A Sheaf of Corn Part 31

"Which dog?" he asked, pulling up, smiling at her.

"Your horrid little white dog."

"I haven't got a little white dog," he said, and laughed, and went away.

After all, Elinor did not share the expedition to Wenderling; for at lunch-time it came on to rain, and Ted would not let her get wet. He was proud of seeing her rough it sometimes; he delighted to take her hunting on days when no other lady was in the field, to see her face, rosy and eager, her bright hair darkened with the wet, the raindrops hanging on her hat. He kept her beside him, standing silent and patient in a certain soppy, sodden spot by the river, waiting for the chance of a wild duck flying homeward above the low-lying mists of the fens. What did not hurt him could not harm her, in her youth and strength and spirit, he thought.

"She has the pluck and the staying power of a man," he was proud to tell Anstey; but was proud, too, now and again, to exercise his new prerogative of taking care of the wife who was such a recent, dear possession. Quite unexpectedly, he would veto some proceeding she proposed.

"I won't have you doing it," he would say with dignity. And she was equally proud to obey.

"Ted says I mustn't," or "Ted says I may." What, in those golden hours, did it matter which?

She walked with him, bareheaded, through the drizzling rain to the house where the bicycles were kept, and felt the tyres with him, and rubbed a spot of rust off the handle bar, and walked beside him again, he pushing the machine, down the drive to the road.

"It's a beastly day," Ted said, with an eye c.o.c.ked at the low-hanging, steel-coloured clouds. "If Bob wasn't so keen on my seeing this horse, I'd chuck it and stay with you."

"Come home soon," she begged him; and, "You may be sure I shall come as soon as I possibly can," he promised her.

"It wasn't Bob's dog that bothered you the other day," she told him as he stood ready to mount, his foot on the pedal; "Bob hasn't got a little white dog."

"It must have been that brute that ran out from Barker's under Starlight's feet the other day, then," he called, and was off.

Nell stood by the gate and watched him till he joined his friend, and, in spite of the faster falling rain, she watched him still. Before they reached the bend of the road Ted turned his head; she waved a gay hand to him, and he, hesitating for a moment, wheeled round and bicycled back.

"Did you call me, Nell?" he said.

Of course she had not called.

"Bob knew you hadn't, but I thought I heard you call; and then you held up your hand and beckoned me."

"Nonsense! Nothing of the sort!" she laughed. "Be off, Ted. I shall never get you home again if you don't start."

"You'll have me home in a twinkling," he promised. And in a flash was gone.

She turned and ran back, with head bent beneath the downpouring rain, light-hearted, to her home, not knowing, never guessing that on that handsome, smiling, healthy face of her young husband she had looked her last.

For when, a couple of hours later, borne on men's shoulders, he was carried to his home, he was so crushed and mangled out of his likeness as his wife had known him that, even by force, they prevented her from looking upon him.

When time had elapsed--Elinor, for some part of it mercifully numbed or unconscious, could not have told if hours, days or weeks--Bob Anstey, at her request, was brought to her. He had been in waiting, knowing that, sooner or later, that meeting, if they did not die with the pain of it, must be lived through.

He had expected to see her lying helpless and strengthless with hidden face. She was standing up against the darkened windows at the end of the long room furthest from the door. He started, walking slowly, almost as if he was groping his way, among the familiar chairs and tables, in her direction. But when half the s.p.a.ce was traversed, and she still stood there, uttering no word, dully watching him, his courage failed, and he stopped short. It was the sight of Ted's chair, his pipes on the bracket beside it, the picture of him, smiling, in the silver frame on the mantelpiece, which unmanned him. He had prayed that he might have strength to support the girl-widow in this interview; and he found himself suddenly giving way before her, sobbing like a child; while Elinor looked on tearlessly from afar, dangling the ta.s.sel of the window-blind in her hand.

When at length he somewhat mastered his grief and looked up, she had come quite close to him, but she did not speak.

"I thought you might like to hear," Anstey said, in sorrow-m.u.f.fled voice; and she nodded her head for him to go on.

"He--talked of you nearly all the way," he began. "He said how----"

She stopped him. "Not that," she said, "not yet. The other--the other!"

By some instinct he knew what she meant. "It was going down the Wenderling Hill," he said, "just as we got into the town. You know that steepish hill? Halfway down was a brewer's waggon. We were going at a good stroke, not saying anything, for the moment. We got up to the waggon. 'There's that infernal white dog again,' he said. And I heard him call loudly, 'Get out of the way, you brute!' He swerved violently on one side, as if the dog were in his path--I don't know how it happened; G.o.d knows _why_ it happened!--he was flung right under the wheels. He--thank G.o.d, he did not suffer, Nell, or know a moment's terror or regret. He died instantly."

Elinor was silent for long. She sat, with brow clasped tightly in both hands, looking intently upon the carpet at his feet, trying, he thought, to understand, to get into a mind too confused to work receptively what he was saying to her. Presently, still tightly holding her head, but with more of comprehension in her face, she looked up.

"And the dog?" she asked him. "The little white dog?"

"It's a strange thing about the dog," he told her slowly. "There wasn't one!"

IT ANSWERED

"And besides all that, the poor little woman is ill," he said. "She didn't complain much, but she looked like a ghost to-day."

"What is the matter with her now?" his wife asked.

She was lying back in her chair as if she, herself, were a little tired, and her long white hands busied themselves with four knitting-needles from which depended the leg of a knickerbocker-stocking intended for the shapely limb of Everard Barett.

He looked quickly at her with an air of suspicion and offence. "Now?"

he repeated. "What does '_now_' mean, spoken in that tone? I don't want to talk about Vera if you don't want to hear. You call the little woman your friend, and ask in that tone, 'What's the matter with her _now_?'"

Mrs Barett knitted on in silence during the agitated minute in which her husband kicked away the chair on whose seat his feet had been stretched, sat up, punched the cushion behind him three times with a vicious fist, and, finding it even then fail intelligently to support his head, flung it across the room.

"'Matter with her _now_!'" he snorted to himself, in a tone as unlike that mimicked as possible.

"Vera seems to be generally full of complaints, that's all," the wife said.

He gave her a furious glance, and stretched a hand backwards for the newspaper that lay on the table behind him. "We will change the subject," he said, loftily.

"She has her husband, who is devoted to her," Mrs Barett reminded him, disregarding the remark.

For answer the man moved impatiently, and angrily slapped one of his slippered feet over the other.

She smiled upon her knitting. "I daresay her husband isn't the style of man you admire, but he is devoted to her all the same," she said.

"Pappy idiot!" Mr Barett e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. He worked himself deeper into his chair, and held his newspaper before his face.

His wife knitted on, and presently said, as if of the outcome of her thought, "I will go in and see Vera to-morrow, of course."

The newspaper rustled defiantly as it was turned over.

"You know very well, Everard, if Vera is really ill there is no one more sorry than I. Of course, I shall not neglect her."

He was mollified by that, and lowered the paper sufficiently to gaze over the top of it into the fire. "It would be rather unfair if you did; and, considering all the little woman did for you when baby was born, a little like ingrat.i.tude into the bargain," he said. "You can't have forgotten all she did?"

No. She had not forgotten, Mrs Barett admitted.