THE LINK THAT BINDETH MAN AND WIFE.
After Griff had done with his peats, and had eaten a dinner
proportionate to his labours, he set off for Marshcotes. Mrs. Lomax,
with a cross-country tramp in mind, was just coming out of the gate
when he arrived at the Manor.
"What, going for a walk? Absurd, little mother, under such a blazing
sun."
"It is, rather; but what would you have, Griff? I must fill up my time
somehow."
"That is another of your covert reproaches. I believe you are horribly
jealous of Kate, if the truth were known."
The mother looked him wistfully up and down.
"Yes, I am--as jealous as possible. I miss you so, dear."
Griff, in a man's way, had not been wont to give an over-careful regard
to the looks of those who were constantly about him. Something in
his mother's tone, however, a certain touch of helplessness that was
foreign to her character, set him scrutinizing her face. She seemed
older and more worn, he thought, than when he first returned home, a
year ago.
"You don't look quite yourself, old lady," he said tenderly. "Let's
spend the afternoon in the garden, under that ridiculous lilac-tree
which thinks it can grow at the edge of a moor."
"It is a very fine lilac, Griff," snapped Mrs. Lomax.
"Ah, I thought the fight wasn't all dead in you. Well, I won't abuse
the lilac, and I'll even drink your home-made wine without a murmur,
if only you will promise to amuse me this afternoon. I'm lazy, mother;
don't let us go for a walk."
"Which means that you think _me_ feebler than I was. Oh, yes, you do! I
saw it in your face as you looked at me just now. I have a good mind to
show you what I can do when I choose."
By way of answer Griff threaded his arm through hers, led her into the
garden, and set her down by main force in the shady seat under the
lilac-bushes.
"I have good news for you, mother," he said, breaking a long pause.
"About Kate?" flashed the old lady, with a woman's perspective, and a
mother's half-resentful pride where a grandchild is in question.
But Griff missed her point utterly.
"No; what good news could I bring of her except that she is just as
much Kate as ever? It is about Laverack; you remember telling me
father's relations with him?"
"Yes, I remember well. Only--it is not a topic that pleases me, Griff."
"Not if I tell you that I met him this morning, and made myself known
to him, and called him a cad to his face?"
Her keen old eyes brightened.
"You did that, Griff? Yes, it _is_ good news. It may be unchristian,
but I loathe that man. And if one is framed to love well, how can one
help hating with a will, too?"
"Mother, mother, I despair of you! You're a dreadful Pagan, like the
rest of us," laughed the son, anxious to glance off to other topics,
now that he had conveyed his piece of information.
"Well, your father was a Pagan, right through to the core of him. I
have had worse examples to follow, Griff."
"Did you object to his poaching, I wonder?" said Griff, teasingly.
"After he was married, I mean."
"That, rude boy, is a question I don't choose to answer. It is unwise,
though, they say, to deny a man his luxuries; but the pursuit is a
discreditable one at best."
"I've done with it, at any rate."
An impatient half-sigh accompanied the words.
"I am glad of it."
"But, mother, you have no idea of the glorious rough-and-tumbles we
used to have. Kate, though, has made me promise to keep a whole skin,
and there's an end of it. Heigho! I'm glad the Squire and I made a
decent finish to my career in that line."
A rattling of the garden gate came to them round the corner of the
house.
"Some one seems to be trying to get in," said Mrs. Lomax. "Just run and
open the gate, will you, Griff? You always bang it so hard, and the
latch, like myself, is getting worn out."
Again that helpless note in her voice. Griff did not like it at all.
"Worn out?" he echoed. "Not till you give better proof of it, foolish
mother."
"Boy, kindly flatter your wife, and leave tag-ends of sincerity
for your mother." She tried to laugh, but the effort was not very
successful.
Griff did as he was bid, and went to open the gate. At the other side
stood Greta Rotherson.
"How do you do?" he observed, holding out his hand across the top bar.
"I'm very hot, rather cross, and exceedingly anxious to get under
shelter. How would it be, Mr. Lomax, if you opened the gate?"
"Not just yet. I enjoy making you really angry; it brings such a quaint
little flush to your cheeks."
"I don't want compliments," protested Greta, blushing rosier with
pleasure all the same.
"You'll have to put up with them, I fear, if you won't change your
looks. Even a staid married man like myself----"
"Married you may be, sir, but staid you will never become," said Greta,
demurely. "I am going to knock at the back door, if you won't let me in
at the front."
