Hugh thought he saw a glimmer through the storm-cloud. Jessica was his anchor to windward. What hurt him, would hurt her. He would pull through!
"Well," he said, "it's done, and there's no good making such a row about it. She's my wife and she'll stand by me, if nobody else does!"
No one had ever seen such a look on David Stires' face as came to it now—a sudden blaze of fury and righteous scorn, that burned it like a brand.
"You impudent blackguard! You drag my name in the gutter and then try to trade on my self-respect and Jessica's affection. You thought you would take it up yourself—and I would be none the wiser! And if I did find it out, you counted on my love for the poor deluded girl you have married, to make me condone your criminality—to perjure myself—to admit the signature and shield you from the consequences. You imagine because you are my son, that you can do this thing and all still go on as before! Do you suppose I don't consider Jessica? Do you think because you have fooled and cheated her—and me—and married her, that I will give her now to a caught thief—a common jailbird?"
Hugh started. A sickly pallor came to his sallow cheek. That salient chin, that mouth close-gripped—those words, vengeful, vindictive, the utterance of a wrath so mighty in the feeble frame as to seem almost uncouth—smote him with a mastering terror.
A jailbird! That was what his father called him! Did he mean to give him up, then? To have him arrested—tried—put in prison? When he had canvassed the risks of discovery, he had imagined a scene, bitter anger—perhaps even disinheritance. His marriage to Jessica, he had reckoned, would cover that extremity. But he had never thought of something worse. Now, for the first time, he saw himself in the grip of that impersonal thing known as the law—handcuffs on his wrists, riding through the streets in the "Black-Maria"—standing at the dock an outcast, gazed at with contempt by all the town—at length sitting in a cell somewhere, no more pleasures or gaming, or fine linen, but dressed in convict's dress, loose, ill-shapen, hanging on him like bags, with broad black-and-white stripes. He had been through the penetentiary once. He remembered the sullen, stolid faces, the rough, hobnailed shoes, the cropped heads! His mind turned from the picture with fear and loathing.
In the thoughts that were darting through Hugh's mind, there was none now of regret or of pity for Jessica. His fear was the fear of the trapped spoiler, who discerns capture and its consequent penalties in the patrolling bull's-eye flashed upon him. He studied his father with hunted, calculating eyes, as the old man turned to Harry Sanderson.
"Sanderson," said David Stires, once more in his even, deadly voice, "Jessica is waiting in the room above this. She will not understand the delay. Will you go to her? Make some excuse—any you can think of—till I come."
Harry nodded and left the room, shutting the door carefully behind him, carrying with him the cowering helpless look with which Hugh saw himself left alone with his implacable judge. What to say to her? How to say it?
As he passed the hall, the haste of demolition had already begun. Florists' assistants were carrying the plants from the east room, and through the open door a man was rolling up the red carpet. The cluttered emptiness struck him with a sense of fateful symbolism—as though it shadowed forth the shattering of Jessica's ordered dream of happiness. He mounted the stair as if a pack swung from his shoulders. He paused a moment at the door, then knocked, turned the knob, and entered.