CHAPTER XV.—THE STOLEN LETTER.Jasper Denzil, his arm, bruised and crushed as it had been beneath the weight of the fallen horse, still needing the support of a sling, and his pallid cheek and dim eye telling that he had not wholly regained his strength, lounged among the cushions of a sofa in what was called the White Room at Carbery. This room, which owed its name to the colour of its panelled walls, sparely relieved by mouldings of gold and pale blue, overlooked the park and adjoined the billiard-room; and Jasper, with an invalid’s caprice, had chosen it for his especial apartment during the period of his compulsory confinement to the house. Time hung more heavily than ever on the captain’s hands since his accident had cut him off from his ordinary habits of life. Of intellectual resources he had few indeed, being one of those men (and they are numerous amongst us) to whom reading is a weariness of spirit, and thinking a laborious mental process, and who undergo tortures of boredom when thrown helpless into that worst of all company—their own. His sisters’ affection, his sisters’ innocent anxiety to anticipate his wishes and soothe his pain, bored him more than it touched him. He was not of a tender moral fibre, and barely tolerated at best those of his own blood and name. He would very much have preferred as a nurse bluff Jack Prodgers, to Blanche and Lucy. With Prodgers he had topics and interests in common; the minds of the two captains ran nearly in identical grooves; whereas his sisters did not fathom his nature or partake his tastes. So dreary was the existence to which this once brilliant cavalry officer was now condemned, that he had actually come to look forward with a sort of languid excitement to the professional visits of little Dr Aulfus from Pebworth, whose gig, to the great disgust of Mr Lancetter, the High Tor surgeon, was daily to be seen traversing the carriage-drive of Carbery Chase. With his father, Jasper’s dealings were coldly decorous, no fondness and no trust existing on either side. Sir Sykes had announced to Jasper that his debts—of which the baronet, through a chance interview with Mr Wilkins the attorney from London, had been made aware—had been paid in full. ‘I must ask you, Jasper,’ Sir Sykes had said, ‘for two assurances: one to the effect that no more secret liabilities exist to start up at unexpected moments; and the other, that you will never again ride a steeplechase.’ ‘For my own sake, sir, I’ll promise you that last willingly enough,’ said Jasper, with a sickly smile. ‘I didn’t use to mind that kind of thing; but I suppose I am not so young in constitution as I was, and don’t come up to time so readily. And as for more snakes in the grass, such as those which that impudent cur Wilkins wheedled me into signing, for his own benefit and that of his worthy allies, I give you my word there’s not one. Some fresh tailor or liveryman may send a bill in one day. A gentleman can’t always be quite sure as to how many new coats and hired broughams may be totted up against him by those harpies at the West End; but that is all. I should have won a hatful of money the other day if anybody but Hanger had been on The Smasher’s back, when that savage brute rushed at the wall; but I don’t owe any, except a hundred and fifty which Prodgers lent me, and every farthing of which I paid to the bookmakers before the race, in hope of receiving it back with a tidy sum to boot.’ Sir Sykes had forthwith inclosed a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds to Captain Prodgers, with a very frigid acknowledgment of the accommodation offered to his son. ‘I could wish that you had other friends, other pursuits too,’ he said coldly to Jasper. ‘However, I will not lecture. You are of an age to select your own associates.’ Captain Denzil then, being on terms of chilling civility with his father, and an uncongenial companion for his sisters, yielded himself the more readily to the singular fascination which Ruth Willis could, when she chose, exert. Sir Sykes’s ward had a remarkable power of pleasing when it suited her to please. She had at the first conciliated the servants at Carbery—no slight feat, considering the dull weight of stolid prejudice which she had to encounter—and had won the regard of the baronet’s two daughters. Then Lucy and Blanche had felt the ardour of their early girlish friendship for the Indian orphan cool perceptibly, perhaps because the latter no longer gave herself the same pains to win their suffrages. And now she laid herself out to be agreeable to Jasper. Nothing could be more natural or befitting than that a young lady, under deep obligations to the master of the house, should shew her gratitude by doing little acts of kindness to her guardian’s son when a prisoner; and without any apparent effort or design, Ruth seemed to appropriate the invalid ‘I don’t half like her. There are times when I could almost say, I hate her!’ thought Jasper to himself once and again; ‘but she’s clever, and has something about her which I don’t understand, for she never bores a fellow.’ It was a burning day in early August. The windows of the White Room were open, and the heavy hum of the bees, as they loaded themselves with the plunder of the blossoms that clustered so thickly without, had in itself a drowsy potency. Jasper, overcome by heat and lassitude, had fallen asleep among his cushions, and Ruth Willis, who had been reading to him, laid down the paper and slipped softly from the room, closing the door behind her. She met no one, either on her way to her own chamber or as, having donned her garden hat and jacket, she descended the stairs. It was her practice on most fine days to leave the house for a solitary ramble either in the park or among the woods that sloped down to the river. It was Ruth’s custom, when thus she sallied forth alone, to take with her a book, which she could read when seated on some granite boulder against which the swift stream chafed in vain, or amidst the gnarled roots of the ancient trees in the Chase. Nor did she, like the majority of young ladies, consider nothing worth her study save the contents of the last green box of novels from a London circulating library, preferring often the perusal of the quaint pretty old books that are usually allowed to sleep unmolested on their shelves, here the verses of a forgotten poet, there perhaps some idyl unsurpassed in its simple sweetness of thought and diction. With works of this description, well chosen once but now voted obsolete, the library at Carbery Chase was richly stored; and Sir Sykes had willingly given to his ward the permission which she asked, to have free access to its treasures. He himself spent most of his time while within doors in this same library, and there Ruth fully expected to find him, when she entered it, accoutred for her walk. She had in her hand a tiny tome, bound in tawny leather, and with a faded coat of arms, on which might still be deciphered the De Vere wyverns stamped upon the cover. To replace this and to select another volume, she should have to pass Sir Sykes’s writing-table, in front of the great stained glass window; but he would merely look up with a nod and smile as the small slender form of his ward flitted by. Sir Sykes, however, contrary to his habit at that hour, was not in the library. He must but recently have quitted it, however, for the ink in the pen that he had laid aside was yet wet, and the note which he had been engaged in writing was unfinished. On a desk which occupied the right-hand corner of the writing-table, a large old desk, the queer inlaid-work of which, in ivory and tortoise-shell, had probably been that of some Chinese or Hindu mechanic, lay an open letter, the bluish paper and formal penmanship of which suggested the idea of business. Now, it may seem trite to say that a regard for the sanctity of another person’s correspondence is not merely innate in every honourable mind, but so strongly inculcated upon us by education and example, that there are many who are capable of actual crime, yet who would be degraded in their own esteem by any prying into what was meant to meet no eyes but those of the legitimate recipient. Yet Ruth Willis, the instant that she perceived herself to be alone in the room, unhesitatingly drew near to the table and took a brief survey of what lay upon it. As she caught a glimpse of the letter, her very breathing seemed to stop, and a strange glittering light came into her large eyes, and a crimson flush mantled in her pale cheek. ‘I must have it!’ she exclaimed passionately. ‘At any risk I must know all, must realise the extent of the danger, and whence it threatens. There is not a moment to lose!’ Quick as thought the girl snatched up the letter from the desk on which it lay, and darted towards the French window nearest to the now empty fire-place. The window stood open. As she neared it, she heard a man’s tread in the passage, a man’s hand upon the door of the library. To avoid detection, her only chance was in her own promptitude and coolness. She had but just time to pass through the opening and to conceal herself among the rose-trees and flowering shrubs, before Sir Sykes entered the room that she had so lately left. She thrust the letter into her pocket and cowered down close to the wall, terror in her eyes and quick-moving lips, for she knew but too well that in such a case as this no social subterfuge, no fair seeming excuse could avail her. From her lair among the fragrant bushes Ruth could see the baronet tossing over the papers that lay neatly arranged on his table, then hurrying to and fro in evident excitement. That he was seeking for the missing letter was clear. ‘Sooner or later,’ she murmured to herself, ‘he must remember the window, and should he but see me, all is lost. In such a plight, boldness is safest.’ With a stealthy swiftness which had something feline in it, Ruth Willis made her way past shrubs and sheltering trees and black hedges of aged yew, trimmed, for generations past, by the gardener’s shears. There were men at work among the lawns and flower-beds, men at work too among the hothouses and conservatories. It would not be well, should suspicion be rife and inquiry active, that these men should have seen her. There was one place, however, where the trees of the garden overhung the fence dividing it from the park, and here there was a wicket, seldom used. To reach it she had to traverse one short stretch of greensward exposed to the observation of the under-gardeners at their work. Watching for a favourable moment, Ruth glided across the dangerous piece of open ground, unseen by those who were busy at that No more peaceful and few prettier spots could easily have been found than that which Ruth now sought, a place where the swift stream, rushing down from its birthplace among the Dartmoor heights to end its short career in the blue sea—of which, between the interlacing boughs, a view could here and there be obtained—brawled among the red rocks that half choked up the deep and narrow ravine. A welcome coolness seemed to arise from where the spray of the pellucid water was sprinkled over boulders worn smooth by time; and clefts where the delicate lady-fern and many another dainty frond grew thickly. But Ruth Willis for once was blind to the beauty of the scene, deaf to the silvery music of the stream among the pebbles or to the carol of the birds. With dilated eyes and lips compressed, but with trembling fingers, she drew forth the stolen letter, and beneath the shadow of the overhanging boughs, eagerly, almost fiercely, read and re-read the words that it contained. |