“Yes, the Bristol yellowman has been the winning colour of late. How d’ye do, Mrs. Harrison? I don’t suppose you remember me?”
She had come out from the house, and I noticed that her worn face—on which some past terror seemed to have left its shadow—hardened into stern lines as she looked at my uncle.
“I remember you too well, Sir Charles Tregellis,” said she. “I trust that you have not come here to-day to try to draw my husband back into the ways that he has forsaken.”
“That’s the way with her, Sir Charles,” said Harrison, resting his great hand upon the woman’s shoulder. “She’s got my promise, and she holds me to it! There was never a better or more hard-working wife, but she ain’t what you’d call a patron of sport, and that’s a fact.”
“Sport!” cried the woman, bitterly. “A fine sport for you, Sir Charles, with your pleasant twenty-mile drive into the country and your luncheon-basket and your wines, and so merrily back to London in the cool of the evening, with a well-fought battle to talk over. Think of the sport that it was to me to sit through the long hours, listening for the wheels of the chaise which would bring my man back to me. Sometimes he could walk in, and sometimes he was led in, and sometimes he was carried in, and it was only by his clothes that I could know him—”
“Come, wifie,” said Harrison, patting her on the shoulder. “I’ve been cut up in my time, but never as bad as that.”
“And then to live for weeks afterwards with the fear that every knock at the door may be to tell us that the other is dead, and that my man may have to stand in the dock and take his trial for murder.”
“No, she hasn’t got a sportin’ drop in her veins,” said Harrison. “She’d never make a patron, never! It’s Black Baruk’s business that did it, when we thought he’d napped it once too often. Well, she has my promise, and I’ll never sling my hat over the ropes unless she gives me leave.”
“You’ll keep your hat on your head like an honest, God-fearing man, John,” said his wife, turning back into the house.
“I wouldn’t for the world say anything to make you change your resolutions,” said my uncle. “At the same time, if you had wished to take a turn at the old sport, I had a good thing to put in your way.”