“You think not?” smiled his father. “I do not now know you could have justified yourself if you had kept those papers back and it had been discovered. It would have looked like complicity with the Jacobites.”
Sir John lifted his head impatiently.
“Am I not the only man about the Court whose hands are clean from that charge?” he cried. “Complicity with the Jacobites! I know no man could dare accuse me.”
“And I know a hundred,” returned his father. “Arrogance is strangely blind—it stands on a hill and heeds not how the foundations are being sapped till it falls on its face in the mire. And nothing is more pitiable than fallen arrogance.”
“Sir—you speak as if I was a boy to be taught by your parables,” cried Sir John wrathfully. “I say that by this act of yours you have made me dishonor my word—” Then his angry thoughts flashed to what Delia knew and he turned to his father. “It may ruin my plans with the Macdonalds.”
“Better lose the Macdonalds than the Jacobites,” answered the Viscount calmly. “And who knows of your Highland schemes?”
Maddened and fuming, Sir John’s fury fixed itself on the unknown person who had betrayed him; had Delia known nothing of his scheme he would not have had to degrade himself by a bargain he was powerless to carry out.
“Yea, who knows?” he demanded. “I only knew myself this morning that the Macdonalds had taken the oath, and already I am betrayed—now, in the name of God, who is it?”
The Viscount was cool and sneering again.
“You are absolutely incoherent,” he remarked. “But if any one has betrayed your schemes it is, of course, your dutiful wife.”