CHAPTER XIV.

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.