CHAPTER X.

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.