“Yes; I thought she meant to die an old maid, but it seems she’s not too proud to wear your cast-off slippers.”
“My cast-off slippers? What do you mean?” and she paused whilst clasping her bracelet with a look of bewildered interrogation.
“Now, Augusta, pray don’t look so innocent!—Your father’s favourite fetch-and-carry, that sneaking, canting fox, Jabez Clegg, finding that Miss Ashton was a sour grape, has straightway gone wooing to Miss Ashton’s cousin as fruit ripe enough and near enough to drop into his vulpine jaws; and by G—— the girl has had no more spirit than to drop when he shook the boughs, rather than hang on untasted!”
The speaker’s lip and nose had curled with contempt as he began, then his nostril dilated, and he struck his wet hand on the washstand with a force which threatened the earthenware and set it jingling.
Augusta was not yet schooled to silence; her generous spirit rose to repel these allegations.
“Oh, Laurence, how can you? Ellen has had plenty of admirers; she has no need to wear anyone’s cast-off shoes. And as for Mr. Clegg! He is no cast-off slip”——she checked herself; a thousand trivial and forgotten things flashed across her mind at once; there was no doubt that Jabez had aspired to her own hand—he must have offered himself to Ellen in pique, to look as if he didn’t care; she could not add the “of mine,” which should have rounded her sentence; she substituted, with barely a moment’s pause, “He is neither a sneak nor a cant, and if Ellen marries him she will have a good husband;” adding, with marvellously little tact or knowledge of her own husband, “I’m sure, Laurence, dear, you have no right to speak ill of the man who saved your life in the very pond that is frozen over now before our doors! And you cannot really think him mercenary, when he refused the £500 your father offered as a reward for his bravery.”
Not lightning was more quick and scathing than the fury which flashed from her husband’s eyes and almost paralysed his tongue, as the last words fell from her lips. With the damp towel in his hand he struck across her beautiful bare shoulders with a force which traced red lines upon their snow; then marked her round arm with a band as red by tearing away the suspended fan and scarf, which he threw behind the fire without one thought of either “far-fetched” or “dear-bought.”
“Soh, madam!” he hissed rather than spoke, whilst Augusta shrank from him in affright, “soh! you dare defend the wretch who played the spy on us at Carr—attacked me, an unarmed man, with a stick, like a coward, and left me bleeding there for dead, hoping to win the heiress for himself!”
From her father and Cicily both she had gathered the truth of that night’s exploits. His misrepresentations no longer misled; but for very fear she held her peace.
He went on—