Part 27 (1/2)

Once, when after delay a tobacconist addressed an account to her care, and she timidly reproached the cigar-smoker for a lapse of memory that might almost seem undignified, she was answered with chaffing, laughing, joviality.

”Well, my dear, if you're so afraid of our credit going down, there's an easy way out of the difficulty. Write a cheque yourself, and clean the slate for me.”

But one must make allowances. This was a favourite phrase of hers, and it helped the drift of her calmer thoughts. As he said so often, youth has its characteristic faults. Want of thought is not necessarily want of heart.

Perhaps when he began to work, he might improve. There was no doubt that he possessed the capacity for work. He _had_ worked, hard and well. Many a good horse that has not s.h.i.+ed or swerved when kept into its collar will, if given too much stable and too many beans, show unsuspected vice and kick the cart to pieces. And the cure for your horse, the medicine for your man, is work.

Of course he had many redeeming traits. One was his jollity--not often disturbed, if people would humour him. Comfort, too, in the recollection that he treated her with respect--never consciously insulted her--in public.

Sometimes when the shadows and the flickering glow drowsily slackened in their dance, and sleep with soft yet heavy fingers at last pressed upon her eyelids, she was willing to believe that all her fiery thought and shadowy dread was but morbid nonsense occasioned by the queer state of her nerves, and by nothing else.

Truly, during this period of her extreme weakness, she was physically incapable of standing up to him; there was no fight left in her. For a time at least, she could not attempt to protect herself, or anyone else who looked to her for protection.

It pained her, but she was unable to interfere, when he roughly repulsed Gordon Thompson.

They were sitting at luncheon, with the servant going in and out of the room; she heard the street door open and shut; there was a sound of hob-nailed boots, and then came the familiar whistle--like a ghostly echo from the past.

”Who the devil's that?”

”I--I think it must be my Linkfield cousin.”

”Oh, is it?” And Marsden jumped up, and went out to the landing.

”Jen-ny! Jen-ny! You up there?”

The farmer stood at the bottom of the steep stairs, and Marsden was at the top, looking down at him. Mrs. Marsden heard nearly the whole of the conversation, but dared not, could not interfere.

”Any dinner for a hungry wayfarer?”

Gordon Thompson, furious at the marriage, had missed many mid-day meals; but now he came to pick up the severed thread of kindness. However, he was not confident; his whistle had been feeble, tentative, and the ascending note of his voice quavered. In order to propitiate, he had brought from Linkfield a market-gardener's basket with celery and winter cabbages. The present would surely make them glad to see him.

”What do you want here? No orders are given at the door. We buy our vegetables at Rogers's in High Street. Don't come cadging here. Get out.”

Marsden wickedly pretended to mistake him for an itinerant greengrocer.

”Mayn't I go up?... Is it to be cuts? Am I not to call on my cousin?”

”Who's your cousin, I'd like to know.”

”Jen-ny Thompson.”

”No one of that name lives here.”

”Jen-ny Marsden then. I say--it's all right. You're him, I suppose.

Well, I'm Gordon Thompson--your wife's cousin.”

”My wife never had a cousin of that name. Before she married me, she married a man called Thompson--though she didn't marry all his humbugging beggarly relations.”

”Oh, I say--don't go on like that. Don't make it cuts.”