The other three became profoundly thoughtful. To each, the solicitor’s letter had its special message, though to one only was that message clearly intelligible. Rodney was puzzled and deeply suspicious. To him the letter had read like that of a man washing his hands of a disagreeable responsibility. The curious reticence as to the nature of the enclosures and the reference to the private safe sounded ominous. He knew little of Purcell—he had been a friend of the Haygarths—and had no great opinion of him. Purcell was a financier, and financiers sometimes did queer things. At any rate, Penfield’s excessive caution suggested something fishy—possibly something illicit. In fact, to speak colloquially, Rodney smelt a rat.
Margaret also was puzzled and suspicious, but, woman-like, she allowed her suspicions to take a more special form. She, too, smelt a rat, but it was a feminine rat. The lawyer’s silence as to the contents of that mysterious envelope seemed to admit of no other interpretation. It was so pointed. Of course he could not tell her, though he was an old friend and her trustee; so he had said nothing.
She reflected on the matter with lukewarm displeasure. Her relations with her husband were not such as to admit of jealousy in the ordinary sense; but still she was married to him, and any affair on his part with another woman would be very disagreeable and humiliating to her. It might lead to a scandal, too, and from that her ingrained delicacy revolted.
Varney, meanwhile, sat with his head thrown back, wrapped in thought of a more dreamy quality. He knew all about the letter and his mind was occupying itself with speculation as to its effects. Rodney’s view of it he gauged pretty accurately; but what did she think of it? Was she anxious, worried at the prospect of some unpleasant disclosure? He hoped not. At any rate, it could not be helped. And she was free, if she only knew it.
He had smoked out his cigarette and now, as he abstractedly filled his pipe, his eye insensibly sought the spot where the diamond and ruby flashed out alternately from the bosom of the night. A cloud had crept over the moon and the transitory golden and crimson gleam shone out bright and clear amidst the encompassing darkness—white—red, white—red, diamond—ruby; a message in a secret code from the tall, unseen sentinel on that solitary, wave-washed rock, bidding him be of good cheer, reminding him again and again of the freedom that was his—and hers—made everlastingly secure by a friendly iron sinker.
The cloud turned silvery at the edge and the moon sailed out into the open. Margaret looked up at it thoughtfully. “I wonder where Dan is to-night,” she said; and in the pause that followed a crimson spark from the dim horizon seemed to Varney to signal, “Here” and instantly fade into discreet darkness.
“Perhaps,” suggested Phillip, “he is having a moonlight sail on the Broad, or more probably, taking a whisky and soda with Bradford in the inn-parlour where the stuffed pike is. You remember that stuffed pike, Jack?”
His brother nodded. “Can I ever forget it, or the landlord’s interminable story of its capture? I wonder why people become so intolerably boresome about their fishing exploits. The angler is nearly as bad as the golfer.”
“Still,” said Varney, “he has more excuse. It is more of an achievement to catch a pike or a salmon than merely to whack a ball with a stick.”
“Isn’t that rather a crude description of the game?” asked Margaret. “It is to be hoped that Dr. Thorndyke is not an enthusiast.”