CHAPTER XVI.—LIFTS A CORNER OF THE MASK.

Ruth Willis bending forward, her gloved fingers clasped upon the open letter that she held, and her pale face on fire, as it were, with eager passion, seemed sadly out of tune with the still beauty of that silvan spot, where first the crystal Start, freed from its moorland cradle, gushed forth as a real river, although of puny dimensions, bearing its watery tribute to the sea. Above, arched the feathery larch, the slender hazel, and the tapering ash. Branches of the mountain-ash projected like the stone frettings of some medieval belfrey. The clear sweet warble of mavis and merle came throbbing softly to the ear from the dim green heart of the summer woodlands. The letter which she had purloined—the theft may have been prompted by the impulse of the moment, and it is charitable to hope that such deeds were new to her—was now hers, to peruse at her leisure. She read it then, did Ruth Willis, again and again, slowly and deliberately, scanning and weighing every word, as though she had been a student of the cuneiform character, puzzling out Babylonian tablets by the aid of vague and tentative keys to the long-dead language of which they bore the impress.

The letter ran thus:

Such was the letter which Sir Sykes Denzil had unguardedly left upon his library table; and it may be admitted that a more impudent epistle has rarely been addressed to a gentleman of equal station to that of the proprietor of Carbery. It was difficult at first sight to believe that a demand so audacious in itself, and so offensively urged, could be intended as anything else than a sorry jest. Yet that the writer was quite in earnest, nay more, that he felt himself assured of not craving in vain for the coveted boon, was palpable to so attentive a critic as was Ruth Willis.

‘If any man had dared to write thus to me,’ she said, slowly hissing out the words between her half-shut teeth, ‘and I had filled the position held by yonder pompous dolt, I would have—ay, given him cause to repent it.’

And the lurid light that glimmered in her dark eyes, and the hardening of her shrewd pale face until it seemed as though of chiselled marble rather than sentient flesh, and the swift and sudden gesture with which she raised and shook her clenched hand, as though it held a dagger—these signs were the revelation of a fierce and unscrupulous nature, kept down by the pressure of circumstances, but ready at pinch of need to flame forth, as the hot lava bubbles and seethes beneath the crust of cold ashes in which the vines of the Italian peasant have struck root.

Again and with deliberate care did the baronet’s ward read the letter through. Then she refolded it and replaced it in her pocket, and then consulted her watch. Only a few minutes had as yet elapsed since her escape—for it was little else—from the mansion.

‘I must not go back as yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘By this time the whole household will be astir like a hive of angry bees, if, as is all but certain, Sir Sykes has not had self-control enough to keep his own counsel as to the loss he has sustained. He should have burned this choice epistle the moment he had made himself master of its purport; but he is of that order of men who treasure up the very proofs that sooner or later overwhelm them with a weight of silent evidence. Was it not the learned forger, silver-tongued, plausible Dr Dodd, who was left alone with the fatal document that brought him to the gallows, alone in a room where a brisk fire was blazing? One flash of mother-wit, one motion of the hand, and nothing but a heap of tinder would have remained to bear witness of the fraud. But no! The doomed wretch waited passive for the hangman’s fingers to adjust the hempen noose about his miserable neck. So would not I!’

Again the girl glanced impatiently at her watch.

‘How Time lags!’ she exclaimed petulantly, as she marked the slow crawling of the thin black minute-hand around the dial; ‘heeding nothing, influenced by nothing, inexorable in his measured pace. It is a pain to such as I am to be forced to loiter here inactive, when there is a foe to cope with, a peril to avert.’

She said no more, but paced restlessly to and fro along the river-bank, beneath the arching boughs, with somewhat of the air and tread of a caged panther wearing away the sullen hours of captivity behind the restraining bars. Her very step had in it somewhat of the litheness which we notice in the movements of the savage, and the working of her keen features told how deeply her busy brain was pondering on the events of the day. Ruth’s face, when once it was withdrawn from the observation of others, was a singularly expressive one. When she had left the room wherein Jasper had fallen asleep among his pillows, the countenance of Sir Sykes’s ward had been eloquent with weariness and contempt. Now it told of resentment restrained, but only in part restrained, by a caution that was rather of habit than of instinct.

‘An hour more! yet an hour,’ said the girl at length, again looking at her watch, and then she stood leaning against the tough stem of a quivering mountain-ash that almost overhung the brawling torrent. She still kept in her left hand the book which she had had with her when entering the library at Carbery; but even had not the volume been one which she had lately perused, she was in no mood for reading. Manifestly her mind was shaping out some desperate resolution.

