“I like the house, in spite of the damp, and I love the garden even when it is a swamp, and I like Haidee, and Jane the kitchen-maid, and Mr. Rayner,” I said quietly.
With nervous fingers Mr. Reade began playing with his horse’s bridle.
“You like Mr. Rayner, you say? Then I suppose our sympathies must be as far apart as the poles. For he seems to me the most intolerable snob that ever existed, and so selfish and heartless as to be almost outside the pale of humanity.”
This tirade amazed me; but it also made me angry. I could not let him abuse a person whom I liked, and who had been consistently kind to me, without protest.
“You surely cannot judge him so well as I, a member of his household,” said I coolly. “Whether he is a snob or not I cannot tell, because I don’t quite know what it means. But I do know that he is kind to his wife and his children and servants and dependants, and—”
“Kind to his wife, do you say? I should not call it kindness to shut up my wife in the darkest, dampest corner of a dark, damp house, until she is as spiritless and silent as a spectre, and then invent absurd lies to account for the very natural change in her looks and spirits.”
“What do you mean? What lies?”
“The stories he told you about her when you first came. He would never have tried them on any one but an unsuspecting girl, and of course he never thought you would repeat them to me.”
“I wish I hadn’t!” said I indignantly. “You have known Mr. and Mrs. Rayner only during the three years they have lived here. What proof have you that the things he told me were not true?”
“No proof, Miss Christie, but a man’s common-sense,” said he excitedly—“no more proof than of another fact of which I am equally certain, that he is as surely killing his wife as if he were making her drink poison.”