‘I must not go back as yet,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘By this time the whole household will be astir like a hive of angry bees, if, as is all but certain, Sir Sykes has not had self-control enough to keep his own counsel as to the loss he has sustained. He should have burned this choice epistle the moment he had made himself master of its purport; but he is of that order of men who treasure up the very proofs that sooner or later overwhelm them with a weight of silent evidence. Was it not the learned forger, silver-tongued, plausible Dr Dodd, who was left alone with the fatal document that brought him to the gallows, alone in a room where a brisk fire was blazing? One flash of mother-wit, one motion of the hand, and nothing but a heap of tinder would have remained to bear witness of the fraud. But no! The doomed wretch waited passive for the hangman’s fingers to adjust the hempen noose about his miserable neck. So would not I!’
Again the girl glanced impatiently at her watch.
‘How Time lags!’ she exclaimed petulantly, as she marked the slow crawling of the thin black minute-hand around the dial; ‘heeding nothing, influenced by nothing, inexorable in his measured pace. It is a pain to such as I am to be forced to loiter here inactive, when there is a foe to cope with, a peril to avert.’
She said no more, but paced restlessly to and fro along the river-bank, beneath the arching boughs, with somewhat of the air and tread of a caged panther wearing away the sullen hours of captivity behind the restraining bars. Her very step had in it somewhat of the litheness which we notice in the movements of the savage, and the working of her keen features told how deeply her busy brain was pondering on the events of the day. Ruth’s face, when once it was withdrawn from the observation of others, was a singularly expressive one. When she had left the room wherein Jasper had fallen asleep among his pillows, the countenance of Sir Sykes’s ward had been eloquent with weariness and contempt. Now it told of resentment restrained, but only in part restrained, by a caution that was rather of habit than of instinct.
‘An hour more! yet an hour,’ said the girl at length, again looking at her watch, and then she stood leaning against the tough stem of a quivering mountain-ash that almost overhung the brawling torrent. She still kept in her left hand the book which she had had with her when entering the library at Carbery; but even had not the volume been one which she had lately perused, she was in no mood for reading. Manifestly her mind was shaping out some desperate resolution.
‘I will do it!’ she said at last, lifting her head with a defiant glitter in her lustrous eyes; ‘before I sleep it shall be written. I know and gauge beforehand the risk of such a course; know too that I am loosening my own grasp on the helm if I invite another to aid me. But that is better than to be foiled at the outset, and after weeks spent in this self-schooling, and in the sickening task of cajoling a shallow, knavish egotist, such as the future Sir Jasper will be until his dying day. Let those look to it who for their own schemes venture to cross my path!’
The hour, however slowly it might appear to pass in the estimation of one whose nerves were on fire with excitement, nevertheless did wear itself out, and there was an end of waiting. With tranquil step and unruffled brow, Sir Sykes’s ward returned to her guardian’s house, to find, as she had anticipated, confusion and dismay prevalent there; the servants sullen or clamorous, the baronet’s daughters distressed, and Sir Sykes himself in a state of feverish suspicion, which almost made him forget the traditions of good-breeding.
‘Do you, Miss Willis, know anything of this?’ he asked half rudely, the instant that he caught sight of his ward.
‘I—know of what?’ returned Ruth innocently, as she lifted her eyes, with a startled look, to his.
‘You forget, papa,’ said Lucy Denzil, almost indignantly, ‘that Ruth has heard of nothing. She was away from the house all the time.’