‘I will do it!’ she said at last, lifting her head with a defiant glitter in her lustrous eyes; ‘before I sleep it shall be written. I know and gauge beforehand the risk of such a course; know too that I am loosening my own grasp on the helm if I invite another to aid me. But that is better than to be foiled at the outset, and after weeks spent in this self-schooling, and in the sickening task of cajoling a shallow, knavish egotist, such as the future Sir Jasper will be until his dying day. Let those look to it who for their own schemes venture to cross my path!’

The hour, however slowly it might appear to pass in the estimation of one whose nerves were on fire with excitement, nevertheless did wear itself out, and there was an end of waiting. With tranquil step and unruffled brow, Sir Sykes’s ward returned to her guardian’s house, to find, as she had anticipated, confusion and dismay prevalent there; the servants sullen or clamorous, the baronet’s daughters distressed, and Sir Sykes himself in a state of feverish suspicion, which almost made him forget the traditions of good-breeding.

‘Do you, Miss Willis, know anything of this?’ he asked half rudely, the instant that he caught sight of his ward.

‘I—know of what?’ returned Ruth innocently, as she lifted her eyes, with a startled look, to his.

‘You forget, papa,’ said Lucy Denzil, almost indignantly, ‘that Ruth has heard of nothing. She was away from the house all the time.’

‘Yes, yes; I beg pardon of course,’ exclaimed the baronet reddening, but still fixing his eyes searchingly on the placid face of his ward.

The Indian orphan bore his scrutiny with an admirable composure. Her lower lip trembled a little, as was natural, when she turned towards Lucy. ‘Pray do tell me,’ she said, ‘what has happened? for it really does seem as though I had been unfortunate enough to make Sir Sykes angry with me.’

‘Papa has lost a letter—a letter of importance,’ said Lucy, blushing as she spoke; ‘and as the servants deny all knowledge of it, and its loss’——

‘Say theft, not loss!’ interrupted the baronet with unwonted harshness. ‘I make no doubt that the letter was stolen from my desk in the library, on which I had left it for but some two minutes, while I went to speak with my son in the White Room. The French window nearest to the fireplace was open, giving an easy means of entry, as of egress, for the purloiner of this letter, who must have been on the watch for an opportunity of surprising my secrets—that is to say,’ stammered Sir Sykes, who felt the imprudence of these last words—‘of basely prying into my private correspondence.’

‘Are you quite, quite sure, papa dear,’ pleaded Blanche, ‘that you left the letter there, instead of bestowing it in some safe place for safe keeping, which may afterwards have escaped your memory, and will presently be recollected? Such things have happened often and often, even to the most methodical, and’——

‘There, there, my girl!’ broke in the baronet peevishly. ‘Have I not heard that argument repeated ad nauseam by every man and maid that I have questioned; and is it not the stock answer to all inquiries after missing trinkets or valuables unaccounted for? I grant that I can prove nothing. If I could’——

He did not complete the sentence, but crushing down the wrath that almost choked his voice, turned away. Nothing, at this unpleasant conjuncture, could be in better taste, or more simple, than Ruth’s demeanour. She began to cry. It was the first time since the day of her arrival that any one at Carbery had seen her in tears, and now both Blanche and Lucy came kindly to kiss her and console her with whispered entreaties to excuse Sir Sykes for an indiscriminate anger which there was much to palliate. But Ruth soon dried her eyes, and going up to her guardian laid her hand upon his arm and looked up timidly in his face.

‘Let me be useful,’ she said. ‘Let me help in hunting high and low for this letter; pray, pray do, dear Sir Sykes, you who have been so very, very kind to me since I have been here.’

Nothing could be prettier. And Sir Sykes, though in his present irritable condition he actually shuddered at her light touch upon his arm, as though he had been in contact with a snake, was compelled to say a word or two of apology.

‘I am greatly annoyed,’ he said awkwardly, ‘and have been unjust and inhospitable, I fear, and must ask you to forget my rudeness. I am best alone.’

Sir Sykes therefore withdrew, and for some time was seen no more; while Jasper, who had been an amused spectator of the turmoil, sauntered back to the White Room, muttering as he went: ‘Lucky, rather, that this child had so perfect an alibi, or the governor would have tried, convicted, and sentenced his only son and heir as the light-fingered captor of his lost property. A new sensation, it strikes me, that of injured innocence. And talking of that—how nicely Miss Ruth, be she who she may, played her part—not one bit overdone—it was perfect! We breathe here an atmosphere of mystery; but it will be strange if, when I am all right again, I do not make a push to get at the governor’s secret, whatever it may be.’

The letter, it need hardly be said, remained undiscovered by the volunteer searchers who undertook the quest of it; but gradually the indignant household became more calm, and the general voice confirmed the comfortable opinion, that Sir Sykes had unwittingly locked up the missing document in some desk or drawer, whence it would one day be satisfactorily extracted.