“I think she’s got uneasy about you. She was asking all sorts of questions.”
“Yes—well?”
“And I wouldn’t wonder if some one was telling her—I was going to say lies—but I mean something like the truth—ha, ha, ha! By the law, I’ve been telling such a hatful of lies about it myself, that I hardly know which is which, or one end from t’other.”
“Do you mean to say she was abusing me, or what?” urged Charles, very uncomfortably.
“I don’t suppose you care very much what the old soger says of you. It ain’t pretty, you may be sure, and it don’t much signify. But it ain’t all talk, you know. She’s always grumblin’, and I don’t mind that—her ticdooleroo, and her nerves, and her nonsense. She wants carriage exercise, she says, and the court doctor—I forget his name—ha, ha, ha! and she says you allow her next to nothing, and keeps her always on the starving line, and she won’t stand it no longer, she swears; and you’ll have to come down with the dust, my boy.”
And florid, stalwart Harry laughed again as if the affair was a good joke.
“I can’t help it, Harry, she has always had more than her share. I’ve been too generous, I’ve been a d—d fool always.”
Charles spoke with extreme bitterness, but quietly, and there was a silence of two or three minutes, during which Harry’s eyes were on his plate, and the noise of his knife and fork and the crunching of his repast under his fine teeth, were the only sounds heard.
Seeing that Harry seemed disposed to confine his attention for the present to his luncheon, Charles Fairfield, who apprehended something worse, said—
“If that’s all it is nothing very new. I’ve been hearing that sort of thing for fully ten years. She’s ungrateful, and artful, and violent. There’s no use in wishing or regretting now; but God knows, it was an evil day for me when first I saw that woman’s face.”