“You must,” she said, with peremptoriness, which betrayed the importance she attached to the apparently small matter.
Sir Robert was not at all pleased at his wife’s question, recalling an episode in his life which he would fain have forgotten.
“He put his hand through a window,” he said briefly, “and the mark shows still, as I dare say you have noticed, Miss Pembury.”
Rhoda said “Yes” under her breath, but there was still upon her face a dazed look of incredulity which irritated Lady Sarah.
The girl took the first opportunity of escaping upstairs, but she was in no state to amuse little Caryl, so she hastened to her own room, locked herself in, and sitting down, breathless and trembling, on a chair near the window, gave herself up to her distress, her doubts and her fears.
What did it mean? What could it mean but one thing?
There stood out clearly in her recollection the remembrance of the terrible night of her escape from the Mill-house, and the sight of the moonlight streaming on the hand with the red wound across it. That the hand she had seen that night was the hand of Jack Rotherfield she was quite sure. Her impression of the red mark she had seen that night was so strong, that nothing would have shaken her in this conviction. True, it was difficult to understand the story she had just heard, and wholly impossible to believe that Sir Robert was not telling the truth when he said he had seen the hand gashed by the broken window.
But Rhoda, who mistrusted Lady Sarah as strongly as she trusted her husband, thought that the clever little lady, who had certainly succeeded in throwing dust in Sir Robert’s eyes before her marriage, was quite capable of having deceived him by a trick. How it was managed the girl could not quite understand; but she felt sure that Jack, having been concerned in the death of Langford, was the man with the wounded hand whom she saw on his way upstairs; and she believed that the wound had been received in a struggle with the poor butler, and that, in order to avoid bringing suspicion upon himself, the young man had been artful enough to conceal his injury until the following day, when, taking an opportunity when there were several people present, he had thrust his wounded hand through the window as if by accident, and led those present to believe that the cut was freshly made.
Some such trick as this Rhoda felt sure had been played, but it sickened her to think that, in that case, Lady Sarah must have been a party to the stratagem, by which Jack shielded himself and deceived Sir Robert at the same time.
What was the whole truth concerning that night? Rhoda wondered.