Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Faint though it was, the reproach in her voice cut him to the heart. Yet his moment had come. He had decided, it is true, to say nothing at all; but then there had been no opening, and here was one such as might never come again.

  ‘Gladdie,’ he began, with great tenderness, ‘don’t be hurt, but I’m going to tell you what may have something to do with it. You know, you are apt to get — I won’t say excited — but perhaps a little too enthusiastic, when you talk of the Bush. Quite right — and no wonder, I say — but then, here in England, somehow, they very seldom seem to get enthusiastic. Then, again — I think — perhaps — you say things that are all right out there, but sound odd in our ridiculous ears. For we are an abominable, insular nation of humbugs — —’ began poor Alfred with a tremendous burst of indignation, fearing that he had said too much, and making a floundering effort to get out of what he had said. But his wife cut him short.

  The colour had mounted to her olive cheeks. Denseness, at all events, was not among her failings — when she kept calm.

  She was sufficiently calm now. ‘I see what you mean, and I shall certainly say no more about Australia. “I like a man that is well-bred!” Do you remember how Daft Larry used to wag his head and say that whenever he saw you? “You’re not one of the low sort,” he used to go on; and how we did laugh! But I’ve been thinking, Alfred, that he couldn’t have said the same about me, if I’d been a man. And — and that’s at the bottom of it all!’ She smiled, but her smile was sad.

  ‘You are offended, Gladys?’

  ‘Not a bit. Only I seem to understand.’

  ‘You don’t understand! And that isn’t at the bottom of it!’

  ‘Very well, then, it isn’t. So stop frowning like that this instant. I’d no idea you looked so well when you were fierce. I shall make you fierce often now. Come, you stupid boy! I shall learn in time. How do you know I’m not learning already? Come away; we’ve had enough of the water-hole, I think.’

  She took his arm, and together they struck across to Ham Gate. But Alfred was silent and moody; and the Bride knew why.

  ‘Dear old Alfred,’ she said at last, pressing his arm with her hand; ‘I know I shall get on well with all your people, in time.’

  ‘All of them, Gladdie?’

  ‘At any rate, all but Granville.’

  ‘Still not Gran! I was afraid of it.’

  ‘No; I shall never care much about Gran. I can’t help it, really I can’t. He is everlastingly sneering, and he thinks himself so much smarter than he is. Then he enjoys it when I make a fool of myself; I see he does; and — oh, I can’t bear him!’

  A pugnacious expression came into Alfred’s face, but passed over, and left it only stern.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know his infernal manner; but, when he sneers, it’s only to show what a superior sort of fellow he is; he doesn’t mean anything by it. The truth is, I fear he’s becoming a bit of a snob; but at least he’s a far better fellow than you think; there really isn’t a better fellow going. Take my word for it, and for Heaven’s sake avoid words with him; will you promise me this much, Gladdie?’

  ‘Very well — though I have once or twice thought there’d be a row between us, and though I do think what he’d hear from me would do him all the good in the world. But I promise. And I promise, too, not to gas about Australia, to any of them for a whole week. So there.’

  They walked on, almost in silence, until Ham Common was crossed and they had reached the middle of the delightful green. And here — with the old-fashioned houses on three sides of them, and the avenue of elms behind them and the most orthodox of village duck-ponds at their feet — Gladys stopped short, and fairly burst into raptures.

  ‘But,’ said Alfred, as soon as he could get a word in, which was not immediately, ‘you go on as though this was the first real, genuine English village you’d seen; whereas nothing could be more entirely and typically English than Twickenham itself.’

  ‘Ah, but this seems miles and miles away from Twickenham, and all the other villages round about that I’ve seen. I think I would rather live here, where it is so quiet and still, like a Bush township. I like Twickenham; but on one side there’s nothing but people going up and down in boats, and on the other side the same thing, only coaches instead of boats. And I hate the sound of those coaches, with their jingle and rattle and horn-blowing; though I shouldn’t hate it if I were on one.’

