The Challenge of Love. Victorian Romance Novel
to talk to you about Mr. Wolfe.”
“Oh!”
“Rats, rats, rats!” shouted the green bird on the other side of the red-brick wall.
Mrs. Threadgold trampled straight into her subject without any sensitive hesitation. She had gone to look through Wolfe’s linen for him, and she had discovered more than ragged socks and torn shirts. That map of Wolfe’s had amplified and explained certain broken pieces of gossip that had come to her ears. Like most selfish people, she was very shrewd when she had to deal with anything that affected the little world about her.
“I call it gross disloyalty to you, Monte. A sort of underhand spying, and scandal-mongering on paper.”
Dr. Threadgold had poured out his port, but he forgot to touch the wine, and sat with blank blue eyes set staringly behind his glasses. Mr. Johnson’s parrot was silent, listening with head on one side and an eye cocked cynically in the direction of the lime tree. “What a woman!” The bird stretched one leg with expressive leisureliness, nibbled at his claws with his beak, and then sat up with an air of interested attention.
“But, my dear——”
“You know, Monte, what Mr. Hubbard told you. It is very easy to see what this might lead to. What does the man mean by prying about in Navestock? He must have some object. You don’t pay him to go about to set the whole town by the ears. You must speak to him about that map. It ought to be burned.”
“But, my dear, I can’t say——”
“What can’t you say, Monte?”
“I can’t know that the map exists.”
“I have told you.”
“But, my dear, be reasonable. How can I? Prying about in a man’s room! Why——”
“I did not go there to look for it. It was a coincidence, Montague, and a very fortunate coincidence, and you should have no hesitation of taking advantage of it. Supposing it gets abroad that this assistant of yours has been amusing himself by condemning half the property in the town? He may be a young fool, Montague, but would it do you any good?”
The parrot shouted “Hurrah!” Threadgold gave an irritable jerk of the head.
“Confound that bird!”
“You must speak to Wolfe about this, and absolutely forbid him——”
“My dear, I can’t. I can’t assume——”
“There is nothing to assume. Surely you are not afraid of your own assistant? We had better get rid of him at once if that is the case. I will go and fetch that map and show it you.”
“Sophia, please do nothing of the kind.”
“You ought to see it. I insist upon your seeing it.”
“My dear——”
The parrot twanged the bars of his cage, screamed, and then remarked in an undertone: “She’s a devil—she’s a devil.”
As Dr. Threadgold had said, a sunstroke in the “Pardons” hay-fields had hurried Wolfe away from the dinner table. A sunburnt man, coatless, his blue-check shirt open at the throat, had come running up from the river meadows, his brown face wet with sweat under his broad-brimmed hat. The sky was a clear, sultry blue, and the mulberry trees on the Green might have been carved out of green marble. The air shimmered with heat, and windows were open and blinds drawn. Shadows were sharp and heavy, and the glare of the sun upon the paving stones and cobbles dazzled and tired the eyes.
The Wraith glided sluggishly under the red-brick bridges, water-weeds trailing with a languorous motion, the pollard willows along the bank hanging drowsy and motionless heads. Dust lay thick upon the roads, and whitened the grass, the wild flowers, and the hedges. Blue haze covered Tarling Moor, and the sun was a great, blazing buckler heated to a white heat.
The sunburnt man led Wolfe along a path beside the river. The fields, shorn by the scythe, were a brownish yellow; and the scattered earth, ploughed up in lines and patches by the moles, a pale, dry brown. Westwards, “Pardons” rose as a great mound of green shadows, its twisted chimneys showing above the solemn spires of its cedars. The garden, sloping towards the river, was splashed here and there with colour. “Pardons” was famous for its lawns, sleek, sun-streaked stretches of grass spreading in long curves under the motionless canopies of its trees. The place satisfied the eyes with its calm, cool opulence. Between the dark trunks of the cedars Wolfe saw the fish-ponds glimmering, studded with the green leaves and the white-and-yellow cups of the water-lilies. Beyond the house spread the park, clasped by a red-brick wall that rose and fell with the undulations of the ground. Deer herded there amid the bracken, and about the clumps of beech trees that were like great temples paved with bronze. Some of the old oaks were mere huge, grey shells stretching out a few twisted limbs like monsters defying Time. Ilexes had been planted a hundred years ago, and their leaves glittered when the wind blew. Between the park and the garden ran yew hedges twenty feet high, black as midnight, and as solemn.
The field under the park wall was fragrant with tossed and sun-scorched hay. Only half of it had been mown, the fresh swathes lying at the purple edge of the uncut grass. Men had thrown down their scythes, women their rakes and forks. They had huddled themselves in a group under the boughs of an oak that grew close to the park wall, the pink-and-white sun-bonnets of the women mixed with the hats of the men. A crowd never seems to think. It is a mere amorphous mass, an amœba-like thing that flows, and emits jelly-like protrusions when stimulated by curiosity, sympathy, and fear.
Wolfe pushed through.
“Get back, please, get back.”
The circle enlarged itself like a smoke ring, with irregular undulations. At the foot of the tree they had laid a man on a couple of smocks and rolled up another under his head. His face was dead-white with a queer glistening whiteness, his body flaccid, his eyes closed. He was unconscious, and breathing very feebly. A woman in a blue-print bodice and a white apron was kneeling beside him, and mopping his face with a wet rag.
The haymakers stared at Wolfe, but Wolfe looked only at the man. He bent down, and put a hand inside his shirt.
“When did it happen?”
The woman with the wet rag answered him through her blubberings.
“Not an hour past, doctor.”
“After a meal, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And plenty of drink?”
She looked at him with humid eyes pleading pitifully in a wrinkled, ugly face.
“ ’E be’n’t dying, doctor?”
Wolfe was silent, feeling the beat of the man’s heart.
“Oh, don’t say it be death, sir. He was such a lusty chap. He was laughing over ’is beer.”
“I’m sorry. But he’s bad.”
The woman began to sob, the strings of her sunbonnet twitching upon her shoulders.
Wolfe was raising the man’s lids when a voice came from somewhere, a deep, languid, mellow voice, and if colour can be ascribed to voices, the colour of gold under trees at twilight. The country folk moved aside. The woman in the blue bodice sat up and wiped her eyes with the wet rag.
“Who is it?”
“Tom Bett, ma’am.”
“A sunstroke.”
“Dr. Threadgold’s man be here.”
Wolfe, half turning, saw a woman in a white dress moving from the open sunlight into the shade of the oak. She seemed to glide rather than to walk in the cloud-like expanse of her crinoline. She was a very tall woman, and a mass of auburn hair surrounded a face that was white and smooth as ivory. This hair of hers was the colour of copper in certain lights; in others—all dusted over with