The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman. H. G. Wells

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ freely again when the partings were over and he could get back into the automobile. "Toot," said the horn and he made a last grave salutation to the slender white figure on the steps. The great butler stood at the side of the entrance and a step or so below her, with the air of a man who has completed a difficult task. A small attentive valet hovered out of the shadows behind.

      §5

      (A fragment of the conversation in Lady Beach-Mandarin's returning automobile may be recorded in a parenthesis here.

      "But did you see Sir Isaac?" she cried, abruptly.

      "Sir Isaac?" defended the startled Mr. Brumley. "Where?"

      "He was dodging about in the garden all the time."

      "Dodging about the garden!... I saw a sort of gardener——"

      "I'm sure I saw Him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Positive. He hid away in the mushroom shed. The one you found locked."

      "But my dear Lady Beach-Mandarin!" protested Mr. Brumley with the air of one who listens to preposterous suggestions. "What can make you think——?"

      "Oh I know I saw him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "I know. He seemed all over the place. Like a Boy Scout. Didn't you see him too, Susan?"

      Miss Sharsper was roused from deep preoccupation. "What, dear?" she asked.

      "See Sir Isaac?"

      "Sir Isaac?"

      "Dodging about the garden when we went through it."

      The novelist reflected. "I didn't notice," she said. "I was busy observing things.")

      §6

      Lady Beach-Mandarin's car passed through the open gates and was swallowed up in the dusty stream of traffic down Putney Hill; the great butler withdrew, the little manservant vanished, Mrs. Sawbridge and her elder daughter had hovered and now receded from the back of the hall; Lady Harman remained standing thoughtfully in the large Bulwer-Lyttonesque doorway of her house. Her face expressed a vague expectation. She waited to be addressed from behind.

      Then she became aware of the figure of her husband standing before her. He had come out of the laurels in front. His pale face was livid with anger, his hair dishevelled, there was garden mould and greenness upon his knees and upon his extended hands.

      She was startled out of her quiet defensiveness. "Why, Isaac!" she cried. "Where have you been?"

      It enraged him further to be asked so obviously unnecessary a question. He forgot his knightly chivalry.

      "What the Devil do you mean," he cried, "by chasing me all round the garden?"

      "Chasing you? All round the garden?"

      "You heard me breaking my shins on that infernal flower-pot you put for me, and out you shot with all your pack of old women and chased me round the garden. What do you mean by it?"

      "I didn't think you were in the garden."

      "Any Fool could have told I was in the garden. Any Fool might have known I was in the garden. If I wasn't in the garden, then where the Devil was I? Eh? Where else could I be? Of course I was in the garden, and what you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. And look at me! Look, I say! Look at my hands!"

      Lady Harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she answered. She knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had come to a point in their relationship when a husband's good temper is no longer a supreme consideration. "You've had plenty of time to wash them," she said.

      "Yes," he shouted. "And instead I kept 'em to show you. I stayed out here to see the last of that crew for fear I might run against 'em in the house. Of all the infernal old women——"

      His lips were providentially deprived of speech. He conveyed his inability to express his estimate of Lady Beach-Mandarin by a gesture of despair.

      "If—if anyone calls and I am at home I have to receive them," said Lady Harman, after a moment's deliberation.

      "Receiving them's one thing. Making a Fool of yourself——"

      His voice was rising.

      "Isaac," said Lady Harman, leaning forward and then in a low penetrating whisper, "Snagsby!"

      (It was the name of the great butler.)

      "Damn Snagsby!" hissed Sir Isaac, but dropping his voice and drawing near to her. What his voice lost in height it gained in intensity. "What I say is this, Ella, you oughtn't to have brought that old woman out into the garden at all——"

      "She insisted on coming."

      "You ought to have snubbed her. You ought to have done—anything. How the Devil was I to get away, once she was through the verandah? There I was! Bagged!"

      "You could have come forward."

      "What! And meet her!"

      "I had to meet her."

      Sir Isaac felt that his rage was being frittered away upon details. "If you hadn't gone fooling about looking at houses," he said, and now he stood very close to her and spoke with a confidential intensity, "you wouldn't have got that Holy Terror on our track, see? And now—here we are!"

      He walked past her into the hall, and the little manservant suddenly materialised in the middle of the space and came forward to brush him obsequiously. Lady Harman regarded that proceeding for some moments in a preoccupied manner and then passed slowly into the classical conservatory. She felt that in view of her engagements the discussion of Lady Beach-Mandarin was only just beginning.

      §7

      She reopened it herself in the long drawing-room into which they both drifted after Sir Isaac had washed the mould from his hands. She went to a French window, gathered courage, it seemed, by a brief contemplation of the garden, and turned with a little effort.

      "I don't agree," she said, "with you about Lady Beach-Mandarin."

      Sir Isaac appeared surprised. He had assumed the incident was closed. "How?" he asked compactly.

      "I don't agree," said Lady Harman. "She seems friendly and jolly."

      "She's a Holy Terror," said Sir Isaac. "I've seen her twice, Lady Harman."

      "A call of that kind," his wife went on, "—when there are cards left and so on—has to be returned."

      "You won't," said Sir Isaac.

      Lady Harman took a blind-tassel in her hand,—she felt she had to hold on to something. "In any case," she said, "I should have to do that."

      "In any case?"

      She nodded. "It would be ridiculous not to. We——It is why we know so few people—because СКАЧАТЬ