“It may be so, but before I go on I want you clearly to understand that it is you, not I, who insist on bringing the roof down upon us.”
Charlotte’s only reply was to sit very upright, with her sarcastic mouth drawn in a rigid line. She could not understand in the least what her brother was driving at, but in his manner was a new, a strange intensity which somehow gave her a feeling of profound discomfort.
“You don’t realize what you are doing,” he said. “Still you are not to blame for that. But the time has come to pull aside the curtain, and to let you know what we all owe a woman who has been cruelly maligned.”
Charlotte stiffened perceptibly at these words. After all, the case was no more and no less than for more than twenty years she had known it to be. Still open confession was good for the soul! It was a sordid intrigue, an intrigue of a nature which simply made her loathe the man opposite. How dare he—and with a servant in his own house! If looks could have slain, his Grace would have been spared the necessity to continue a very irksome narrative.
“Make provision for her and send her away.” The sharp voice was like the crack of a gun.
The Duke raised himself slowly and painfully on his elbows. “Hold your tongue,” he said. And his eyes struck at her. “Be good enough to forgo all comment until you have heard the whole story.”
It was trying Charlotte highly, but she set herself determinedly to listen.
“Do you remember when she first came here, as second maid to poor Rachel, a fine, upstanding, gray-eyed Scots girl, one of the most beautiful creatures you ever saw? Do you remember her devotion? No, I see you have forgotten.” He closed his eyes for an instant, while the woman opposite kept hers fixed steadily upon him. “Well, I don’t excuse myself. But Rachel and I were never happy; the plain truth is we ought not to have married. It was a family arrangement and it recoiled upon us. The Paringtons are an effete lot and the same can be said of us Dinnefords. Nature asked for something else.”
Now that he had unlocked the doors of memory a growing emotion became too much for the Duke, and for a moment he could not go on. His sister, in the meantime, continued to hold him with pitiless eyes.
“One might say,” he went on, “that it was the call of the blood. I remember her first as the factor’s daughter, a long-legged creature in a red tam-o’-shanter, running about the woods of Ardnaleuchan. You haven’t forgotten Donald Sanderson, the father?”