CHAPTER V
Slinker’swife drew up with a flourish at Crump steps, but she relinquished the reins rather wearily. She looked almost tired—Christian thought—a thing very foreign to her extraordinary vitality. Butler and footman were automatons of respect as she descended, and she smiled inwardly as she went in. She knew quite well what they had said about her when she first came.
Mrs. Lyndesay was standing just inside the hall, her hard face like ivory against the dark background. There was something inhuman about her to Christian, coming out of the sunlight into the frigidity of her presence. During the last month she seemed to have retired further than ever into that icy aloofness which wore, for him at least, the appearance of hatred. She turned her eyes away from him sharply as he entered, and he knew that she had looked instinctively for another form to fill the door when he crossed the threshold.
Slinker’s wife thrust a hand through her arm, and led her to the tea-table. All through the meal she talked steadily, while Mrs. Lyndesay listened with something almost like amusement in her eyes. Somewhereand somehow, Slinker’s wife had found a chord in that hidden heart which answered when she struck it.
Christian, ignored, wandered into the garden, and stood looking across the green of the sunk lawn and the glory of the flower-beds to the rising background of woods. There was a stream running flittingly from wood to garden, and he walked beside it, hearing it but not hearkening, for he was reviewing his swift and disastrous meeting with Deborah. Emphatically, he had done the wrong thing, and in the most hopelessly wrong manner. He had hurt her afresh—she, who had already suffered more hurt than one dared think of. After all, what use could Slinker’s wife be to her, on any terms? Somehow, the horse-dealer’s daughter had inspired him with a confidence in vaguely miraculous powers. You leaned with a strange trust on Slinker’s wife. Something about her made you feel that the world could never be long out of joint with her capable hands willing and ready to manipulate it. He had known her all his life, or near it, and she was older than he by several years—a million years older in everything else but age.
She joined him presently in a white gown, the faint trace of fatigue utterly vanished, and towed him into one of the mossy woodland paths.
“I’ve finished with those crow’s clothes,” she said, slipping her hand through his arm, and looking down at herself approvingly. “Parker nearly did a faintwhen he saw me, but who cares? I didn’t allow Slinker to be a bore to me when he was alive, and I certainly won’t have him a nuisance now he is dead. I’m only his widow by accident, so to speak, and I don’t see why I should go about making an object of myself on his account. What’s the matter, Youngest One? You seem a bit down in the mouth. Worrying about that turn-up, this morning?”
“Looking back, it seems such a rotten thing to have done!” Christian replied. “You see, I never gave her time to think, just fell upon her out of the sky and sprang the thing at her. I should have prepared her, broken it gently——”
Slinker’s wife laughed humorously.
“I do need some gentle preparation, don’t I? Oh, you needn’t apologise! And of course public opinion expects us to glare defiance at each other, as if we each had a claw upon Slinker’s dead body. It’s only natural she should hate me. But that girl’s got grit, Laker—the sort of grit you don’t meet with every day in the week. Most females left in a similar lurch would have had nervous prostration and a prolonged visit on the Continent or at the nearest rest-cure. Butshegoes to market slick in the chattering teeth of the whole County—snaps her fingers in their pained faces, and lets them see she isn’t ashamed of anything she’s done. Whyshouldshe be ashamed, either, I’d like to know? If Slinker asked her to marry him, she’d every right to say yes.”
Christian shook his head.
“That’s what’s wrong. And that’s what sheisashamed of, no matter how splendidly she tries to hide it. She can’t really have been able to stand Slinker. No decent girl could. And to marry him for his position—— I say, Nettie dear, I’m horribly sorry!”
Mrs. Slinker smiled with something of an effort.
“Don’t judge our rotten sex too hardly, Laker. It isn’t always sheer sordidness, even when we do marry for position; there’s a glamour it gives the man, no matter what he may be himself. He’s got all his fathers and grandfathers standing bail for him. You kind of catch your breath at all he represents, and shut your eyes to the miserable, moth-eaten bagman you might possibly find him if you weren’t blinkered by his grandeur.”
“The glamour couldn’t have lasted long; and after that had vanished, I don’t see how she could ever have dreamed of going through with it. A nice girl like that, with nice ideas, and—and—isn’t that moss a ripping colour?”
