Sisters Part 41

"What do letters matter to us?"

"That we can't tell until we see them."

They went in out of the sunshine to their arm-chairs in the shade. The English mail had arrived, and it was very interesting. Letters from lords and ladies, piles of papers of fashionable intelligence, voices from that world which one of the pair had already begun to hanker to be back in, although not yet distinctly conscious of it. The bride fetched her work-basket, and busied herself with a piece of useless embroidery, while the bridegroom read aloud to her pa.s.sages from the epistles of his t.i.tled correspondents, and from the printed chronicles of their doings here and there. She had dreamed of his reading again the sort of things that he used to read, while she sewed and listened; but in the life that he had lived and grown to there had been no room for learning and the arts. He had dropped them, with his health and his horsemanship, long ago. The coroneted letters and the MORNING POST occupied them until luncheon.

At luncheon, as at every other meal--despite the new husband's expressed desire to have his wife to himself--his valet was present as butler, watching over the dyspeptic's diet, and seeing that the wine was right. Neither master nor man trusted anybody else to do this. It was a large crumple in Deb's rose-leaf, Manton's limpet-like attachment to Claud, who seemed unable to do anything without his servant's help, and the latter's cool relegation of herself to the second place in the MENAGE. It was all very well for HER to give her husband the premier place--she did it gladly--but for Manton to take possession of Redford as a mere appendage of his lord's was quite another matter. It was still the honeymoon, and he might do as he liked--or rather, as Claud liked; but it was not difficult to foresee the day when the valet who dictated to her cook would become too much for the proud spirit of the lady of the house, with whom it had ever been dangerous to make too free--or to foretell what would happen then.

Claud dozed through the afternoon--like most idle and luxurious men, he drank a great deal of wine, which made him sleepy--and Deb took the opportunity to go all through her house and put everything in order.

They met again at tea, and had a stroll about the garden, arm-in-arm and happy. Dinner was a rather silent function. Deb wished for Jim, and regretted her easy abandonment of him; Claud never talked when he was eating--the business was too serious, and Manton was there. But while her husband smoked over his coffee, serene and charming, she sat alone with him, revelling in his wit and gaiety, telling herself that he was indeed the splendid fellow she had always thought him.

Then they went up to the big drawing-room--he was used to big rooms--and he flung himself at full length upon one of the downy couches, and she put silk pillows under his head.

While she was doing it, he pulled her down to him and kissed her.

"It's nice, isn't it?" he murmured in her ear.

For answer, she pressed her lips to his ivory brows and his dropped eyelids. Her big heart was too full for speech.

"Now I am going to play to you," she whispered, and went off to the old piano, that the tuner had prepared for this sacred purpose.

What years it was since she had cared to touch piano keys! And never since the love-time of her youth had she played as she did now--all the old things that he had ever cared for, with the old pa.s.sion in them....

And while she played--he slumbered peacefully.

Jim, when his day of hard work was over, went back to his manager's house--all the home he knew--had a bath, put on clean clothes, ate perfunctorily of roast mutton, and bread and jam, and sat down with his pipe on the top step of his verandah, where he hugged his knees and watched the stars come out. He was a confirmed old bachelor now, "set", his sisters said, in his bachelor ways. None of them lived with him, to keep his house and cheer him up. It was too dull for them (with the mistress of Redford never there), and besides, he did not want cheering; for himself, he preferred dullness. An old working housekeeper "did" for him, cooking his simple meals--eggs and bacon alternating with chops for breakfast, and mutton and bread and jam for his tea-dinner, with a fowl for Sundays--keeping his few plain rooms clean and his socks mended. A hundred or two a year must have covered his household expenses; the hundreds remaining of his handsome income went to sh.o.r.e up the weak-kneed of his kindred, who had the habit of falling back on him when their funds ran out, or anything else went wrong with them.

He was a great reader. Books lined the walls of his otherwise meagrely furnished rooms--they represented the one personal extravagance that he indulged in--and newspapers and magazines came by every mail. In these and in his thoughts he lived, when not intent upon the affairs of the estate, which in the eyes of some appeared wholly to absorb him.

Tonight his thoughts sufficed. The latest parcel from Mullens' lay untied, the new American periodicals with wrappers intact. Deb was home again--that was enough food for the mind at present.

But, oh, what a home-coming! His own and only "boss" no longer, as heretofore, but subject to a husband who clearly meant to be his master, and as clearly meant him to have no mistress any more. Neither in the way of business nor in the way of sentiment could she be again to him what she had been throughout his life--the altar of his sacrifice, the G.o.ddess of his simple worship, his guide, his goal. He must not hope, nor try, nor even long for her now. That one last comfort was taken from him.

Well!...

He walked about, while the fiercest paroxysm racked him. As some of us in our pain-torments rush to lotion or anodyne, he sought the soothing of the starry night, the cool darkness that had so often brought him peace. To get away from the faintly audible tinkling of the shearers'

banjo and their songs, he strolled in the opposite direction, and that was towards the dark ma.s.s of the trees encircling her house--her home, in which he had no part. Mechanically he noted a garden gate open--she had left it so--open to the rabbits against which its section of the miles of wire-netting fencing the grounds had been so carefully provided, and he went forward to shut it. Being there, he had a distant view of the big drawing-room windows, thrown up and letting out wide streams of light across the lawn. And while he stood to gaze at them, picturing what within he could not see, he heard the piano--Debbie playing.

And so she had an appreciative audience, although she did not know it.

Below her windows, out of the light, Jim--poor old Jim!--sat like a statue, his head thrown back, his eyes uplifted, tears running down his hairy, weather-beaten face. It was the most exquisitely miserable hour of his life--or so he thought. He did not know what a highly favoured mortal he really was, in that his beautiful love-story was never to be spoiled by a happy ending.