He made now a wild attempt to bluster. “Lies! Lies!” he protested. “Your ladyship's a-dreaming. Should I be making bad worse by plotting at my time of life? Should I? What can King James avail me, indeed?”
“'Tis what I will ask Rotherby to help me to discover,” she informed him.
“Rotherby?” he cried. “Would you tell that villain what you suspect? Would you arm him with another weapon for my undoing?”
“Ha!” said she. “You admit so much, then?” And she laughed disdainfully. Then with a sudden sternness, a sudden nobility almost in the motherhood which she put forward--“Rotherby is my son,” she said, “and I'll not have my son the victim of your follies as well as of your injustice. We may curb the one and the other yet, my lord.”
And she swept out, fan going briskly in one hand, her long ebony cane swinging as briskly in the other.
“O God!” groaned Ostermore, and sat down heavily.
Mr. Caryll helped himself copiously to snuff. “I think,” said he, his voice so cool that it had an almost soothing influence, “I think your lordship has now another reason why you should go no further in this matter.”
“But if I do not--what other hopes have I? Damn me! I'm a ruined man either way.”
“Nay, nay,” Mr. Caryll reminded him. “Assuming even that you are correctly informed, and that his Grace of Wharton is determined to move against you, it is not to be depended that he will succeed in collecting such evidence as he must need. At this date much of the evidence that may once have been available will have been dissipated. You are rash to despair so soon.”
“There is that,” his lordship admitted thoughtfully, a little hopefully, even; “there is that.” And with the resilience of his nature--of men who form opinions on slight grounds, and, therefore, are ready to change them upon grounds as slight--“I' faith! I may have been running to meet my trouble. 'Tis but a rumor, after all, that Wharton is for mischief, and--as you say--as like as not there'll be no evidence by now. There was little enough at the time.
“Still, I'll make doubly sure. My letter to King James can do no harm. We'll talk of it again, when you are in case to travel.”
It passed through Mr. Caryll's mind at the moment that Lady Ostermore and her son might between them brew such mischief as might seriously hinder him from travelling, and he was very near the truth. For already her ladyship was closeted with Rotherby in her boudoir.