  ‘Would you so very much like to fizz around on a coach, then?’

  ‘Would I not!’ said Gladys.

  The first person they saw, on getting home, was Granville, who was lounging in the little veranda where they had taken tea on the afternoon of their arrival, smoking cigarettes over a book. It was the first volume of a novel, which he was scanning for review. He seemed disposed to be agreeable.

  ‘Gladys,’ he said, ‘this book’s about Australia; what’s a “new chum,” please? I may as well know, as, so far, the hero’s one.’

  ‘A “new chum,”’ his sister-in-law answered him readily, ‘is some fellow newly out from home, who goes up the Bush; and he’s generally a fool.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Granville; ‘the hero of this story answers in every particular to your definition.’

  Granville went on with his skimming. On a slip of paper lying handy were the skeletons of some of the smart epigrammatic sentences with which the book would presently be pulverised. Husband and wife had gone through into the house, leaving him to his congenial task; when the Tempter, in humorous mood, put it into the head of his good friend Granville to call back the Bride for a moment’s sport.

  ‘I say’ — the young man assumed the air of the innocent interlocutor— ‘is it true that every one out there wears a big black beard, and a red shirt, and jack-boots and revolvers?’

  ‘No, it is not; who says so?’

  ‘Well, this fellow gives me that impression. In point of fact, it always was my impression. Isn’t it a fact, however, that most of your legislators (I meant to ask you this last night, but our friend the senator gave me no chance) — that most of your legislators are convicts?’

  ‘Does your book give you that impression too?’ the Bride inquired coolly.

  ‘No; that’s original, more or less.’

  ‘Then it’s wrong, altogether. But, see here, Gran: you ought to go out there.’

  ‘Why, pray?’

  ‘You remember what I said a “new chum” was?’

  ‘Yes; among other things a fool.’

  ‘Very good. You ought to go out there, because there are the makings of such a splendid “new chum” in you. You’re thrown away in England.’

  Granville dropped his book and put up his eyeglass. But the Bride was gone. She had already overtaken her husband, and seized him by the arm.

  ‘Oh, Alfred,’ she cried, ‘I have done it! I have broken my promise! I have had words with Gran! Oh, my poor boy — I’m beginning to make you wish to goodness you’d never seen me — I feel I am!’

  CHAPTER VIII

  GRAN’S REVENGE

  All men may be vain, but the vanity of Granville Bligh was, so to speak, of a special brand. In the bandying of words (which, after all, was his profession) his vanity was not too easily satisfied by his own performances. This made him strong in attack, through setting up a high standard, of the kind; but it left his defence somewhat weak for want of practice. His war was always within the enemy’s lines. He paid too much attention to his attack. Thus, though seldom touched by an adversary, when touched he was wounded; and, what was likely to militate against his professional chances, when wounded he was generally winged. His own skin was too thin; he had not yet learned to take without a twinge what he gave without a qualm: for a smart and aggressive young man he was simply absurdly sensitive.

  But, though weaker in defence than might have been expected, Granville was no mean hand at retaliation. He neither forgot nor forgave; and he paid on old scores and new ones with the heavy interest demanded by his exorbitant vanity.
Here again his vanity was very fastidious. First or last, by fair means or foul, Granville was to finish a winner. Until he did, his vanity and he were not on speaking terms.

  There were occasions, of course, when he was not in a position either to riposte at once or to whet his blade and pray for the next merry meeting. Such cases occurred sometimes in court, when the bench would stand no nonsense, and brusquely said as much, if not rather more. Incredible as it may seem, however, Granville felt his impotency hardly less in the public streets, when he happened to be unusually well dressed and gutter-chaff rose to the occasion. In fact, probably the worst half-hour he ever spent in his life was one fine morning when unaccountable energy actuated him to walk to Richmond, and take the train there, instead of getting in at Twickenham; for, encountering a motley and interminable string of vehicles en route to Kempton Park, he ran a gauntlet of plebeian satire during that half-hour, such as he never entirely could forget.