He opened at that, after weighty argument with the latch, and Greta
tripped in, looking like a bit of fleecy, fair-weather cloud in
her muslin dress. Griff could never quite rid himself of the notion
that she was just a pretty child, and he treated her accordingly.
He wondered, in a way, at the preacher's infatuation; and, with his
mole-like outlook on women as a whole, he asked himself sometimes if
little Greta would be able to weather foul days as well as fair.
Mrs. Lomax brightened as she saw the girl. She had a better notion of
these matters than her son, and never felt the least doubt but that
Greta, for all her butterfly prettiness, was just the sort of woman to
come out strong in a crisis.
"You are earlier than I expected you, my dear. I am glad," said the old
lady, simply.
"Yes, father had to go off to Saxilton on business, and I thought you
might like a chat--which means that I wanted one badly myself."
Then she and Griff began teasing each other, till Greta was likely to
have the worst of it, and Mrs. Lomax interfered. And after awhile there
came another rattling at the gate, followed by the scrunch of heavy
boots on the gravel. Greta talked faster, without waiting for any one
to answer her, and her cheeks were an honest crimson.
Gabriel Hirst, for once in a way, had come in a garb that was likely
to advance his cause; though the accident of his taking Marshcotes
Manor at the end of a long ride must not be set down to any cunning
forethought on the preacher's part. He bungled less than usual as he
came across the grass, and Griff smiled as he noted that his horseback
humour was on him.
Presently Mrs. Lomax snared Griff into the house, on the pretext of
talking over some business matters with him.
"Did you arrange this meeting, mother?" he asked, as he opened the
parlour door for her.
"Didn't I tell you," she smiled, "that I have to find things to do
nowadays?"
"I like the notion of your turning matchmaker. Pray, is this kind of
meeting a regular occurrence?"
"I have very few luxuries, Griff.--Not that it is the least good in
the world. Gabriel seems always to be falling between two stools.
He can't work properly, because he is in love with the girl, and he
won't speak out like a man, because he is not sure yet whether she
is a temptation of the flesh or not. You men--you men! If only you
understood what a true woman's love is worth."
"The lassie would have him--eh, mother?"
"The lassie, sir, will wait till she is asked," retorted the mother.
When Griff reached Gorsthwaite that evening, it struck him that
something was amiss with Kate. His late uneasiness about his mother
had sharpened his eyes, and he was awake to the restlessness in Kate's
movements. From time to time, too, she looked wistfully at him, and
seemed on the point of speaking. More than all, he noted that she was
disposed to be lavish of caresses, in a way that fitted ill with her
wonted undemonstrative strength.
"What ails you, wife?" he ventured once.
"Nothing--nothing at all, dear. Why do you ask?"
"You are so unlike yourself. Have I left you alone too much lately? Say
the word, Katey, and I'll give up the farming, and--and the horse. They
take me away a good deal between them."
"Nonsense, Griff. You are going to give up nothing at all, except your
foolish suspicions of me. I am the happiest woman in the world at this
moment."
Alas for his inexperience! In that curious, half-hysterical assertion
of happiness, he might have read all that she longed to tell him. But
he missed it, and went on to talk of Dereham's coming on the morrow.
"He is rather fastidious, you know," laughed Griff; "what can we give
him to eat? Luckily we have a brace of grouse ready for cooking. How
would an omelette be?"
"I can't make them," protested Kate, vaguely uneasy at the mention of
Dereham's fastidiousness.
"But I can--beauties! It is high time you learned; I'll give you a
lesson in the morning. Oh, yes, we shall manage famously! Tell the
cook, wifey, that she can have a morning off to-morrow, because I mean
to turn her kitchen upside down."
"Indeed, I shall tell her nothing of the kind. I don't trust you,
Griff--you talk too glibly about it."
Griff stroked her cheek playfully.
"You think that omelette will turn out like the women I used to
paint--half-cooked inside, and dried to a cinder outside? Well, we
shall see."
As a matter of fact, the omelette, as well as the rest of the dinner,
turned out remarkably well. Dereham had entered Gorsthwaite with an
uncomfortable feeling that he was here to be bored by a friend's wife,
to make the best of a foolish job; but as the meal went on, and Kate,
in her straightforward way, took up his tentative comments on men and
matters, emphasizing points of view which were too simple ever to have
occurred to him, he began to wonder. From wonder he passed to interest;
he clean forgot the passivity which was his especial pride; he talked
little, and listened much to the words he enticed by strategy from his
hostess. Finally, he felt regretful when Kate left them to their smoke.
