“Right you are, as concerns himself. But I am a believer in breed, my friend. And the longer I live, the more true I find it come. A credulous father, if you prefer the word, is likely to be blest with a credulous child, and your wife took after her father more closely in the inner, because she didn’t in the outer woman. At least, I can’t say from my own eyes, knowing nothing of old Blowpipes, but I understand she did not favour him in the flesh.”
“Not exactly,” I answered, with a little smile, as I thought of the loveliness of Kitty’s face; “but she was like him a little just here and there.”
“A little won’t do. My old Trunnion, who croaked in the great frost that almost settled you, my boy, has a son of his old age, Commodore, who will be heard of towards July at the market, scarcely a bit like him in the face, except in one tuck of his nostril, and a tuft of five hairs over his near eye. But do you think I could not swear to him by his ways and tricks, and his style of coming up? That’s the time to know what a horse thinks of you; and I tell you this colt thinks exactly as his father did; and all the more because he isn’t like him in the face. There must be the likeness somewhere.”
“Yes, I have heard you say that many times before, and I daresay you are right enough about it. But what has that to do with—what has happened to me?”
“Just everything, stupid. Your wife being soft—or credulous, if you like it better—she sucks in a lot of lies against you. The dose comes from somebody she believes in, not her old enemies, of course. Her dignity will not allow her to complain—women are always horribly dignified when jealous—and off she goes, without a word, leaving you to your own conscience which will more than give you the tip for it. She’ll come back by-and-by, when she has punished you enough; and then of course you’ll have to swear, etc., etc. She’ll call herself all sorts of names. And there’ll be nobody like you, till next time. You’ll see if that isn’t at the bottom of all this.”
“Not likely,” I answered with some wrath. “In the first place, my Kitty would never believe a word of such stuff against me, and there is no such thing as jealousy in her nature.”
“You know best. But I thought I heard something from the man round the corner at Ludred.”
“That was a different thing altogether,” I said quickly, although the remembrance struck me, as it had not done before; “and in the next place, if she could be so absurd, she would be the last person in the world to go away without a word, without even giving me a chance of taking my own part. No, that theory will never do. My Kitty was the most just, as well as the kindest darling ever born.”
“You don’t know what they are sometimes. How can you expect to know more about them than they do about themselves? Yesterday, just by way of something, I asked Sally what she would do, if she ever turned up jealous. ‘I would grind my ring-finger off,’ she said, ‘with these two teeth, I would, Sam’—for she has got uncommon grinders—‘and I would make my rival swallow it.’ Now, Sally has been well broken in, remember, and no vice in the family; at any rate since her great grand-dam; but her eyes showed that she would do it!”
“There is no ferocity in Kitty,” I answered with a lofty air; “I know nothing about race-horses, and very little about women. But women are only men in a better form, more gentle, more just, and more loving. They never give way to such fury as we do—”