The two men stood gazing at each other. The old butler, flushed with excitement, his shaky old figure erecting itself, expanding, taking a commanding aspect; the young lord, pale, with anxious puckers about his eyes, shrinking backward into himself, deprecating, as if in old Rolls he saw a judge ready to condemn him. "We are all—in the same box," he faltered. "He was mad; he would have it: first, Erskine; if it didn't happen with Erskine, it was his good luck. Then there's you, and me——" Rintoul never took his eyes from those of Rolls, on whose decision his fate seemed to hang. He was too much confused to know very well what he was saying. The very event itself, which he had scarcely been able to forget since it happened, began to be jumbled up in his mind. Rolls—somehow Rolls must have had to do with it too. It was not he only that had seized the bridle,—that had heard the horrible scramble of the hoofs, and the dull crash and moan. He seemed to hear all that again as he stood drawing back before John Erskine's servant. Erskine had been in it. It might just as well have happened to Erskine; and it seemed to him, in his giddy bewilderment, that it had happened again also to Rolls. But Rolls had kept his counsel, while he had betrayed himself. All the alarms which he had gone through on the morning of the examination came over him again. Well! perhaps she would be satisfied now.
"Then it was none of my business," said Rolls. The old man felt as if he had fallen from a great height. He was stunned and silenced for the moment. He sat down upon his bed vacantly, forgetting all the punctilios in which his life had been formed. "Then the young master thinks it's me," he added slowly, "and divines nothing, nothing! and instead of the truth, will say till himself, 'That auld brute, Rolls, to save his auld bones, keepit me in prison four days.'" The consternation with which he dropped forth sentence after sentence from his mouth, supporting his head in his hands, and looking out from the curve of his palms with horror-stricken eyes into the air, not so much as noticing his alarmed and anxious companion, was wonderful. Then after a long pause, Rolls, looking up briskly, with a light of indignation in his face, exclaimed, "And a' the time it was you, my lad, that did it?—I'm meaning," Rolls added with fine emphasis, "my lord! and never steppit in like a gentleman to say, 'It's me—set free that innocent man'——"
"Rolls, look here!" cried Rintoul, with passion—"look here! don't think so badly till you know. I meant to do it. I went there that morning fully prepared. You can ask her, and she will tell you. When somebody said, 'The man's here'—Jove! I stepped out; I was quite ready. And then——you might have doubled me up with a touch;—you might have knocked me down with a feather—when I saw it was you. What could I do? The words were taken out of my mouth. Which of us would they have believed? Most likely they would have thought we were both in a conspiracy to save Erskine, and that he was the guilty one after all."
It was not a very close attention which Rolls gave to this impassioned statement. He was more occupied, as was natural, with its effect upon his own position. "I was just an auld eediot," he said to himself—"just a fool, as I've been all my born days. And what will Bauby say? And Dalrulzian, he'll think I was in earnest, and that it was just me! Lord be about us, to think a man should come to my age, and be just as great a fool! Him do it! No; if I had just ever thought upon the subjik; if I hadna been an eediot, and an ill-thinking, suspicious, bad-minded——Lord! me to have been in the Dalrulzian family this thirty years, and kenned them to the backbone, and made such a mistake at the end——" He paused for a long time upon this, and then added, in a shrill tone of emotion, shame, and distress, "And now he will think a' the time that it was really me!"
Rintoul felt himself sink into the background with the strangest feelings. When a man has wound himself up to make an acknowledgment of wrong, whatever it is, even of much less importance than this, he expects to gain a certain credit for his performance. Had it been done in the Town House at Dunearn, the news would have run through the country and thrilled every bosom. When he considered the passionate anxiety with which Nora had awaited his explanation on that wonderful day, and the ferment caused by Rolls's substitution of himself for his master, it seemed strange indeed that this old fellow should receive the confession of a person so much his superior, and one which might deliver him from all the consequences of his rashness, with such curious unconcern. He stood before the old butler like a boy before his schoolmaster, as much irritated by the carelessness with which he was treated as frightened for the certain punishment. And yet it was his only policy to ignore all that was disrespectful, and to conciliate Rolls. He waited, therefore, though with his blood boiling, through the sort of colloquy which Rolls thus held with himself, not interrupting, wondering, and yet saying to himself there could be no doubt what the next step must be.
"I am no' showing ye proper respect, my lord," said Rolls at last; "but when things is a' out of the ordinar like this, it canna be wondered at if a man forgets his mainners. It's terrible strange all that's happened. I canna well give an account o't to myself. That I should been such an eediot, and you——maybe no' so keen about your honour as your lordship's friends might desire." Here he made a pause, as sometimes a schoolmaster will do, to see his victim writhe and tempt him to rebellion. But Rintoul was cowed, and made no reply.
"And ye have much to answer for, my lord," Rolls continued, "on my account, though ye maybe never thought me worth a thought. Ye've led me to take a step that it will be hard to win over—that has now no justification and little excuse. For my part, I canna see my way out of it, one way or another," he added, with a sigh; "for you'll allow that it's but little claim you, or the like of you, for all your lordship, have upon me."
"I have no claim," said Rintoul, hastily; and then he added, in a whisper of intense anxiety, "What are you going to do?"
Rolls rose up from his bed to answer this question. He went to the high window with its iron railings across the light, from which he could just see the few houses that surrounded the gates, and the sky, above them. He gave a sigh, in which there was great pathos and self-commiseration, and then he said, with a tone of bewilderment and despair, though his phraseology was not, perhaps, dignified,—"I'm in a hobble that I cannot see how to get out of. A man cannot, for his ain credit, say one thing one afternoon and another the next day."
"Rolls," said Rintoul, with new hope, coming a little closer, "we are not rich: but if I could offer you anything,—make it up to you, anyhow——"