“Well?” Lionel greeted him. “What will you do now?”
Sir Oliver looked at him from under brows that scowled darkly in reflection of his thoughts.
“Do now? Of what do you talk?” quoth he.
“Have you not heard?” And Lionel told him the news.
Sir Oliver stared long at him when he had done, then his lips tightened and he smote his brow.
“So!” he cried. “Would that be why she refused to see me? Did she conceive that I went perhaps to plead? Could she think that? Could she?”
He crossed to the fireplace and stirred the logs with his boot angrily. “Oh! ‘Twere too unworthy. Yet of a certainty ‘tis her doing, this.”
“What shall you do?” insisted Lionel, unable to repress the question that was uppermost in his mind; and his voice shook.
“Do?” Sir Oliver looked at him over his shoulder. “Prick this bubble, by heaven! Make an end of it for them, confound them and cover them with shame.”
He said it roughly, angrily, and Lionel recoiled, deeming that roughness and anger aimed at himself. He sank into a chair, his knees loosened by his sudden fear. So it seemed that he had had more than cause for his apprehensions. This brother of his who boasted such affection for him was not equal to bearing this matter through. And yet the thing was so unlike Oliver that a doubt still lingered with him.
“You... you will tell them the truth?” he said, in small, quavering voice.
Sir Oliver turned and considered him more attentively.
“A God’s name, Lal, what’s in thy mind now?” he asked, almost roughly. “Tell them the truth? Why, of course—but only as it concerns myself. You’re not supposing that I shall tell them it was you? You’ll not be accounting me capable of that?”
“What other way is there?”
Sir Oliver explained the matter. The explanation brought Lionel relief. But this relief was ephemeral. Further reflection presented a new fear to him. It came to him that if Sir Oliver cleared himself, of necessity his own implication must follow. His terrors very swiftly magnified a risk that in itself was so slender as to be entirely negligible. In his eyes it ceased to be a risk; it became a certain and inevitable danger. If Sir Oliver put forward this proof that the trail of blood had not proceeded from himself, it must, thought Lionel, inevitably be concluded that it was his own. As well might Sir Oliver tell them the whole truth, for surely they could not fail to infer it. Thus he reasoned in his terror, accounting himself lost irrevocably.
Had he but gone with those fears of his to his brother, or had he but been able to abate them sufficiently to allow reason to prevail, he must have been brought to understand how much further they carried him than was at all justified by probability. Oliver would have shown him this, would have told him that with the collapsing of the charge against himself no fresh charge could be levelled against any there, that no scrap of suspicion had ever attached to Lionel, or ever could. But Lionel dared not seek his brother in this matter. In his heart he was ashamed of his fears; in his heart he knew himself for a craven. He realized to the full the hideousness of his selfishness, and yet, as before, he was not strong enough to conquer it. In short, his love of himself was greater than his love of his brother, or of twenty brothers.
The morrow—a blustering day of late March found him again at that alehouse at Penycumwick in the company of Jasper Leigh. A course had occurred to him, as the only course now possible. Last night his brother had muttered something of going to Killigrew with his proofs since Rosamund refused to receive him. Through Killigrew he would reach her, he had said; and he would yet see her on her knees craving his pardon for the wrong she had done him, for the cruelty she had shown him.
Lionel knew that Killigrew was absent from home just then; but he was expected to return by Easter, and to Easter there was but a week. Therefore he had little time in which to act, little time in which to execute the project that had come into his mind. He cursed himself for conceiving it, but held to it with all the strength of a weak nature.
Yet when he came to sit face to face with Jasper Leigh in that little inn-parlour with the scrubbed table of plain deal between them, he lacked the courage to set his proposal forth. They drank sherry sack stiffly laced with brandy by Lionel’s suggestion, instead of the more customary mulled ale. Yet not until he had consumed the best part of a pint of it did Lionel feel himself heartened to broaching his loathsome business. Through his head hummed the words his brother had said some time ago when first the name of Jasper Leigh had passed between them—“a desperate adventurer ripe for anything. So the price be high enough you may buy him body and soul.” Money enough to buy Jasper Leigh was ready to Lionel’s hand; but it was Sir Oliver’s money—the money that was placed at Lionel’s disposal by his half-brother’s open-handed bounty. And this money he was to employ for Oliver’s utter ruin! He cursed himself for a filthy, contemptible hound; he cursed the foul fiend that whispered such suggestions into his mind; he knew himself, despised himself and reviled himself until he came to swear to be strong and to go through with whatever might await him sooner than be guilty of such a baseness; the next moment that same resolve would set him shuddering again as he viewed the inevitable consequences that must attend it.
Suddenly the captain set him a question, very softly, that fired the train and blew all his lingering self-resistance into shreds.
“You’ll ha’ borne my warning to Sir Oliver?” he asked, lowering his voice so as not to be overheard by the vintner who was stirring beyond the thin wooden partition.
Master Lionel nodded, nervously fingering the jewel in his ear, his eyes shifting from their consideration of the seaman’s coarse, weather-tanned and hairy countenance.
“I did,” he said. “But Sir Oliver is headstrong. He will not stir.”
“Will he not?” The captain stroked his bushy red beard and cursed profusely and horribly after the fashion of the sea. “Od’s wounds! He’s very like to swing if he bides him here.”
“Ay,” said Lionel, “if he bides.” He felt his mouth turn dry as he spoke; his heart thudded, but its thuds were softened by a slight insensibility which the liquor had produced in him.
He uttered the words in so curious a tone that the sailor’s dark eyes peered at him from under his heavy sandy eyebrows. There was alert inquiry in that glance. Master Lionel got up suddenly.
“Let us take a turn outside, captain,” said he.
The captain’s eyes narrowed. He scented business. There was something plaguily odd about this young gentleman’s manner. He tossed off the remains of his sack, slapped down the pot and rose.
“Your servant, Master Tressilian,” said he.
Outside our gentleman untethered his horse from the iron ring to which he had attached the bridle; leading his horse he turned seaward and strode down the road that wound along the estuary towards Smithick.
A sharp breeze from the north was whipping the water into white peaks of foam; the sky was of a hard brightness and the sun shone brilliantly. The tide was running out, and the rock in the very neck of the haven was thrusting its black crest above the water. A cable’s length this side of it rode the black hull and naked spars of the Swallow—Captain Leigh’s ship.
Lionel stepped along in silence, very gloomy and pensive, hesitating even now. And the crafty mariner reading this hesitation, and anxious to conquer it for the sake of such profit as he conceived might lie in the proposal which he scented, paved the way for him at last.