Читать книгу The Eyes of Love - Warwick Deeping - Страница 5

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Sam Wetherell would have nothing to do with Ann’s dog. He refused, with scorn that was almost venomous, to give a home to a beast that was not worth the price of a dose of poison.

Sam stood by the garden gate, and pointed with the stem of his pipe.

“Yah, a purty fool you be, Nan, to be come over by a dirt of a dog like that! Sure, you’d have to pay folk t’ drown ’im. No slush, now! Hey, warrook, get out wid ye, yer white sausage on wheels.”

He began to search round for something to throw, while the mongrel looked dubiously about him.

Ann stood irresolute. The cur’s forlorn look touched her. Even the queer brown-and-white blotches on his coat, his bandy legs and flapping ears had a quaint pathos. He seemed one of the unfortunates, and Ann had a soft heart.

“Don’t drive him away, dad. I’ll take him up to Fox Farm.”

Wetherell stared. Surely there could be no possible bargain in the business! Even Mr. Falconer was not fool enough to be landed with such a mongrel.

“Go on,” he said; “do yer want ’un to shoot ut?”

Ann stooped for the dog, picked him up, and huddled him in her arms.

“Poor lad, then! We’ll get him a home somehow.”

So it befell that Jesse Falconer, gathering apples in one of the old orchard trees, heard a voice calling him as he clambered about the lichenous boughs. He looked down and saw Ann Wetherell standing in a slant of the evening sunlight, the white dog in her arms, and her eyes full of a shy compassion.

“Mr. Falconer, sir, I’ve come to ask you to take the dog.”

The sunlight played upon her pale face. As for the mongrel, he seemed content to lie in her arms and cock one eye coolly at the man in the tree.

Falconer stood in the main fork with one arm round a bough. In his right hand he held a red apple, and the sunlight made gold glints in his brown hair.

“I thought you wanted to keep him?”

Ann flushed with sudden self-consciousness.

“It’s father,” she said; “he won’t have the dog. And it seems hard to pick him out of the water, and then turn him adrift.”

Her eyes met Falconer’s, and they looked at each other with incipient curiosity. A slight frown of thought gathered on the man’s forehead. Ann believed that he was going to refuse.

“Maybe you’ve got a dog, Mr. Falconer.”

“Only the sheep-dog Bob, in the yard. And he’s more with the men than with me. The truth is——”

He shifted himself in the tree, stared momentarily into space, and then looked down at Ann.

“You’ll think it queer—what I’m going to say. I’ve had several dogs in my time, and they all came to bad ends. Now, a man gets fond of a dog——”

Ann’s eyes watched his, and they were full of a listening sympathy.

“How queer. But——”

“I said that I would never have another dog. There seemed to be something unlucky about me. And it didn’t seem fair to the beasts. When I got fond of one, something was sure to happen to him.”

Ann nodded a grave head. And Falconer noticed suddenly how sensitive her mouth and eyes were. He found himself wondering how Sam Wetherell had come to have a daughter whose face suggested mystery, pathos, and compassion.

“Then you think——”

Her lips trembled and remained open. Falconer tossed the apple into the grass.

“I lost one dog from poison, another under a reaping machine. An Irish terrier got shot for hunting. A retriever went into a mill-stream, and was sucked under the wheels. Four lives lost! What do you think?”

They eyed each other with ingenuous earnestness. Then Ann said:

“You’d be kind to him, Mr. Falconer, and he’d be happy—and nothing might happen.”

“Then you think he is willing to take the risk?”

Ann spoke to the dog, and he gave a wag of the tail and a sharp bark.

“There, see—he says yes.”

Falconer swung himself out of the tree. Ann’s head came to the level of his shoulder as they stood in the rank grass.

“I’ll take him. Has he a name?”

“I haven’t heard one, sir.”

“Then you had better christen him, since it was you who really saved him from that half brick.”

“Brick! Why, look, he answers to it! Call him Brick, Mr. Falconer.”

And Brick the dog was named.

On the day of the dog’s rescue down at Pool, Kate Falconer had driven to Lymnor in her pony trap. To a wife who had a small private income of her own, and a nature that was largely practical, the shops of Lymnor offered numberless fascinations. Kate Falconer was a woman who loved to loiter in Lymnor with five pounds in her purse, and with the knowledge that she could buy most of the objects that she saw in the windows. The delight of buying was with her a potential delight. She loved the power of money, and money itself, better than the finest stuffs in the drapers’ shops. It was her form of dissipation to wander up and down the Lymnor streets, and buy nothing more than two yards of tape. Yet her satisfaction would be complete. She had enjoyed the power of purchasing many things without spending a shilling.

Climbing back out of Lymnor with the reins slack on the pony’s back, she was overtaken by a little, bullet-headed man riding a black mare. The rider drew in beside the pony cart, flourished a black felt hat, and showed a row of healthy white teeth.

“Hallo—how are we to-day?”

Kate Falconer looked round at him with a sudden brightening of her hard brown eyes.

“Why, Jack, where have you been?”

“Down at Curtis’s, looking at some new machines. That fresh ground of mine is showing up like Lincolnshire stuff, turning buttercups into gold.”