  To these abominable experiences, the Bride’s piece of rudeness unrefined (which she had the bad taste to perpetrate at the very moment when he was being rude to her, but in a gentlemanlike way) was indeed a mere trifle; but Granville, it will now be seen, thought more of trifles than the ordinary rational animal; and this one completely altered his attitude towards Gladys.

  If, hitherto, he had ridiculed her, delicately, to her face, and disparaged her — with less delicacy — behind her back, he had been merely pursuing a species of intellectual sport, without much malicious intent. He was not aware that he had ever made the poor thing uncomfortable. He had not inquired into that. He was only aware that he had more than once had his joke out of her, and enjoyed it, and felt pleased with himself. But his sentiment towards her was no longer so devoid of animosity. She had scored off him; he had felt it sufficiently at the moment; but he felt it much more when it had rankled a little. And he despised and detested himself for having been scored off, even without witnesses, by a creature so coarse and contemptible. He was too vain to satisfy himself with the comfortable, elastic, and deservedly popular principle that certain unpleasantnesses and certain unpleasant people are ‘beneath notice.’ Nobody was beneath Granville’s notice; he would have punished with his own boot the young blackguards of the gutter, could he have been sure of catching them, and equally sure of not being seen; and he punished Gladys in a fashion that precluded detection — even Gladys herself never knew that she was under the lash.

  On the contrary, she ceased to dislike her brother-in-law. He was become more polite to her than he had ever been before; more affable and friendly in every way. Quite suddenly, they were brother and sister together.

  ‘How well those two get on!’ Lady Bligh would whisper to her husband, during the solemn game of bezique which was an institution of their quieter evenings; and, indeed, the Bride and her brother-in-law had taken to talking and laughing a good deal in the twilight by the open window. But, sooner or later, Granville was sure to come over to the card-table with Gladys’s latest story or saying, with which he would appear to be hugely amused: and the same he delighted to repeat in its original vernacular, and with its original slips of grammar, but with his own faultless accent — which emphasised those peculiarities, making Lady Bligh sigh sadly and Sir James look as though he did not hear. And Alfred was too well pleased that his wife had come to like Granville at last, to listen to what they were talking about; and the poor girl herself never once suspected the unkindness; far from it, indeed, for she liked Granville now.

  ‘I thought he would never forgive me for giving him that bit of my mind the other day; but you see, Alfred, it did him good; and now I like him better than I ever thought possible in this world. He’s awfully good to me. And we take an interest in the same sort of things. Didn’t you hear how interested he was in Bella’s sweetheart at lunch to-day?’

  Alfred turned away from the fresh bright face that was raised to his. He could not repress a frown.

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t call the girl Bella,’ he said, with some irritation. ‘Her name’s Bunn. Why don’t you call her Bunn, dear? And nobody dreams of making talk about their maids’ affairs, let alone their maids’ young men, at the table. It’s not the custom — not in England.’

  A week ago he would not have remonstrated with her upon so small a matter; but the ice had been broken that morning in Richmond Park. And a week ago she would very likely have told him, laughingly, to hang his English customs; but now she looked both pained and puzzled, as she begged him to explain to her the harm in what she had said.

  ‘Harm?’ said Alfred, more tenderly. ‘Well, there was no real harm in it — that’s the wrong word altogether — especially as we were by ourselves, without guests. Still, you know, the mother doesn’t want to hear all about her servants’ family affairs, and what her servants’ sweethearts are doing in Australia, or anywhere else. All that — particularly when you talk of the woman by her Christian name — sounds very much — why, it sounds almost as though you made a personal friend of the girl, Gladdie!’

  Gladys opened wide her lovely eyes. ‘Why, so I do!’

  Alfred looked uncomfortable.

  ‘So I do!’ said the Bride again. ‘And why not, pray? There, you see, you know of no reason why I shouldn’t be friends with her, you goose! But I won’t speak of her any more as Bella, if you don’t like — except to her face. I shall call her what I please to her face, sir! But, indeed, I wouldn’t have spoken about her at all to-day, only I was interested to know her young man was out there; and Gran seemed as interested as me, for he went on asking questions — —’

  Alfred was quite himself again.

