“You’ve given one dog a second chance,” he said. “Can’t you see your way to doin’ it for another?”
Dixon honoured him with a long look.
“There’s the Ring o’ Bells,” he said at last, “just across the road.”
They went off together.
CHAPTER V
Slinker’s wife drew up with a flourish at Crump steps, but she relinquished the reins rather wearily. She looked almost tired—Christian thought—a thing very foreign to her extraordinary vitality. Butler and footman were automatons of respect as she descended, and she smiled inwardly as she went in. She knew quite well what they had said about her when she first came.
Mrs. Lyndesay was standing just inside the hall, her hard face like ivory against the dark background. There was something inhuman about her to Christian, coming out of the sunlight into the frigidity of her presence. During the last month she seemed to have retired further than ever into that icy aloofness which wore, for him at least, the appearance of hatred. She turned her eyes away from him sharply as he entered, and he knew that she had looked instinctively for another form to fill the door when he crossed the threshold.
Slinker’s wife thrust a hand through her arm, and led her to the tea-table. All through the meal she talked steadily, while Mrs. Lyndesay listened with something almost like amusement in her eyes. Somewhere and somehow, Slinker’s wife had found a chord in that hidden heart which answered when she struck it.
Christian, ignored, wandered into the garden, and stood looking across the green of the sunk lawn and the glory of the flower-beds to the rising background of woods. There was a stream running flittingly from wood to garden, and he walked beside it, hearing it but not hearkening, for he was reviewing his swift and disastrous meeting with Deborah. Emphatically, he had done the wrong thing, and in the most hopelessly wrong manner. He had hurt her afresh—she, who had already suffered more hurt than one dared think of. After all, what use could Slinker’s wife be to her, on any terms? Somehow, the horse-dealer’s daughter had inspired him with a confidence in vaguely miraculous powers. You leaned with a strange trust on Slinker’s wife. Something about her made you feel that the world could never be long out of joint with her capable hands willing and ready to manipulate it. He had known her all his life, or near it, and she was older than he by several years—a million years older in everything else but age.
She joined him presently in a white gown, the faint trace of fatigue utterly vanished, and towed him into one of the mossy woodland paths.