Читать книгу Deadman's - Mary Gaunt - Страница 4

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'The moving finger writes; and having writ,

Moves on; nor all your piety and wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.'

JOCELYN RUTHVEN did not say good-bye to Mrs. Langdon, not a little to her disappointment. A touching farewell full of bitter unspoken regrets, regrets that could only be expressed by tender hand-clasps and sad looks, would have been just to her mind, but Ruthven never even thought of such a thing. He would do her bidding, of course; she was quite right. He must marry the girl; but the dreariness of the outlook filled his mind to the exclusion of every other thought, and even the image of the woman he worshipped faded before this great trouble. He did not want to see anyone; he wanted to get away and get it all over as soon as possible.

'Get my horse round, will you, Langdon?' he said. 'I'd better be getting back to the camp.'

'Not to-night, old man, surely,' said the hospitable squatter. 'You stop with us to-night, at least.'

'I'd better go,' he said. 'I'm not good company, anyhow. What about the girl, Langdon? Can you send her back? To-morrow will do. I'll go and see her mother and settle things up.'

'Don't do anything in a hurry, man. If you must marry her, at least put the wedding off for a month or two. It'll give you time to look about you, and you might, you know—mind you, I don't say you will, but you just might find reason to change your mind.'

'I find a hundred thousand reasons for changing my mind,' said Ruthven bitterly; 'but the original reason for marrying her still remains, and the sooner it's done the better.'

'Oh, for God's sake, bring a little common-sense to bear on the matter, and don't pay any attention to what Emmie says! She's a good enough girl, is Emmie, but she ain't quite such superior clay as you and she seem to think. She's wrong-headed at times, and she's wrong-headed now, and why on earth you should go and ruin your life just to please her, I can't think. Why she should want it, either, I'm sure I don't know,' he went on reflectively; 'doesn't strike me as suiting her book at all. However—oh, hang it all, Ruthven! you'll be casting this up in her teeth some day. I wish to Heaven either you or the girl had stopped in the camp! It would have been all right if it hadn't come across my wife.'

'Your wife isn't the only one in the world who would say I ought to marry her,' said Ruthven. 'I ought, I suppose. I'm going to, any way. Say good-bye to your wife for me, and send the girl along. I'll just go and pack my valise.'

So it happened that the first intimation Emma Langdon had of Commissioner Ruthven's departure was the sight of his tall upright figure mounted on a chestnut horse cantering slowly across the home paddock. She thought it was her husband's doing, and she did not like it at all. Here was the principal actor in the little drama at which she was assisting going away without even a word, not a single arrangement made for meeting, not a word about how the marriage was going to be settled. She ought—she felt she really ought to have had the settling up of that. She didn't know that she exactly wanted the marriage to take place at Karouda, but—well, anyhow he would never have ridden away without a word or even a message of his own accord. It was all Ben's fault, of course, and it would be no good giving a message to him, because he wouldn't deliver it, or he would so mangle it in the delivering that the original meaning would be lost. Ben was so clumsy, and, besides, she was angry with him, and didn't want to speak to him much. But, then, she must know something about Ruthven's latest plans, and there was no one else to ask, so she smoothed her hair and went back into the sitting-room again.

Ben was seated stolidly in front of the fire, one foot on each hob, a six-months-old English paper in his hands. He looked over his shoulder as his wife entered, but made no room for her before the fire. He simply gave a discontented grunt, and shrugged his shoulders in what she said was the rudest manner.

She moved about the room quietly, sighed a little in a gentle, resigned way that made her husband grunt still more angrily, put the chairs straight and tidy, and then took up her seat a little behind him, so that the firelight reached her across his stalwart right leg.

It put him manifestly in the wrong, and he didn't like it. He turned his head and looked at her sitting there sewing like a martyr, and then pushed back his chair impatiently.

'Are you cold, Emmie?'

'It doesn't matter in the least,' she sighed gently.

'It does matter. Why the dickens can't you behave like an ordinary woman, and ask a fellow to give you a bit of the fire, instead of looking like an image and sighing like a furnace?'

'It doesn't matter. I always want you to be comfortable. And, besides, of course you knew you had all the fire.'

That was true enough, and it put him so much in the wrong when he was feeling in an intangible, unexplainable sort of a way that it was he who was the injured person, that he swore helplessly under his breath, and held the paper so tight that it split in two between his strong fingers.

He dashed it on the fire, looked at his wife sitting sewing meekly, the very incarnation of wifely obedience, and then burst out:

'Emma, why the devil do you meddle in things that don't concern you?'