She pressed his arm affectionately.
“It’s all right, Youngest One! You can’t think of us in the same light; and, after all, why should you? I come of tougher stock, rougher stuff. I knew how to handle a man like Slinker. I could have made something of him—perhaps—something that Heaven wouldn’t have been ashamed of—if I’d tried. But I didn’t think him worth while, andI don’t doubt that the Almighty agrees with me. I didn’t even think the estate worth while, with Slinker slung round my neck like an albatross; so I went to Canada to my sister, and thought of him as seldom as possible till I got the news of his death and his charmingly-plannedcomédie à trois. I wonder what he meant by the whole thing?—whether he was waiting for me to hear, and come back? It would have been like Slinker’s slinkin’ way of doing things. I’d have been bound to come to the church, at any rate; not a step further! I wonder if that’s the real solution of the muddle? After all—Slinker cared.”
“Don’t!” Christian shuddered. “Don’t you see what a diabolical situation that creates for—for—the other woman?”
She looked at him curiously.
“Yes, I suppose it makes things worse, doesn’t it? It wouldn’t have been so bad if Slinker had loved her and wanted her too badly to remember that he had some wretched sort of a wife already. Well, we’ll leave it at that! What do I care? But you mustn’t blame her too much. It’s because she’s one of your own people that you feel as you do—that she shouldn’t have stooped to a man like that for a reason like that. You could forgive a stranger who had done it—a woman who wasn’t a Lyndesay born and bred; you could forgive—Nettie Stone, the horse-dealer’s daughter!”
He looked at her whimsically, knowing her too well,respecting her too much, to lie to her. He let the statement pass.
“Didn’t the place call you more than once?” he asked. “Didn’t all this—the land, the house, the things they stand for—call you ever again after that one moment when you put out your hand and took them?” He looked through the green veil of the wood to the long house lying below them, and over the house to the faint hills. “Didn’t you want it, ache for it, break your heart for it? Oh, Nettie, how did you keep away?”
She shook her head, smiling.
“That isn’t in me—how should it be? How should generations of horse-dealing draw any human soul magically to Crump? The house is dumb for me—in spite of the hundred tongues it keeps for you. The land says nothing—no more than it says to every other soul that springs from it and goes back to it. It is our mother—we others. To you, it is your child.”
“But, if you don’t feel, how do youknow?” he asked, laying a hand for a moment on an ancient trunk. “And youdoknow!”
“Intuition, I suppose. Besides, the thing radiates from you. One has only to watch your eyes—listen to your voice. It must mean more to you than to us whose forefathers owned no more than the six feet of earth doled them for a grave. You don’t get a soul for soil out of that! No. Just once the whole thing caught me—the glamour of Lyndesay of Crump; but never again. I never felt it again.”
“What kept you—came in between? Why did you never want to take your place?”
Slinker’s wife looked up and up to where the quiet smoke of Dockerneuk chimneys curled in the pure air.
“Because I had once seen something better,” she said, “and after I had done the irrevocable thing, the remembrance of that better thing came back to me. I saw quite plainly what a good man was worth, and the worth of a good man’s love—just everything that Slinker couldn’t mean to me, in spite of Crump. I might have taken it before, and come out all right in the end. But after that I couldn’t have taken it and saved my soul alive.”
“What stopped you, Nettie dear?”
“A little thing—a very little thing. Just the sound of a two-horse grass-cutter on a summer morning. It was miles away from here, in another part of England, in an hotel in some beastly little town; but soon after dawn I woke as if some one had whispered, and, far away, ever so far, I heard the whirr and the click and the call to the horses. And the smell of the hay—that came too; and all it stood for—all it stood for! I couldn’t stop after that. I told Slinker I was going, and I went; and I never had anything to do with him afterwards. I knew then what I wanted—what I had wanted without knowing; and though I couldn’t have it, I could at least refuse anything less. Crump was less, Lyndesay of Crump was less—and Nettie Stone the mostwretched, ashamed reptile that ever crawled the earth!”
Christian kissed her hand.
“Thank you for marrying Slinker,” he said. “You belong to me, now, and I shall not be so lonely any more. Thank you for marrying Slinker.”