"I begin to understand," observed Dereham, after he had silently worked
his way through the half of a cigar.
"What do you understand, you oracle?"
"There you're off it, old fellow. Oracles never understand--they only
pretend to. That is by the way, though. What I meant was, that you seem
to be really established here."
"Why, yes. I should be sorry to desert Gorsthwaite in favour of any
place you could name."
"I thought it was just a pose, you see; we all thought so. You're a
different man altogether, Lomax, from the Ogilvie lap-dog I used to
know. Suits you better, I think."
"Dereham, will you let Mrs. Ogilvie alone? You have exacted penance
enough for that folly already."
"All right, my dear chap; I plead guilty. What I want to know, though,
is, when are we to have another picture? Are you sinking into an animal
pure and simple--a sort of superior hog, that eats and drinks, and
fills in the between-times with sleep?"
Griff, by way of answer, took Dereham up to the room he used as a
studio. A large canvas stood on an easel in the middle of the floor.
Dereham went close to the picture, to which the finishing touches had
been put early that morning, and stood regarding it attentively.
"Humph!" he dropped at length. "Same style as the two eccentric daubs
that the elderly critics profess to think so much of. Gad, though,
there's something in it! Why, bless my soul, the figure in the
foreground is your wife!"
Yes, Griff had struck a fine idea, undoubtedly. The background was a
rush-fringed tarn, with a sweep of rust-coloured bracken on the right
and a clump of heathery knolls on the left; in the foreground, standing
on a peat-bed of brownish-black, was the figure of a woman, her eyes
looking steadfastly out from the canvas, her body set to a careless
strength of pose. One corner of the tarn, and the bracken to the right
of it, were lit by the dying sun; the rest of the moorscape lay in
brooding darkness. On the face of the woman was just that blending of
light and sombre shade in which the moor-features themselves had been
picked out. It was impossible to say which was the more alive, the
woman or the lonely strip of heath; each seemed able to stand alone,
yet each helped the other's strength.
"Anything else?" asked Dereham, after a pause, in his usual nonchalant
tone.
"Yes; the companion to this. One I call 'Moor Calm,' the other 'Moor
Storm.'"
Griff uncovered a second canvas lying against the wall. This time
the background was a swirling sea of heather-tips below; and above,
lightning and tempest and wind-driven, scudding night-clouds. The
naked figure of a man held the foreground--a man eye to eye with
the lightning, shoulder to shoulder with the storm; on his lips sat
determination, but grim laughter lay in his eyes. The whole smote one
with a sense of fearless, Fate-defying nudity.
Dereham shuddered a little as he looked--then shrugged his shoulders
when he saw that Griff was watching him.
"Very fine, my friend, for those who understand it. I don't, for my
part; it makes me feel cold and wet through."
"But I understand it!" interrupted Griff, giving a loose rein to his
enthusiasm. "I never see the moor without thanking God that I took to
painting instead of literature. The moor shifts her expression every
hour, every minute: you can't stir without getting a fine, strong bit
of canvas-work. Yet fools go wasting their time on waterfalls, and
buttercup meadows, and milkmaids going kine-wards. Does it never occur
to them that there is something worth painting, if they will only take
the trouble to climb a few hundred feet to get it?"
"Well, I dare say it will bring you _kudos_," said Dereham, with a
yawn that was intended as an apology for certain twinges of enthusiasm
discernible in his own person. "For my part, I find these moors of
yours devilish healthy, and devilish dull. I'm frankly in love with
houses, and warm fires, and theatres, and the rest of it. If I hadn't
met you, I think not even the shooting would have compensated me for
coming."
"Like it or not, old chap," laughed Griff, "you will hear of me again
when these pictures appear. Have another weed."
"I daren't, in this temple of the rough, the savage, and the naked. You
can't imagine primitive man sitting with a cigar-stump in his mouth.
No, it shall be a pipe.--Lomax," he went on, after he had lit up, "how
do you find time to paint? I thought you were farming all day long."
"I only work when it suits me. My man is dependable enough, and he
keeps things going. But farming puts me into condition, and that saves
me from conceiving the flabby subjects which boomed me. I'm in the
thick of it up here, too--right in the middle of human nature that
isn't ashamed of its simpleness. Every day of my life I rub against
good, sharp angles, and every day I thank the Lord that I am not planed
down to a model human yet."
"Lomax," put in the other, with an air of grave profundity, "don't
begin thanking the Lord that you are a publican and sinner, or you may
be turned into a Pharisee."