She looked at him with wide-open astonished eyes as one who is unjustly accused, and said nothing. He would have liked nothing better than to take her by the shoulders and shake her soundly.

'Answer me. Don't sit there like a graven image.'

'I don't know what you mean.'

'Don't know what I mean! You've grown mighty dense all of a sudden. Look here, then. How dared you meddle between Ruthven and that girl—that Phillips hussy?'

'How dared you meddle, then, if it comes to that? it was no business of yours.'

'You had no right to mix yourself up in such a thing.'

'The girl came to me,' said Mrs. Langdon sweetly. 'Poor thing! I was bound to do something.'

'Then you ought to have come to me. What the devil do you mean, madam, by going to any other man but your husband?'

Mrs. Langdon shrugged her shoulders. There was no pleasing this man. He was determined to work off his temper upon somebody.

'See here, Emmie, I won't stand it! I won't, and that's flat! Here have you for the last three months been carrying on a sort of desperate sympathetic friendship—I'm blest if I know what you call the thing—with that young fool Ruthven. I won't stand it, Emmie, there now! Once for all, I won't stand it!'

His wife raised her eyes as one who would say, 'This man is perfectly incomprehensible,' but she said nothing.

'Do you hear me, Emmie? I say I won't stand it!'

And he brought his hand down heavily on the arm of his chair.

'I don't understand you,' she said coldly.

'Oh yes, you do. You understand well enough. I say I won't have this mild illicit sort of love-making that's been going on between you and Ruthven. Do you think I haven't eyes in my head? You pose as a misunderstood, unappreciated woman—superior clay, in fact—and Jocelyn Ruthven, the young fool, worships. I know I'm coarse and rude and wanting in refinement and don't value you properly; but, all the same, I'm not going to stand what I've stood for the last three months. I've been expecting you to come to your senses, or Ruthven to find out what an ass he was making of himself, but it seems he hasn't. And now—oh, he's brought his pigs to a pretty market. You think you've done a fine thing, making him marry that girl, don't you? It's all your confounded vanity; you like to show your power. But I tell you what: if he marries that girl, before the month is out he'll be cursing the day he ever met you. He has made an ass of himself over you, but that's more your fault than his. He's not a bad chap at bottom, is Ruthven, and he shan't make a fool of himself if I can help it. I'll get him out of this hole, anyhow, in spite of himself. Send that girl along to me at once, Emmie.'

His wife laid her work down in her lap, and looked him straight in the face.

'Don't you hear me? Send that girl along. I want to speak to her. I guess I can make a better bargain than Ruthven.'

'There's no question of bargain in the matter.'

'Oh, isn't there? We'll soon see about that. Get the girl.'

'She's gone,' said Mrs. Langdon, taking up her work again.

'Gone? How the devil can she be gone? Bat Henderson, confound him! fetched her up along with the stores, didn't he? She got wind Ruthven would be here for a week or so, and determined to make things pleasant for him. But Henderson ain't going back, so how can she be gone?'

'She is gone, though,' said his wife distinctly. 'Naturally, she didn't like being here with all the servants wondering what she came for, and I'm sure I didn't want her, so, of course, I told Bat Henderson to put a horse in the buck-board and take her back again.'

'The devil you did! You're mighty considerate all of a sudden. Are you quite sure, now, you didn't go to her and say she was to clear out there and then?'

If she had, as her husband firmly believed, Mrs. Langdon made no sign. She went on sewing quietly, and wondered if Jocelyn Ruthven even guessed what she was suffering on his account.

'Well, I won't be done. I'll have a try for Ruthven's future comfort yet. Here, hi, you, Johanna!' as a maid passed the door. 'You go and tell Day to saddle me Lady Jane.'

The woman looked at her mistress doubtfully.

'Please, sir, Bat Henderson have took Lady Jane along a that gurl on the buck-board. Missus told him to; there weren't no other horse to take.'

Ben Langdon waited till that maid had gone, and then he did take his wife by the shoulders and shake her soundly. He had been wanting to do it all the afternoon, and now he did it. He wasn't very gentle about it, either, and when he pushed her down somewhat roughly into a chair, she put up her hands to her face and began to cry. She felt her efforts to do right were costing her a good deal. She wondered if Jocelyn Ruthven appreciated them.

Her husband looked at her shamefacedly a moment. She looked very slight and fragile, sitting huddled up there with her handkerchief to her eyes; but she was aggravating, and if he had been a brute, she had made him so.

'Oh, d——n it all!' he swore between his teeth. 'Ruthven's brought it on himself. It's no business of mine. He'll have to see it through, I suppose, and a pretty kettle of fish it'll be, too.'