The Storm Centre. Mary Noailles MurfreeЧитать онлайн книгу.
anew, sitting before the fire, she laid the work upon her knee and unconsciously wrung her hands. The next moment she felt the eyes of the officer lifted toward her in a cursory glance. She affected to shift the rings on her fingers, then took up the crochet-needle and bent her head to the deft fashioning of shells.
Now she could think unmolested, think of what she could never forget! Yet why should she canvass the details again and again, save that she must. The event marked an epoch of final significance in her life—the moment that her dream fled and she awakened to the stern fact that she had ceased to love. And at first it was a trifle, a mere trifle, that had inaugurated this amazing change. Her husband wished to sell the horse, her horse, that Judge Roscoe had given her a week before. The gift had come, she knew, as an overture of reconciliation, as there had been much hard feeling between Judge Roscoe and his niece. For after her elopement and marriage he promptly applied to the chancery court seeking to protect her future by securing the settlement on her of certain funds of her estate, urging the fact of her minority and the spendthrift character of her husband. Leonora vehemently opposed the petition, and owing to the efforts of her counsel to gain time and the law's delays, she came of age before any decree could be granted, and then defeated the measure by making a full legal waiver of her rights in favor of her husband. But, at length, when pity overmastered Judge Roscoe's just anger, she welcomed a token of his renewed cordiality. She did not feel at liberty to sell the gift, she had remonstrated. It was not bestowed as a resource—to sell. She feared to wound her kinsman. What was the pressing necessity for money? Why not manage as if the horse had not been given her?
The contention waxed high as she stood in habit and hat just in the vestibule with the horse outside hitched to the block, for Judge Roscoe was coming to ride with her. She held fast, for a wonder; she seldom could resist; but the horse was not theirs to sell. Rufus Gwynn suddenly turned at last, sprang up the stairs, three steps at a time, and as he came bounding down again she saw the glint of steel in his hand.
Even now she shuddered.
"It is growing colder," Captain Baynell said. (How observant that man seemed to be!) "Allow me to mend the fire."
He stirred the hickory logs, and as the yellow flames shot up the chimney he sank back into his great chair, and she took up the thread of her work and her reminiscences together.
She honestly thought her husband had intended to kill her. Somehow the veil dropped from her eyes, and she knew him for the fiend he was even before the dastardly act that revealed him unqualified.
But it was not she on whom his spite was to fall. Such deeds bring retribution. Only the horse—the glossy, graceful, spirited animal, turning his lustrous confiding eyes toward the house as the door opened, whinnying a low joyous welcome, anticipative of the breezy gallop—received the bullet just below the ear.
It was then and afterward like the distraught agony of a confused dream. She heard her own screams as if they had been uttered by another; she saw the great bulk of the horse lying in the road, struggling frightfully, futilely, whether with conscious pain or merely the last reserves of muscular energy she did not know; she noted the gathering crowd, dismayed, bewildered, angry; she knew that her husband had hastily galloped off, a trifle out of countenance because of certain threats of some brawny Irish railroad hands going home with their dinner-pails who had seen the whole occurrence. Then Judge Roscoe had ridden up at last to accompany her as of old, thinking how pretty and pleased she would be on the new horse—for equestrianism was the vaunt of the girls of that day and she had been a famous horsewoman—and feeling a great pity because of her privations, and her cruel folly, and her unworthy husband. When he saw what had just occurred, he said instantly, "You must come home with me, Leonora; you are not safe." And she had answered, "Take me with you—quick—quick! So that I may never see that coward again." Thus she had left her husband forever.
"Shall I draw up the blind?" asked Captain Baynell, seeing her fumble for her zephyr.
"No, thank you; there is still light sufficient, I think. The days are growing longer."
Again, in the silence of the quiet room, the spell of her reminiscences resumed its sway. She recalled the promises that had not sufficed; no explanations extenuated the facts; no lures could avail; her resolution was taken and held firm. She laughed when, with full confidence in her unshaken love for him, her husband appealed to her by their mutual devotion. She was simply enlightened. But she resented the satisfaction that Judge Roscoe and his wife obviously felt in the separation, and the knowledge of the secret triumph of all her friends who had opposed the match. She was embittered, humiliated, broken-spirited, yet she maintained throughout a mask of placidity to the world, inquisitive, pitying, ridiculing, as she knew it to be. The separation passed as temporary. She was making a visit to her former home. This feint had the more countenance when a sudden need for her presence arose. Her aunt fell ill and died, and soon there came tidings of the death of Clarence Roscoe's wife while he was far away in the Confederate army. The three little girls were all alone.
"Bring them here, Uncle Gerald. I will take charge of them," Leonora had said. "Perhaps I can feel less dependent then."
And Judge Roscoe, who had borne his own losses like a philosopher, had tears in his eyes for her losses. "Oh, poor Leonora!" he had exclaimed. "Your very presence is a boon, my dear. But for you to be so stricken and desolate and—"
He was about to say "robbed," but the facts forbade him; for Gwynn's legal rights rendered her position as difficult as unenviable. In her own house she had contrived to hold her belongings together. Now, day by day, came tidings of the sale of her special personal effects—her carriage, her domestic animals, her furniture, the very pictures on the walls; then had followed a letter from her husband, regretting all his misdeeds and promising infinite rehabilitation if she would but forgive him. Naught could provoke a remonstrance, could stimulate Leonora to action, could induce a return.
Judge Roscoe had said but little. He had the deep-seated juridical respect for the relation of man and wife as a creation of law, as well as an institution of God. When he was appealed to, he felt it his duty to place impartially before her the husband's arguments, and promises, and protestations, but he experienced intense relief when she tersely dismissed Rufus Gwynn's plea for a reconciliation. "I know him now," she replied.
"An' 'fore de Lawd, I knows him too!" her old nurse declared; "I jes' uped an' I sez, 'Marse Rufe, ye hev' got sech a notion o' sellin' out, ye mought sell old Chaney—ef ennybody would buy sech a contraption in dese days! So I'm goin' over to my old home at Judge Roscoe's place, to wait on Miss Leonora. I knows she needs me, an' I 'spect she's watchin' fur me now.' An' Marse Rufe, he says, 'Aunt Chaney, I don't know what you are talking about! Go over there, an' welcome! An' try to get my wife to see I was just overtaken in my temper and desperate; you persuade her to come back, Aunt Chaney.' Dat's what de debbil said ter me. I always heard dat de debbil had a club foot. But, mon, he ain't. Two long, slim, handsome feet, an' his boots, sah, made in New Orleens!"
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