  ‘Any way, darling,’ he said, interrupting her with a kiss, ‘I am glad you have got over your prejudice against Gran!’ — and he went out, looking it; but leaving behind him less of gladness than he carried away.

  The conversation had taken place in the little morning-room in the front of the house, which faced the west; and the strong afternoon sunshine, striking down through the trembling tree-tops, dappled the Bride’s face with lights and shadows. It was not, at the moment, a very happy face. All the reckless, radiant, aggressive independence of two or three weeks ago was gone out of it. The bold, direct glance was somewhat less bold. The dark, lustrous, lovely eyes were become strangely wistful. Gladys was in trouble.

  It had crept upon her by slow degrees. Shade by shade the fatal truth had dawned even upon her — the fatal disparity between herself and her new relatives. This was plainer to no one now than to the Bride herself; and to her the disparity meant despair — it was so wide — and it grew wider day by day, as her realisation of it became complete. Well, she had made friends with Granville: but that was all. The Judge had been distant and ceremonious from the first: he was distant and ceremonious still. He had never again unbent so much as at that tragic moment when he bade her rise from her knees in the wet stable-yard. As for Lady Bligh, she had begun by being kind enough; but her kindness had run to silent sadness. She seemed full of regrets. Gladys was as far from her as ever. And Gladys knew the reasons for all this — some of them. She saw, now, the most conspicuous among her own shortcomings; and against those that she did see (Heaven knows) she struggled strenuously. But there were many she could not see, yet; she felt this, vaguely; and it was this that filled her with despair.

  It was green grass that she gazed out upon from the morning-room window, as the trouble deepened in her eyes; and in Australia she had seldom seen grass that was green. But just then she would have given all the meadows of England for one strip of dry saltbush plain, with the sun dropping down behind the far-away line of sombre, low-sized scrub, and the sand-hills flushing in the blood-red light, and the cool evening wind coming up from the south. The picture was very real to her — as real, for the moment, as this shaven grass-plot, and the line of tall trees that shadowed it, with their trunks indistinguishable, in this light, against the old brick wall. Then she sighed, and the vision vanished — and she thought of Alfred.

&
nbsp; ‘He can’t go on loving me always, unless I improve,’ she said dismally. ‘I must get more like his own people, and get on better with them, and all that. I must! Yet he doesn’t tell me how to set to work; and it’s hard to find out for oneself. I am trying; but it’s very hard. If only somebody would show me how! For, unless I find out, he can’t care about me much longer — I see it — he can’t!’

  Yet it seemed that he did.

  If attending to the most extravagant wish most lightly spoken counts for anything, Alfred could certainly care for his wife still, and did care for her very dearly indeed. And that wish that Gladys had expressed while walking through the village of Ham — the desire to drive about in a coach-and-four — had been at least lightly uttered, and had never since crossed her mind, very possibly. Nevertheless, one day in the second week of June the coach-and-four turned up — spick and span, and startling and fairylike as Cinderella’s famous vehicle. It was Alfred’s surprise; he had got the coach for the rest of the season; and when he saw that his wife could find no words to thank him — but could only gaze at him in silence, with her lovely eyes grown soft and melting, and his hand pressed in hers — then, most likely, the honest fellow experienced a purer joy than he had ever known in all his life before. Nor did the surprise end there. By collusion with Lady Bligh and Granville, a strong party had been secretly convened for Ascot the very next day; and a charming dress, which Gladys had never ordered, came down from her dressmaker in Conduit Street that evening — when Alfred confessed, and was hugged. And thus, just as she was getting low and miserable and self-conscious, Gladys was carried off her feet and whirled without warning into a state of immense excitement.

  Perhaps she could not have expressed her gratitude more eloquently than she did but a minute before they all drove off in the glorious June morning; when, getting her husband to herself for one moment, she flung her arms about his neck and whispered tenderly: —