"Away with your word-twists! I've done with them.--I say, Dereham,
let's have a round with the gloves," he broke off, as his eyes fell on
a couple of pairs that had been tossed into one corner.
Dereham looked Griff's lengthy muscularity up and down.
"Hit a man your own size," he observed, with a pleasant grin.
But he put on the gloves for all that, and they went at it
hammer-and-tongs, as of old. Griff was more than a match for his
opponent in height and driving power, but the slighter man had the
advantage in quickness; and at the end of the bout they were on pretty
equal terms with regard to blows given and received.
"That does one good," panted Griff. "I am not allowed to slip out at
nights now, Dereham; little moonlight picnics have been knocked on the
head. It's a big responsibility getting married."
"Of course it is. Preserve me from having a woman pin her heart to my
coat-tails; it must be no end of a drag."
"You are an ass, old fellow," retorted Griff, tranquilly; "it is the
finest spur a man can have."
"Lord, Lord! this life is dulling you; I knew it would. Let's talk of
the weather."
"It is odd to think of four of the old set coming together on one
narrow strip of moor," said Griff, breaking a lengthy silence.
"Four? Who's the fourth?" asked Dereham, sharply.
Griff, remembering Roddick's secret, bit his lips and answered nothing.
"I think I can guess," said the other, presently. "The other night I
saw something up above the Folly that gave me a clue; it was lucky
for them that the stars and I had the sight to ourselves. Roddick
disappeared from town as suddenly as you did. Is that the secret? Well,
it is safe enough with me. Roddick may be a fool for his pains, but
he's a jolly good sort. As to the oddity, I don't quite see it. I have
been due to come to the Folly for a fortnight's shooting ever since
last winter; so has Sybil Ogilvie; Roddick follows for the best, and
the worst, of all possible reasons--and, hey presto! where has your
mystery gone?"
"Shall you go to see him?"
"Yes. Where does he live? I can't leave without saying how-d'ye-do to
him. Do you know his story, by the way?"
"From start to finish. Poor beggar, he's in a tight place."
"I sometimes think," said Dereham, with a carelessness that sat oddly
on his words, "I sometimes think that if I had lost all that makes life
worth living, I should go and strangle that beast-wife of Roddick's.
Not that I should, really; but it would be the truest service one could
do him."
"I have played with that notion, too; it would be a tough problem to
settle, if----," said Lomax, musingly.
When Dereham had gone, Kate came and stood by the mantelshelf, and
looked down at her husband, who was sprawling contentedly in his big
easy-chair. He was well satisfied with their little luncheon-party.
Truth to tell, he had been anxious as to the effect which Kate would
produce on this half-tender, half-cynical friend of his butterfly
days; it was not, he told himself, that he really cared a straw that
his own opinion should be endorsed, but he did shrink from the thought
that Dereham might go away and vaguely pity him--that smacked too
much of insult to his wife. Dereham, however, had left no doubt of
his admiration for Kate. As he shook Griff's hand at the door, he had
muttered, "You'll do, old fellow. Can I come to see your wife again?"
And this meant more than it seemed--it meant, in brief, that he envied
his friend his prize. And a man likes to feel this, be he never so
secure in his own judgment.
So, being content, it did not occur to Griff that there was any
underlying trouble in his wife's eyes--though the trouble was more in
evidence than it had been when he noticed it the night before. She
crept to his knee presently, and took his two big hands in hers.
"Griff!"
"Yes, little woman? How very solemn we sound."
"You won't be angry if I ask you a question? Did I--did I shame you,
Griff, before your friend? I know so little of the world, and----"
"Child, be quiet! How dare you hint at such a thing?"
Griff was frowning more than he knew of. He hated this resurrected
doubt, after it had been laid to rest once and for all; he had not been
proud of himself for feeling it, and Kate had no business to allow it
to come into her head.
She saw the frown. Her lip trembled. The next moment she had buried her
face, and was sobbing like a child.
"Wife, wife! what is it all about? Did I speak harshly? I didn't mean
to; only, it was so absurd that you could shame me in any one's eyes,
and--Kate, what is it? You have never given way like this before."
She made no answer for a long while; when she did raise her head at
last, it was to whisper something that set strange new pulses beating
in the man. He understood now; and as he took her on his knee and let
her cry it out against his shoulder, all his wildness seemed to have
merged into one steady wave of tenderness.
And then Kate laughed, low and soft, with a note in her voice that
dated forward.
"He is to be a boy, Griff--he _must_ be a boy--and--and--you will not
be ashamed of _him_ when he comes, will you, dear?"