Red Money | Page 6

drifted along
the terrace and into the house like a cloud blown any way by the wind.
Miss Greeby looked after her limp figure with a contemptuous grin,
then she nodded casually to Mrs. Belgrove, and walked whistling down
the terrace steps.
"Cat, indeed!" commented Mrs. Belgrove to herself when she saw Miss
Greeby's broad back disappear behind the laurels. "Nothing half so
pretty. She's like a great Flanders mare. And I wish Henry VIII was
alive to marry her," she added the epithet suggesting that king, "if only
to cut her head off."


CHAPTER II.

IN THE WOOD.
Miss Greeby swung along towards her destination with a masculine
stride and in as great a hurry as though she had entered herself for a
Marathon race. It was a warm, misty day, and the pale August sunshine
radiated faintly through the smoky atmosphere. Nothing was clear-cut
and nothing was distinct, so hazy was the outlook. The hedges were
losing their greenery and had blossomed forth into myriad bunches of
ruddy hips and haws, and the usually hard road was soft underfoot
because of the penetrating quality of the moist air. There was no wind
to clear away the misty greyness, but yellow leaves without its aid
dropped from the disconsolate trees. The lately-reaped fields, stretching
on either side of the lane down which the lady was walking, presented a
stubbled expanse of brown and dim gold, uneven and distressful to the
eye. The dying world was in ruins and Nature had reduced herself to
that necessary chaos, out of which, when the coming snow completed
its task, she would build a new heaven and a new earth.
An artist might have had some such poetic fancy, and would certainly
have looked lovingly on the alluring colors and forms of decay. But
Miss Greeby was no artist, and prided herself upon being an
aggressively matter-of-fact young woman. With her big boots slapping
the ground and her big hands thrust into the pockets of her mannish
jacket, she bent her head in a meditative fashion and trudged briskly
onward. What romance her hard nature was capable of, was uppermost
now, but it had to do strictly with her personal feelings and did not
require the picturesque autumn landscape to improve or help it in any
way. One man's name suggested romance to bluff, breezy Clara Greeby,
and that name was Noel Lambert. She murmured it over and over again
to her heart, and her hard face flushed into something almost like
beauty, as she remembered that she would soon behold its owner. "But
he won't care," she said aloud, and threw back her head defiantly: then
after a pause, she breathed softly, "But I shall make him care."
If she hoped to do so, the task was one which required a great amount
of skill and a greater amount of womanly courage, neither of which
qualities Miss Greeby possessed. She had no skill in managing a man,

as her instincts were insufficiently feminine, and her courage was of a
purely rough-and-tumble kind. She could have endured hunger and
thirst and cold: she could have headed a forlorn hope: she could have
held to a sinking ship: but she had no store of that peculiar feminine
courage which men don't understand and which women can't explain,
however much they may exhibit it. Miss Greeby was an excellent
comrade, but could not be the beloved of any man, because of the very
limitations of semi-masculinity upon which she prided herself. Noel
Lambert wanted a womanly woman, and Lady Agnes was his ideal of
what a wife should be. Miss Greeby had in every possible way offered
herself for the post, but Lambert had never cared for her sufficiently to
endure the thought of passing through life with her beside him. He said
she was "a good sort"; and when a man says that of a woman, she may
be to him a good friend, or even a platonic chum, but she can never be
a desirable wife in his eyes. What Miss Greeby lacked was sex, and
lacking that, lacked everything. It was strange that with her rough
common sense she could not grasp this want. But the thought that
Lambert required what she could never give--namely, the feminine
tenderness which strong masculine natures love--never crossed her very
clear and mathematical mind.
So she was bent upon a fool's errand, as she strode towards the Abbot's
Wood, although she did not know it. Her aim was to capture Lambert
as her husband; and her plan, to accomplish her wish by working on the
heart-hunger he most probably felt, owing to the loss of Agnes Pine. If
he loved that lady in a chivalrous fashion--and Miss Greeby believed
that he did--she was absolutely lost to