“Stay here, would you, madam! What luck do you suppose would come of that?”
“Luck! I have quite as much luck as I require. Nash, why do you not request this—this gentleman to leave us?”
“Why, he dare not keep you here,” cried the Squire, passing over the last compliment. “He would be prosecuted for—you know what.”
“Let him be prosecuted! Let the wicked woman do her worst. Let her bring an action, and we’ll defend it. I have more right to him than she has. Mr. Caromel, do you wish to keep up this interview until night?”
“Perhaps you had better go now, Squire,” put in the man pleadingly. “I—I will consult Nave, and see what’s to be done. She may like to go back to California, to the Munns; the climate suited her: and—and an income might be arranged.”
This put the finishing stroke to the Squire’s temper. He flung out of the room with a few unorthodox words, and came home in a tantrum.
We had had times of commotion at Church Dykely before, but this affair capped all. The one Mrs. Nash Caromel waiting to go into her house, and the other Mrs. Nash Caromel refusing to go out of it to make room for her. The Squire was right when saying it was public property: the public made it theirs. Tongues pitched into Nash Caromel in the fields and in the road: but some few of us pitied him, thinking what on earth we could do ourselves in a like position. While old Jones the constable stalked briskly about, expecting to get a warrant for taking up the master of Caromel’s Farm.
But the great drawback to instituting legal proceedings lay with Mrs. Nash Caromel the First. She declined to prosecute. Her husband might refuse to receive her; might hold himself aloof from her; might keep his second wife by his side; but she would never hurt a hair of his head. Heaven might bring things round in its own good time, she said; meanwhile she would submit—and bear.
And she held to this, driving indignant men distracted. They argued, they persuaded, they remonstrated; it was said that one or two strong-minded ones swore. All the same. She stayed on at her mother’s, and would neither injure her husband herself, nor let her family injure him. Henry Tinkle, her brother, chanced to be from home (as he was when she had run away to be married), or he might have acted in spite of her. And, when this state of things had continued for two or three weeks, the world began to call it a “crying scandal.” As to Nash Caromel, he did not show his face abroad.
“Not a day longer shall the fellow retain my money,” said the pater, speaking of the twelve hundred pounds he had lent to Nash: and in fact the term it had been lent for was already up. But it is easier to make such a threat than to enforce it; and it is not everybody who can extract twelve hundred pounds at will from uncertain coffers. Any way the Squire found he could not. He wrote to Nash, demanding its return; and he wrote to Nave.