Part 23 (1/2)

”Frank!” cried Rachel, amazed at his persistence. ”Oh, don't! Let me implore you not to ask him anything more. Frank! do you mind leaving him now? Oh, you must, you must, really. Look at him!”

Sir William, white and exhausted, was leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. Rendel looked at her face of quivering anxiety as it bent over her father, then turned slowly and left the room.

CHAPTER XVII

Rendel came downstairs, hardly conscious of what he was doing, a wild conflict of emotion raging in his mind. He shut himself into his study, and tried to distinguish clearly the threads of motive and conduct that had become so hideously entangled. It sounds a simple thing, doubtless, as well as a praiseworthy one, to discover the doer of an evil deed, to convict him, to bring home to him what he has done, and to prove the innocence of any other who may be suspected. Such a course, when spoken of in general terms, gives a praiseworthy and sustaining sense of a duty accomplished towards society. But it is in reality a much more complicated operation than we are apt to think. The evildoer, unfortunately for our sense of righteousness in prosecuting him, is not always one who has unmixed evil instincts, and nearly every contingency of human conduct becomes, as we contemplate it, many-sided enough to be very confusing. And it was beginning to dawn upon Rendel that, although it may fulfil the ends of abstract justice that the guilty should be exposed and the innocent acquitted, such an act takes an ugly aspect when the eager pursuer is himself the innocent man who is to be vindicated, and the guilty one a weaker and defenceless person who is to be put in his place. ”And yet,” he said to himself bitterly, as he tried to think of it impartially, ”if it were a question of any one else's reputation and not of my own I should be bound to say who the guilty man was.” What was he to do? What could he do? He did not know how long he had been sitting there when Rachel came quickly in.

”Oh! Frank,” she said, with a face of alarm, ”he's very ill. I'm sure he is. I've sent for Dr. Morgan to come at once. He fainted after you left, and he's only just come round again. Oh! I am terribly anxious,” and she looked at him, her lips quivering, then put her hands before her eyes and burst into tears.

Rendel's heart smote him. Everything else, as he looked at her, faded into the background. The thing that mattered was Rachel was the woman he loved. It was he who had brought this grief upon her.

”Darling,” he said, ”I'm so sorry.”

She shook her head and tried to smile.

”Oh,” she said, trying to suppress her tears, ”I ought not to have left him. I daresay you didn't know, but it has done him the most terrible harm. Did you tell him, then, about--about--the thing you told me of, that you had been suspected--of telling something--what was it?” and she pa.s.sed her hand over her forehead as if unable to think.

”No,” said Rendel, ”I didn't tell him that _I_ had been accused of it. I daresay he guessed I had. I told him it had happened.”

”But, Frank, why did you?” she said. ”I implored you not.”

”Rachel,” he said, ”do you realise what it means to me that I should be accused of a thing like this?”

”Of course, yes, of course,” she said, evidently still listening for any sound from upstairs. ”But still a thing like that, that can be put right in a few minutes, cannot matter so much as life and death....”

And again her voice became almost inaudible.

”There are some things,” said Rendel in a low voice, ”that matter more to a man than life and death.”

”Do you mean to say,” said Rachel, ”that it matters more that you should be supposed to have done something that you have not done, than that my father should not get well?”

”Supposing your father had been wrongfully accused of something underhand and dishonourable,” said Rendel, ”would not that matter more to him than--than--anything else?”

Rachel put up her hands with a cry as if to ward off a blow.

”My father!” she said, drawing away from Rendel. ”You must not say such a thing. How could it be said?”

”You endure,” said Rendel, ”that it should be said about me.”

”About you! That is different,” she said, unable in the tension of her overwrought nerves to choose her words. ”You are young, you can defend yourself; but it is cruel, cruel of you to say that it might happen to my father. You don't realise what my father is to me or you couldn't say such things even without meaning them. No, you can't know, you can't understand, or you couldn't, just for your own sake, have gone to him to-day when he is so ill and told him things that excited him.”

”I think I do understand,” Rendel said, forcing himself to speak calmly.

”Of course I know, I have always known, perhaps not quite so clearly as to-day, that--that--he must come first with you.”

”Oh! in some ways he must, he must,” Rachel said, half entreatingly, yet with a ring of determination in her voice. ”I promised my mother that I would, as far as I could, take her place, and while he lives I must.

Frank, I would give up my life to save him suffering, as she would have done. Ah! there is Doctor Morgan,” and she left the room hastily as a doctor's brougham stopped at the door.