The Challenge of Love. Victorian Romance Novel
us important, and able to say the nastiest thing that we please? I like to take people like I take dogs and horses. I’m not afraid of them, and that’s everything.”
Wolfe looked at her thoughtfully.
“Most of us—when we grow up—are so shy and so afraid of staring too hard at someone else’s crooked legs that we play a game of peep-bo round corners.”
“You don’t.”
“Thank you!”
“I shouldn’t think you were ever afraid of anything. That’s why I like you.”
Wolfe winced inwardly, as a man should when he is a keen and honest critic of self.
“Men are afraid of things that you have never thought of.”
“What things?”
“Losing money or losing work; offending people who are useful; getting themselves laughed at or hated.”
“But if I felt myself in the right?”
“Well?”
“I’d never give in, never.”
“By George, I don’t believe you would.”
He looked at her with a kind of awe, the awe of a man for something that is terribly and beautifully sincere. In the old tales of chivalry strong men knelt and took some young girl as their Lady of Honour. Wolfe understood the human significance of the spirit of chivalry. It was the bowing down of the man before cleanliness, beauty, and truth.
“Then you wouldn’t think much of a fellow who met a savage dog in a lane, and slunk round by another way?”
Her eyes met Wolfe’s.
“No, I shouldn’t.”
“No; that’s right.”
They had passed from under the beech trees, and down the wet, sunlit road came Bob Munday in the Moor Farm pony-cart. The boy had a way of staring wonderingly at Jess. He would have jumped into the great duck pond if she had so much as hinted that it would please her.
“Hallo, here’s Bob. I must be riding on, or I shall not be back by surgery hours.”
He looked down at her gravely.
“Do you know, you have done me a great deal of good.”
“I?”
“Yes, you.”
And Wolfe rode on with the wave of the hat, and a heart that felt warmer and less cynical.
CHAPTER NINE
Mrs. Threadgold had chosen to be curious as to how this big, lean, brown man spent his evenings in his little bedroom at the top of Prospect House, and, since curiosity is the clockwork that moves many a small mind, Mrs. Threadgold remembered that Wolfe’s shirt cuffs were badly frayed. It would be doing the man a kindness if she went through his linen, and arranged for one of the maids to sew new cuffs on Wolfe’s shirts, and mend any socks that were in need of darning. Mrs. Threadgold accepted herself and her moral solidity with such complete seriousness that nothing that she ever did struck her as being mean and trivial. Self-criticism did not exist for her, nor did she ever catch a glimpse of her own smooth face reflected in the distorting glass of self-scorn. People who have no sense of humour will perpetrate the most astounding impertinences and convulse a whole household over the disappearance of a packet of pins.
Slyness was not part of the adventure. In fact, Mrs. Sophia felt no desire to conceal her exploration of Wolfe’s room.
“Elizabeth, I am going to look through Mr. Wolfe’s linen. I see that some of it is very shabby. We must see if we can do something for it.”
“Yes, ma’am, some of the shirts are all holes.”
“Indeed!”
“Mr. Wolfe has only four, ma’am.”
Mrs. Threadgold may not have realised what she was saying when she remarked, “I must speak to him about it.” She was always “speaking to people,” and the phrase was a habit with her.
She went in and rummaged with true feminine thoroughness, and in the course of her rummaging she discovered Wolfe’s map. Wolfe, like most large-natured men, had little secretiveness; moreover, the lock of his portmanteau was broken. Two well-worn shirts, and a couple of pairs of old socks lay on the bed. Mrs. Sophia stood by the window, holding Wolfe’s map of Navestock that was pinned to a large piece of cardboard and staring at the multi-colored patterns, and the neat records written with a mapping pen. No great ingenuity was required to discover the true meaning of the thing. Mrs. Threadgold had her spectacle case with her. She laid the map on the chest of drawers, put on her glasses, and went through Wolfe’s researches at her leisure.
Dr. Threadgold, when he was not too busy, made a practice in summer of taking a glass of port under the lime tree in the back garden of Prospect House. His wife had her basket chair and her wicker work-table carried out into the shade, and the sunlight would come fluttering through the lime leaves upon these two people who looked so smooth and pleased and placid. The garden was nothing but gravel and grass, with a trellis covered with a vine at one end, and a single bed of geraniums in the centre of the grass plot staring heavenwards like a great red eye. A few laurels filled the corners, and there were a few fruit trees on the walls patterned out like the Tree of Life upon an Assyrian tablet.
In a town one may be made the victim of vulgarity of one’s neighbours, and old Johnson, the wine merchant, who lived in the next house, kept a parrot and three musical daughters. Old Johnson and Mrs. Threadgold did not love each other. It was a case of “That underbred person, the wine merchant,” and “That female next door.” Mr. Johnson’s green parrot was put out into the garden, and amused himself there by twanging the wires of his cage, squalling like a cat, and talking—as Mr. Johnson’s parrot might be expected to talk. Dr. Threadgold, who was “Montague” in the house, and before visitors and servants, became “Monte” in the garden under the shade of the lime. Mr. Johnson’s parrot had picked up the cry. He would bob up and down on his perch, and shout “Monte, Monte,” in imitation of Mrs. Threadgold.
“Monte, Monte.”
Mrs. Sophia was under the lime tree, watching her husband who stood at the study window turning over the pages of a book. They had finished dinner twenty minutes ago, and Wolfe had been called away suddenly to a case of sunstroke in the “Pardons” hay-fields. Mrs. Sophia had called twice to her husband, but apparently he had not heard.
“Montague.”
Dr. Threadgold opened the french window and came out.
“Did you call, dear?”
“I called you twice before.”
“I thought it was that wretched bird of Johnson’s.”
“Montague! Do you mean to say——?”
“No, of course not.”
“Your wine is here.”
“Chuck my chin, chuck my chin,” said a voice over the wall.
Mrs. Threadgold watched her husband cross the grass, his hands behind him, a broad-brimmed hat throwing a shadow across his face. In the course of some twenty years Sophia Threadgold had come to know every hole, cranny, and corner of this little man’s soul, his vanities and foibles, his genial strutting affectations, his sententious timidity, his horror of giving offence. She knew his moods, and the symptoms that characterised them; the remarks he would make upon any particular subject, the way he would jump at any given flick of her tongue. Her affection for him was a queer mingling of motherliness and contempt. She owned him, and padded his amiable flaccidity with the buckram of her rigid selfishness.
“Mr.