind or courteous to try to dissuade her,” said he.

But Caryl persisted.

“I don’t believe she really wants to go, papa. I think she’ll stay if you ask her to,” said he.

“No, no, Caryl, I must go,” said Rhoda hoarsely.

Sir Robert looked up then, and his eyes met hers. In his there was a look of grave, tender kindness of gentle reproach, which cut her to the heart.

“I never thought, Caryl, that she could have left you,” he said in a low voice.

And Rhoda, bending suddenly very low over the child, hid her face and whispered:

“Caryl, you’re don’t know what you’re asking, dear, but--I’ll stay.”