The innocent face was gone—the look, that almost seemed like imbecility in its unawakened ignorance. His features were distorted and quivering with fury, his eyes full of great hot tears of pain, which splashed upon that paper in his hand in round circles, making the boy’s passion wilder still with the shame that he had been made to cry like a girl! But these fierce drops were not the easy tears of a child. He flung the cheque upon the table with a laugh that was more painful still.
“Put it up in a frame,” he said, “in your hall, or in the bank, or where folk can see it best; and write on it, ‘Forged by Archie Rowland.’ And send your policeman out to take me, and bring me to trial, and get me condemned. You’re a rich, rich man, and maybe you will be able to do it: for there’s nobody will believe that you invented all that to ruin your son, your only son. Oh, what grand words to say! Or maybe it was her invention!” cried Archie, as a movement caught his ear, which drew his wild eyes to Evelyn. He stood staring at her for a moment in silence. “It would not be so unnatural if it were her invention,” he said.
There was a moment of awful silence—for great though the passion was in Rowland’s accusation, the fury of the unjustly accused was greater. It was a storm against which no lesser sentiment could stand. The slight untrained figure of the lad rose to strange might and force, no softness in it or pliancy. He stood fiercely at bay, like a wild animal, panting for breath. And the father made no reply. He sat staring, silenced by the response, which was a kind of fiercer echo of his own passion.
“You have nothing to say, it appears,” said Archie, with quick breathing, “and I will say nothing. I will go to the place I was brought up in. I will not run away. And then ye can send your warrant, or whatever you call it, to arrest me. I will bide the worst you can do. Not a step will I move till you send to take me. You will find me there night or day. Good-bye to ye,” he said abruptly. A momentary wavering, so slight that it was scarcely perceptible, moved him, one of those instantaneous impulses which sometimes change the whole character of life—a temptation he thought it—to cry “father! father,” to appeal against this unimaginable wrong. But he crushed it on the threshold of his mind, and turned to the door.
“Archie!” cried Evelyn in despair, rushing after him. “Archie! I believe every word you say.”
He took no notice of her, nor of the hand with which she grasped his sleeve, but pausing, looked round for a moment at his father, then he flung open the door: disdaining even to close it after him, and walked quickly away.
“James!—for God’s sake go after him, stop him. James! James! for the love of God——”
“Ye mean the devil!” said Rowland, quickly, “that put all that into his head.”
He rose up and took the cheque from the table, but, perceiving the stain of the tear, threw it down again, as if it had stung him. There are some things that flesh and blood cannot bear, and the great blot of moisture upon that guilty paper was one of them. It all but unmanned this angry father. “Put that thing away, lock it up, put it out of my sight,” he said, with a quivering in his throat.
He had no doubt of his son’s guilt. He had known other cases in which a fury of injured innocence had been the best way of meeting an accusation. And yet there was something in Archie’s passion which, while it roused his own, penetrated him with another strange contradictory feeling—was it almost approval, of the bearing of the boy? But not on so slight an argument as that was he shaken in his foregone conclusion. He walked up and down the room, curiously made into a sort of public, comfortless, unprotected place by the flinging open of the door, and presently began to speak, flinging broken sentences from him. The hall, with its decorations, the waxed and shining floor, with a broken flower, a fallen card, a scrap of ribbon, dropped upon it here and there, that air of the banquet hall deserted which is always so suggestive, formed the background to his moving figure. And even Evelyn, in her absorption in the wild tragic excitement of this domestic drama, did not think of the stealthy servants moving about, and the eager ears so intent upon picking up some indication of what the trouble might be.