Mr. Jack Rickaby was a short, thick-set man with the face of a groom, pugnacious, black-chinned, merry about the eyes. His black-and-white check riding-breeches and brown gaiters were smart and new, and his wealth of cheerfulness ran into picturesque slang. This sleek, well-groomed surface was the green sheath hiding a hard, brown nut, for Mr. Jack Rickaby was a grim little man with a keen mouth, and muscular shoulders.

These two people, the fresh-coloured, capable woman in the pony cart, and the stocky young farmer on the black mare, talked the same language and thought the same thoughts. Their sympathy was the sympathy of vigorous pushfulness and dogged endeavour. Their eyes looked at the same things with the same expression. A like motive force worked towards like ends.

“Well, how’s Jesse?”

Kate Falconer’s face had changed. Her eyes had lost some of their hardness, and her crude comeliness showed vivacity and a more sensuous warmth.

“Oh, Jesse; he’s messing along the same as usual.”

“Lord! That man does take life calmly. Wish I had some of his weight.”

Kate Falconer stared hard at her pony’s ears.

“I wouldn’t envy Jesse if I were you. Some people enjoy nothing so much as being miserable.”

“Oh, come now; there’s something to be said for Jesse.”

“Is there? I wish you would give him some of your pluck.”

She glanced at Jack Rickaby with critical approval. The man had so many of the qualities that she admired—courage, energy, a grim determination to make money.

“Pluck! Jesse has plenty of pluck. Briggs told me a tale only the other day.”

“That’s not the sort of spirit I mean. If anyone threatened to shoot Jesse, he would say: ‘Life’s such a bother, I really don’t care whether you shoot me or not.’ One can’t help having a good grumble, sometimes.”

Mr. Rickaby stroked his mare’s neck. The playfulness had died out of his eyes for the moment. He was a hard little man, thinking hard thoughts.

“I tell you what,” he said bluntly, “Jesse was never the man for you.”

Their eyes met squarely and honestly. They were practical people, and they did not gloze things over with romantic sentiment.

“That’s the truth, Jack; but it’s no use blurting it abroad. Besides, Jesse’s a clean liver.”

“Well, other people do the blurting. Jesse’s not popular.”

“No, perhaps not; but he’s as clean a man as ever stepped. His mother was an old fool. Fancy her sending the lad to a public school, and to a blessed college to make him a scientific farmer. Jesse always had too much book-stuff in him, and he has been losing money for years. I’ve known him waste a whole day watching a lot of ants. The farm was clear, if a bit rickety in the buildings, when the old lady left it him. Look at it now—a blessed ruin, mortgaged up to the last brick.”

Jack Rickaby assented with a nod of the head. His eyes had picked out a hawk hovering over a distant field. He watched the bird, and whistled softly through his teeth.

“I can’t see the use of being in this world,” he said presently, “unless a man means to bustle and fight. One has to play the game of the hawk over yonder, whatever the parsons may say.”

Ashhurst village showed its shingled spire and tiled roofs on the slope of the next hill. The church spire appeared to hold up an admonishing finger. Mr. Rickaby glanced at Kate Falconer, smiled, and began to tap the mare’s flanks with his heels.

“Well, I suppose I must bump on.”

Kate understood. Their sympathy was of a blunt, practical nature, and would wear.

“I’ll send you up a few samples, Jack. I want to know what you think of them. Jesse won’t bother.”

“All right, Kate, send them along. You can always count on me.”

At Fox Farm Kate Falconer unharnessed the pony, and ran the little cart into the cobwebbed coach-house. She had no objection to relying upon her own hands in these matters, yet it pleases a woman to have a man bustling to serve her. She was closing the coach-house doors when Jesse came into the yard with the white mongrel at his heels.

“You might have come five minutes sooner.”

“I didn’t hear you drive in, Kate.”

“No, I suppose not.”

And her tone implied that she disbelieved him.

Then she noticed the dog, and in her blunt and aggressive way she fell to catechising her husband.

“What have you got there?”

“A dog.”

He had no intention of being facetious, but when two people have fallen into the habit of quarrelling, any chance word is taken as a sting.

“Don’t try to be funny. What’s the animal doing here?”

“I have taken him in.”

“Oh, have you! Well, I may as well tell you I won’t have a dog about the house, much less a thing like that.”

Jesse’s face remained imperturbable.

“If you won’t, Kate, I will.”

His wife stared.

“Where did you pick the thing up?”

“Out of the Castle pool.”

“Someone was showing the sense to drown it. If one has to keep a dog, one may as well keep a decent-looking beast. Even a dog can impose on you, Jesse.”

“Perhaps he can. At all events, he is here to stay.”

Kate Falconer knew her husband’s obstinate moods. They were of rare occurrence, but their very rarity gave them an accumulated inertia that made resistance useless. Jesse would shut his mouth, hunch up his great shoulders, and maintain an impassive silence. It was the poise of a Pyramid, of a great rock half sunk in sand.

“Oh, very well, then. I’m not going to quarrel about a thing on four legs.”

And she crossed the yard and entered the garden by the rough gate that opened under the arch of an old white cluster rose.