, and in sallying forth he had felt
a confused sense of duty urging him to visit the house where this
girl for whom he had conceived his strange infatuation "carried on her
games." The "no-tale-bearing" tradition of a soldier fought hard with
this sense of duty; his feelings were mixed when he rang the bell and
asked for Mrs. Dallison. Habit, however, masked his face, and he stood
before her at "attention," his black eyes lowered, clutching his peaked
cap.
Blanca noted curiously the scar on the left side of his cropped black
head.
Whatever Hughs had to say was not said easily.
"I've come," he began at last in a dogged voice, "to let you know. I
never wanted to come into this house. I never wanted to see no one."
Blanca could see his lips and eyelids quivering in a way strangely out
of keeping with his general stolidity.
"My wife has told you tales of me, I suppose. She's told you I knock her
about, I daresay. I don't care what she tells you or any o' the people
that she works for. But this I'll say: I never touched her but she
touched me first. Look here! that's marks of hers!" and, drawing up his
sleeve he showed a scratch on his sinewy tattooed forearm. "I've not
come here about her; that's no business of anyone's."
Bianca turned towards her pictures. "Well?" she said, "but what have you
come about, please? You see I'm busy."
Hughs' face changed. Its stolidity vanished, the eyes became as quick,
passionate, and leaping as a dark torrent. He was more violently
alive than she had ever seen a man. Had it been a woman she would have
felt--as Cecilia had felt with Mrs. Hughs--the indecency, the impudence
of this exhibition; but from that male violence the feminine in her
derived a certain satisfaction. So in Spring, when all seems lowering
and grey, the hedges and trees suddenly flare out against the purple
clouds, their twigs all in flame. The next moment that white glare is
gone, the clouds are no longer purple, fiery light no longer quivers and
leaps along the hedgerows. The passion in Hughs' face was gone as soon.
Bianca felt a sense of disappointment, as though she could have wished
her life held a little more of that. He stole a glance at her out of his
dark eyes, which, when narrowed, had a velvety look, like the body of a
wild bee, then jerked his thumb at the picture of the little model.
"It's about her I come to speak."
Blanca faced him frigidly.
"I have not the slightest wish to hear."
H
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