“Oh,” cried Lady Augusta, in a tone which seemed to say, “Is that all?” as if bad behaviour and Roland might have some affinity for each other. William Yorke bent his head nearer, and dropped his voice lower.
“In that mysterious affair of the bank-note, when Arthur Channing was accused—”
“Well? well?” she hastily repeated—for he had made a slight pause—and a tone of dread, as a shadow of evil, might be detected in her accents.
“It was Roland who took the note.”
Lady Augusta jumped up. She would not receive it. “It is not true; it cannot be true!” she reiterated. “How dare you so asperse him, William Yorke? Thoughtless as Roland is, he would not be guilty of dishonour.”
“He has written full particulars both to Arthur Channing and to Mr. Galloway,” said Mr. Yorke, calmly. “I have no doubt that that letter to you also relates to it. He confesses that to clear Arthur was a great motive in taking him from Helstonleigh.”
Lady Augusta seized the letter and tore it open. She was too agitated to read calmly, but she saw enough to convince her that Roland, and no other, had appropriated the money. This must have been the matter he had obscurely hinted at in one of his last conversations with her. The letter was concluded very much after Roland’s own fashion.
“Now, mother, if you care that anything in the shape of honour should ever shine round me again, you’ll go off straight to the college school, and set Tom Channing right with it and with the masters. And if you don’t, and I get drowned on my voyage, I’ll not say but my ghost will come again and haunt every one who has had to do with the injustice.”
Ghosts were not agreeable topics to Lady Augusta, and she gave a shriek at the bare thought. But that was as nothing, compared with her anger. Honourable in the main—hot, hasty, impulsive, losing all judgment, all self-control when these fits of excitement came upon her—it is more than probable that her own course would have been to fly to the college school, unprompted by Roland. A sense of justice was strong within her; and in setting Tom right, she would not spare Roland, her own son though he was.
Before William Yorke knew what she was about, she had flown upstairs, and was down again with her things on. Before he could catch her up, she was across the Boundaries, entering the cloisters, and knocking at the door of the college school.