“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.