As Susy’s footsteps died away, Clarence closed
the door, walked to the window, and examined it closely.
The bars had been restored since he had wrenched them
off to give ingress to the family on the day of recapture.
He glanced around the room; nothing seemed to have
been disturbed. Nevertheless he was uneasy.
The suspicions of a frank, trustful nature when once
aroused are apt to be more general and far-reaching
than the specific distrusts of the disingenuous, for
they imply the overthrow of a whole principle and
not a mere detail. Clarence’s conviction
that Susy had seen Pedro recently since his dismissal
led him into the wildest surmises of her motives.
It was possible that without her having reason to
suspect Pedro’s greater crime, he might have
confided to her his intention of reclaiming the property
and installing her as the mistress and chatelaine
of the rancho. The idea was one that might have
appealed to Susy’s theatrical imagination.
He recalled Mrs.
McClosky’s sneer at his own
pretensions and her vague threats of a rival of more
lineal descent. The possible infidelity of Susy
to himself touched him lightly when the first surprise
was over; indeed, it scarcely could be called infidelity,
if she knew and believed Mary Rogers’s discovery;
and the conviction that he and she had really never
loved each other now enabled him, as he believed,
to look at her conduct dispassionately. Yet it
was her treachery to Mrs. Peyton and not to himself
that impressed him most, and perhaps made him equally
unjust, through his affections.
He extinguished the candles, partly from some vague
precautions he could not explain, and partly to think
over his fears in the abstraction and obscurity of
the semi-darkness. The higher windows suffused
a faint light on the ceiling, and, assisted by the
dark lantern-like glow cast on the opposite wall by
the tunnel of the embrasured window, the familiar
outlines of the room and its furniture came back to
him. Somewhat in this fashion also, in the obscurity
and quiet, came back to him the events he had overlooked
and forgotten. He recalled now some gossip of
the servants, and hints dropped by Susy of a violent
quarrel between Peyton and Pedro, which resulted in
Pedro’s dismissal, but which now seemed clearly
attributable to some graver cause than inattention
and insolence. He recalled Mary Rogers’s
playful pleasantries with Susy about Pedro, and Susy’s
mysterious air, which he had hitherto regarded only
as part of her exaggeration. He remembered Mrs.
Peyton’s unwarrantable uneasiness about Susy,
which he had either overlooked or referred entirely
to himself; she must have suspected something.
To his quickened imagination, in this ruin of his
faith and trust, he believed that Hooker’s defection
was either part of the conspiracy, or that he had
run away to avoid being implicated with Susy in its
discovery. This, too, was the significance of
Gilroy’s parting warning. He and Mrs. Peyton
alone had been blind and confiding in the midst of
this treachery, and even he had been blind to
his own real affections.
Copyrights
Susy, a story of the Plains from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
