Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗

His wife was in the next-door bedroom, suffering from one of her black headaches, and he had torn Louise's clothes off her body, possessed by a madness that he had never known before. She had fought him with the savagery of one of her Blackfoot Indian ancestors, but in some perverse fashion her resistance maddened him as much as the glimpses of her hard young flesh, as it was revealed a gleaming flash at a time.

She had clawed red lines down his chest, and bitten him until he bled, but through it all she had not uttered a word or a sound, although a single scream would have brought her mistress or the house servants running.

in the end, he had borne her down onto the thick white pelt of a polar bear in the middle of the floor, naked except for the tatters of her petticoats hanging from her long fine legs, and with his full weight he had spread her and entered her.

Only then had she made any sound, she had gripped him with the same atavistic savagery, legs and arms encircling him, and she had whispered hoarsely, brokenly. "I love you, I have always loved you, I shall always love you."

When the Armies of the North had marched against them, and his wife had fled with the children to her native France, Louise had stayed with him. When she could she had been in the field with him, and when she could not she had waited for him, filling in the days and most of the nights nursing the wounded at the Confederate Hospital in Galveston, and there she had nursed him when he was brought in half blinded and terribly hurt from the battlefield.

She had been with him when he went back to Fairfields for the last time, and shared his desolation at the burnt fields and ruined buildings, and she had been at his side ever since. Perhaps if she had not, things would have been different now, for she had weakened him; she had dulled the edge of his resolve.

So many times he had smelled out the opportunities the chances for the coup which would restore it all, and each time she had caused him to waver.

"I could never respect you again," she had said once.

"Not if you did that., "I never suspected you were capable of that, Mungo.

It's wrong morally wrong."

Gradually it had changed, until sometimes, after another abortive attempt to restore his fortunes, she would look at him with a coldness, a kind of icy contempt.

"Why do you not leave me?" he had challenged her then.

"Because I love you," she had replied. "And, oh, sometimes how I wish I did not."

In Perth, when he had forced her to bait the trap for him, luring in the intended victim, she had for the first time rebelled. She herself had ridden to warn the man, and they had been forced to run again, shipping out on a little trading schooner only an hour or so ahead of the constables with the warrant for Mungo's arrest.

He had never trusted her again, although he had never been able to make the decision to desert her. He found that he needed her still. At Cape Town a letter had finally caught up with Mungo. It was one of five copies sent out by his brother-in-law, the Duc de Montijo, a copy to each of the addresses that Mungo had occupied in the years since his wife had left him. Solange, his wife, had taken a chill while out riding and had died five days later of pneumonia. Her children were in the care of the Duc, being educated with his own, and the Duc hinted that he would resist any attempt by Mungo Sint John to assume custody.

At last Mungo was free to make good his promise to Louise, the solemn promise he had made to her as they knelt hand in hand before the altar in London's church of Sint Martin-in-the-Fields. He had sworn in the sight of God that just as soon as he was able to do so, he would marry Louise.

Mungo had read through his brother-in-law's letter three times, and then held it in the flame of the candle.

He had crushed the ashes to powder, and never mentioned the letter or its news to Louise. She had gone on believing that he was married, and their relationship had limped on, sickening and staling.

Yet still she could influence him, even when she was not physically present. At the dark crossroads south of Kimberley, even when he had seen the diamonds gleam in Hendrick Naaiman's hands, he had not been able to banish Louise's image from his mind: Louise with contempt in her eyes and cold accusation on her lovely lips.

Expert marksman that he was, the shade of Louise had spoiled his aim. He had fired a wink too late, and a touch wide. He had not killed the Bastaard, but if he had too done so, Louise's reaction could have been no more severe.

When he rode back to where she waited, reeling in the saddle, the wounded stallion dragging under him, he had seen her face in the moonlight. Even though she caught him when he might have fallen, and though she had tended his wounds and gone for succour, he had realized that they had crossed a dividing line over which there was no return.

As if to confirm it, he had seen Zouga Ballantyne staring at her in the lantern light with that unmistakable look in his eyes. Many men had looked at her like that over the years, but this time she had returned Zouga's scrutiny openly, making no attempt to hide it from either man.

On the long road northwards, as she walked beside the cart in which he lay wounded, he had challenged her again and she had not denied it.

At least Zouga Ballantyne is a man of honour."

"Then why do you not leave me?"

"You know I cannot leave you now, not as you are She left it unfinished, and they had not spoken of it again, though in her icy silences he had sensed the presence in her mind of the other man, and he knew that no matter how desperately unhappy a woman might be she will seldom leave a relationship until she has the prospect of something better to replace it. Louise had that prospect now, and they were both aware of it.

He wondered if he would let Louise go if she finally made the decision. There had been a time not long ago when he would have killed her first; but since they had reached Khami, everything had begun altering even more swiftly. They were rushing towards some climax, and Mungo had sensed that it would be explosive.

For Mungo had forgotten the magnetism that Robyn Ballantyne had once exerted upon him, but now he had been vividly reminded by the mature woman, Robyn Codrington. She was even more attractive to him now than she had been as a girl. He sensed that her strength and assurance would provide a secure port for a man tired to his guts and the marrow of his bones by the storms of life.

He knew that she was the trusted confidante of the Matabele king, and that if his fortune awaited him here in the north, as he had come to suspect, then her intercession with the Matabele would be invaluable.

There was something else, some other darker need within him. Mungo Sint John never forgave or forgot an injury. Clinton Codrington had commanded the Royal Naval cruiser which had seized Huron off the Cape of Good Hope, an action which seemed to Mungo to mark the beginning of his long decline, and herald his dogged misfortune. Codrington was vulnerable. Through this woman Mungo could be avenged, and the prospect was strangely compelling.

He sighed and shook his head, roused himself and used the stick to push himself erect. He found himself confronted by the two small figures. Mungo Sint John liked all women of whatever age, and though he had not seen his own children in many years, the youngest would be about the same age as these two.

They were pretty little things. Though he had seen them only fleetingly or at a distance, he had felt the stirring of his paternal instincts; and now their presence was a welcome relief from his dark thoughts, and from the loneliness of the past weeks.