Dance of the Years by Margery Allingham Read Free Book Online

him getting this idea. There were few visitors to the house in those years, and when one did come, Dorothy always bundled James out of the way; first because he was so dark, and secondly because she loved him so.
    This passion of hers developed in his babyhood, much to her own embarrassment, and to all the country folks’ good-humoured amusement for she was considered to be “wonderfully proud,” and the kind of woman who would not have had children of her own, anyway. Very soon she gave up pretending, and they gave up laughing, and James first belonged to her and afterwards when he could talk and walk, she to him.
    It was Shulie’s fault. Shulie was as good a mother as is any other nice, healthy animal. Once her baby was weaned, it became to her just another member of the family, not specially her own. Since she had no sentimentalities or conventions in the matter, she behaved naturally and returned her undivided affection to Galantry, although by him she had no more children.
    When Galantry married her, he knew only that she would not dare to leave him because if she did her own people would not take her back. He never did realize that to her, the marriage tie went far deeper than that.
    Sometimes in the early years, when he saw her from his window standing in the air, her arms outstretched, enjoying the rough, sensuous caress of the wind, he would be overtaken by a sudden terror, and feared that he might become hag-ridden by his conscience urging him to let her go free. This was a fantastic idea as he knew perfectly well, for she was his wife and the mother of his child, but he was a man who played with his thoughts and got much of his entertainment from them. Yet whenever in that nagging self torture, which is the vice of the introspective, he used to edge up to the subject, he was always first gladdened, and then humbled, and to be honest, made to be rather puzzled to find her clinging to his dry, chilly body in a dumb agony of youth and warmth.
    Old Galantry never did quite understand this, and he used to wonder if she was obstinately making the best of her destiny. The notion that she loved him because he was her husband, and that a cunning, if primitive mixture of training and breeding had made that fact well-nigh magical to her, never came into his mind. He saw that she was grateful for his tenderness, and he thought that very sweet inher, but he never knew how passionately grateful she was, or dreamed that she would still have loved and waited on him had he treated her like a dog. In the end he gave up fidgeting about it, and took what the gods had given him, but to his dying day he kept her away from younger men.
    So James grew up on his own, with Dorothy as his protector, keeper and slave. He was an odd-looking child from the beginning. He was wedge-shaped and not very tall, and he had the barrel chest of some ancestor of Shulie’s; some past smith, swinging his hammer in the greenwood, had laid the foundations of that torso. It sat oddly on the fine, aristocratic legs Galantry had had from his mother, and of which she had been so proud. These did not please James so well. All his life he had a complex about legs, insisting that they should be stout and not too long; and this in general, and not only for himself, which would have been reasonable. His hands were Galantry’s too; so like, that they were almost replicas. They were small, artistic, and extraordinarily sensitive at the finger tips. His head resembled neither parent’s particularly; it was square, and set very firmly on the short, thick neck of a Smith. He was dark, too, darker even than his mother, and he had her hair, which curled snakily to his poll; while the down on his body, over his cheek bones, and on his forearms, and even between his shoulder blades, was blue dark, even in infancy. The top part of his face was like his father’s, and they had the same heavy-lidded eyes, which should have been mournful, but which