Tiny Luttrell Part 33

She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand from his, and sprang to her feet. He, too, rose astounded, gazing on every side to see who was coming. But the plain was flecked only with straggling sheep, bleating to the troughs. His gaze came back to the girl. Her straw hat sharply shadowed her face like a highwayman's mask, her blue eyes flas.h.i.+ng in the midst of it, and her lips below parted in pa.s.sion.

"You? I hate you! I _do_ consider myself bound, and you would make me false--you would tempt me through my love for the bush, for this place--you coward!"

Swift reddened, and there was roughness in his answer:

"I can't stand this, even from you. I have heard that all women are unfair; you are, certainly. What you say about my tempting you is nonsense. You have shown me that you love me, and that you don't love the other man; you know you have. You have now to show whether you have the courage of your love--to give him up--to marry me."

This method must have had its attractions after another's; but it hurt, because Tiny was sensitive, with all her sins.

"You have spoken very cruelly," she faltered, delightfully forgetting how she had spoken herself. "I could not marry anyone who spoke to me like that!"

"Oh, forgive me!" he cried, covered with contrition in an instant. "I am a rough brute, but I promise----" He stopped, for her head had drooped, and she seemed to be crying. He stood away from her in his shame. "Yes, I am a rough brute," he repeated bitterly; "but, darling, you don't know how it roughens one, bossing the men!"

Still she hung her head, but within the widened shadow of her hat he saw her red mouth twitching at his clumsiness. Yet, when she raised her face, her smile astonished him, it was so timorous; and the wondrous shyness in her lovely eyes abashed him far more than her tears.

"I dare say--I need that!" he heard her whisper in spurts. "I think I should like--you--to boss--me--too."

These things and others were tersely told in a letter written in the hot blast of a north wind at Wallandoon, and delivered in London six weeks later, damp with the rain of early April. The letter arrived by the last post, and Ruth read it on the sofa in her husband's den, while Erskine paced up and down the room, listening to the sentences she read aloud, but saying little.

"So you see," said Ruth as she put the thin sheets together and replaced them in their envelope, "she accepted him before she knew of Lord Manister's engagement. _He_ knew of it, and had undertaken to tell her, but that was only to give himself a last chance. Had she heard of it first he would never have spoken again."

"I question that," Erskine said thoughtfully. "He might not have spoken so soon; but his love would have proved stronger than his pride in the end. Yet I like him for his pride. That was what she needed, and what Manister lacked. It is very curious."

"I wonder if you really would like him," said Ruth, who no longer cared for the sound of Lord Manister's name. "I don't remember much about him, except that we all thought a good deal of him; but somehow I don't fancy he's your sort."

"I wasn't aware that I had a sort," Erskine said, smiling.

"Oh, but you have. _I_ am not your sort. But Tiny was!"

He laughed heartily.

"Then we four have chosen sides most excellently! It is quite fatal to marry your own sort. Didn't you know that, my dear?"

"No, I didn't," said Ruth, watching him from the sofa; "but I am very glad to hear it, and I quite agree. You and Tiny, for instance, would have jeered at everything in life until you were left jeering at one another. Don't you think so?" she added wistfully, after a pause.

"I think you're an uncommonly shrewd little person," Erskine remarked, smiling down upon her kindly, so that her face shone with pleasure.

"Do you?" she said, as he helped her to rise. "You used to think me so dense when Tiny was here; and I dare say I was--beside Tiny."

"My dearest girl," said Erskine, taking his wife in his arms, and speaking in a troubled tone, "you have never said that sort of thing before, and I hope you never will again. Tiny was Tiny--our Tiny--but surely wisdom was not her strongest point? She amused us all because she wasn't quite like other people; but how often am I to tell you that I am thankful you are not like Tiny?"

"Ah, if you really were!" Ruth whispered on his shoulder.

"But I always was," he answered, kissing her; and they smiled at one another until the door was shut and Ruth had gone, for there was now between them an exceeding tenderness.

Ruth had left him her letter, so that he might read it for himself; but though he lit a pipe and sat down, it was some time before Erskine read anything. Had Ruth returned and asked him for his thoughts, he would have confessed that he was wondering whether Tiny's husband would understand the girl he had managed to tame; and whether he had a fine ear for a joke. As wondering would not tell him, he at length turned to the letter; and that did not tell him either; but before he turned the first of the many leaves, it was as though the child herself was beside him in the room.

The qualities she mentioned in her beloved were all of a serious character, and the praises she bestowed upon him, at her own expense, were a little tiresome to one who did not know the man. Erskine turned over with excusable impatience, and was rewarded on the next page by a sufficiently just summary of Lord Manister; even here, however, Tiny took occasion to be very hard on herself. She declared--possibly she would have said it in any case, but it happened to be true--that she had never loved Lord Manister. On the way she had ill-used him she harped no more; his own solution of his difficulties had, indeed, broken that string. But she spoke of her "temptation" (incidentally remarking that the hall windows haunted her still), and said she would perhaps have yielded to it outright but for her visit to Wallandoon before sailing for England; and that she would certainly have done so at the third asking had it not been for that stronger temptation to go back with Herbert to Australia. As it was, she had gone back fully determined to marry Lord Manister in the end. And if that decision had been furthered to the smallest extent by any sort of consideration for another, she did not say so; neither did she seek to defend her own behavior at any point, for this was not Tiny's way. However, with Jack she had burned to justify herself, because love puts an end to one's ways. She had longed to tell him everything with her own lips, and to have him forgive and excuse her on the spot. This she admitted. But she denied having known what her unreasonable longing really was. Did Ruth remember the "burning of the boats" at Cintra? Well, she had spoken the truth about Jack then; she had never "known" until the night of her last arrival at the station; she had never been quite miserable until the succeeding days.

Reverting to Manister, she supposed the discovery of her departure the day after their interview--in which she had studiously refrained from revealing its imminence--had proved the last straw with him; she added that such a result had been vaguely in her mind at the time, but that she had never really admitted it among her hopes. Yet it seemed she had cured him just when she gave him up for incurable--and how thankful she was! A well-felt word about Lord Manister's future happiness and so on led her to her own; and Erskine slid his eye over that, but had it arrested by a loving little description of the old home to which she was coming back for good. It was a hot wind as she wrote, and the beginning of a word dried before she got to the end of it--so she affirmed. The roof was crackling, and the shadows in the yard were like tanks of ink.

Out on the run the salt-bush still looked healthy after the rains. She had given up whim driving; the manager had put in his word. But she was taking long rides, all by herself; and the lonely grandeur of the bush appealed to her just as it had when she first came back to it nearly a year ago; and the deep sky and yellow distances and dull leaves were all her eyes required; and she thought this was the one place in the world where it would be easy to be good.

The letter came rather suddenly to its end. There were some very kind words about himself, which Erskine read more than once. Then he sat staring into the fire, until, by some fancy's trick, the red coals turned pale and took the shape of a girl's sweet face with blemishes that only made it sweeter, with dark hair, and generous lips, and eyes like her own Australian sky. And the eyes lightened with fun and with mischief, with recklessness, and bitterness, and temper; and in each light they were more lovable than before; but last of all they beamed clear and tranquil as the blue sea becalmed; and in their depths there shone a soul.

THE END.