‘No, I thought it better not to trouble her. They are going to-morrow. Mary had persuaded her—why, I don’t know—to return a day or two sooner than they had intended.’
‘I hope Brotherton will not succeed in prejudicing them against me.’
‘I wish that were possible,’ he answered. ‘But the time for prejudice is long gone by.’
I could not believe this to be the case in respect of Mary; for I could not but think her favourably inclined to me.
‘Still,’ I said, ‘I should not like their bad opinion of me to be enlarged as well as strengthened by the belief that I had attempted to steal Sir Giles’s property. You must stand my friend there, Charley.’
‘Then you do doubt me, Wilfrid?’
‘Not a bit, you foolish fellow.’
‘You know, I can’t enter that house again, and I don’t care about writing to my mother, for my father is sure to see it; but I will follow my mother and Mary the moment they are out of the grounds to-morrow, and soon see whether they’ve got the story by the right end.’
The evening passed with me in alternate fits of fierce indignation and profound depression, for, while I was clear to my own conscience in regard of my enemies, I had yet thrown myself bound at their feet by my foolish lie; and I all but made up my mind to leave the country, and only return after having achieved such a position—of what sort I had no more idea than the school-boy before he sets himself to build a new castle in the air—as would buttress any assertion of the facts I might see fit to make in after-years.
When we had parted for the night, my brains began to go about, and the centre of their gyrations was not Mary now, but Clara. What could have induced her to play me false? All my vanity, of which I had enough, was insufficient to persuade me that it could be out of revenge for the gradual diminution of my attentions to her. She had seen me pay none to Mary, I thought, unless she had caught a glimpse from the next room of the little passage of the ring, and that I did not believe. Neither did I believe she had ever cared enough about me to be jealous of whatever attentions I might pay to another. But in all my conjectures, I had to confess myself utterly foiled. I could imagine no motive. Two possibilities alone, both equally improbable, suggested themselves—the one, that she did it for pure love of mischief, which, false as she was to me, I could not believe; the other, which likewise I rejected, that she wanted to ingratiate herself with Brotherton. I had still, however, scarcely a doubt that she had laid the sword on my bed. Trying to imagine a connection between this possible action and Mary’s mistake, I built up a conjectural form of conjectural facts to this effect—that Mary had seen her go into my room, had taken it for the room she was to share with her, and had followed her either at once—in which case I supposed Clara to have gone out by the stair to the roof to avoid being seen—or afterwards, from some accident, without a light in her hand. But I do not care to set down more of my speculations, for none concerning this either were satisfactory to myself, and I remain almost as much in the dark to this day. In any case the fear remained that Clara must be ever on the borders of the discovery of Mary’s secret, if indeed she did not know it already, which was a dreadful thought—more especially as I could place no confidence in her. I was glad to think, however, that they were to be parted so soon, and I had little fear of any correspondence between them.