by Saki
Sylvia
Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessney with a pleasant sense
of ultimate victory, such as a fervent Ironside might have permitted himself on
the morrow of Worcester fight. She was scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but
belonged to that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious by
circumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupied with a series of
small struggles, usually with the odds slightly against her, and usually she
had just managed to come through winning. And now she felt that she had brought
her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. To
have married Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer" as his more intimate
enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility of his family, and in
spite of his unaffected indifference to women, was indeed an achievement that
had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through; yesterday she
had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away
from Town and its group of satellite watering-places and "settling him
down," in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm
which was his country house.
"You
will never get Mortimer to go," his mother had said carpingly, "but
if he once goes he'll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell over him as
Town does. One can understand what holds him to Town, but Yessney--" and
the dowager had shrugged her shoulders.
Of
Mortimer she saw very little; farm and woods and trout- streams seemed to swallow
him up from dawn till dusk. Once, following the direction she had seen him take
in the morning, she came to an open space in a nut copse, further shut in by
huge yew trees, in the centre of which stood a stone pedestal surmounted by a
small bronze figure of a youthful Pan. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship,
but her attention was chiefly held by the fact that a newly cut bunch of grapes
had been placed as an offering at its feet. Grapes were none too plentiful at
the manor house, and Sylvia snatched the bunch angrily from the pedestal.
Contemptuous annoyance dominated her thoughts as she strolled slowly homeward,
and then gave way to a sharp feeling of something that was very near fright;
across a thick tangle of undergrowth a boy's face was scowling at her, brown
and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes. It was a lonely pathway, all
pathways round Yessney were lonely for the matter of that, and she sped forward
without waiting to give a closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition. It was not
till she had reached the house that she discovered that she had dropped the
bunch of grapes in her flight.
"I
saw a youth in the wood today," she told Mortimer that evening,
"brown-faced and rather handsome, but a scoundrel to look at. A gipsy lad,
I suppose."
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