It was not difficult to believe that Lord Robert had as ardently desired her to wife five years ago as he now desired to be rid of her. Then he obeyed the insistent spur of passion; now he obeyed the remorseless spur of ambition. In reality, then as now, his beacon-light was love of self.
Seeing her so frail and trusting, trembling in her anxious impatience to hear the news of her lord which he had promised her, Sir Richard may have felt some pang of pity. But, like my lord, he was of those whose love of self suffers the rivalry of no weak emotion.
“Your news, Sir Richard,” she besought him, her dove-like glance upon his florid face—less florid now than was its wont.
He leaned against the table, his back to the window. “Why, it is briefly this,” said he. “My lord...” And then he checked, and fell into a listening attitude.
“What was that? Did you hear anything, my lady?”
“No. What is it?” Her face betrayed alarm, her anxiety mounting under so much mystery.
“Sh! Stay you here,” he enjoined. “If we are spied upon...” He left the sentence there. Already he was moving quickly, stealthily, towards the door. He paused before opening it. “Stay where you are, my lady,” he enjoined again, so gravely that she could have no thought of disobeying him. “I will return at once.”
He stepped out, closed the door, and crossed to the stairs. There he stopped. From his pouch he had drawn a fine length of whipcord, attached at one end to a tiny bodkin of needle sharpness. That bodkin he drove into the edge of one of the panels of the wainscot, in line with the topmost step; drawing the cord taut at a height of a foot or so above this step, he made fast its other end to the newel-post at the stair-head. He had so rehearsed the thing in his mind that the performance of it occupied but a few seconds. Such dim light of that autumn afternoon as reached the spot would leave that fine cord invisible.
Sir Richard went back to her ladyship. She had not moved in his absence, so brief as scarcely to have left her time in which to resolve upon disobeying his injunction.
“We move in secret like conspirators,” said he, “and so we are easily affrighted.. I should have known it could be none but my lord himself... here?”