Slinker’s wife 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.
Somewhere and 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 faint when 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. But _she_ goes 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. Why _should_ she 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 she _is_ ashamed 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, and I 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-planned _comédie 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 you _know_?” he asked, laying a hand
for a moment on an ancient trunk. “And you _do_ know!”
“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 most
wretched, 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.”