CHAPTER X

GAVINIA ON THE TRACK

Corp, you remember, had said that he would go to the stake rather than break his promise; and he meant it, too, though what the stake was, and why such a pother about going to it, he did not know.  He was to learn now, however, for to the stake he had to go.  This was because Gavinia, when folding up his clothes, found in one of the pockets a glove wrapped in silk paper.

Tommy had forgotten it until too late, for when he asked Corp for the glove it was already in Gavinia’s possession, and she had declined to return it without an explanation.  “You must tell her nothing,” Tommy said sternly.  He was uneasy, but relieved to find that Corp did not know whose glove it was, nor even why gentlemen carry a lady’s glove in their pocket.

At first Gavinia was mildly curious only, but her husband’s refusal to answer any questions roused her dander.  She tried cajolery, fried his take of trout deliciously for him, and he sat down to them sniffing.  They were small, and the remainder of their brief career was in two parts.  First he lifted them by the tail, then he laid down the tail.  But not a word about the glove.

She tried tears.  “Dinna greet, woman,” he said in distress.  “What would the bairn say if he kent I made you greet?”

Gavinia went on greeting, and the baby, waking up, promptly took her side.

“D——­n the thing!” said Corp.

“Your ain bairn!”

“I meant the glove!” he roared.

It was curiosity only that troubled Gavinia.  A reader of romance, as you may remember, she had encountered in the printed page a score of ladies who, on finding such parcels in their husbands’ pockets, left their homes at once and for ever, and she had never doubted but that it was the only course to follow; such is the power of the writer of fiction.  But when the case was her own she was merely curious; such are the limitations of the writer of fiction.  That there was a woman in it she did not believe for a moment.  This, of course, did not prevent her saying, with a sob, “Wha is the woman?”

With great earnestness Corp assured her that there was no woman.  He even proved it:  “Just listen to reason, Gavinia.  If I was sich a black as to be chief wi’ ony woman, and she wanted to gie me a present, weel, she might gie me a pair o’ gloves, but one glove, what use would one glove be to me?  I tell you, if a woman had the impidence to gie me one glove, I would fling it in her face.”

Nothing could have been clearer, and he had put it thus considerately because when a woman, even the shrewdest of them, is excited (any man knows this), one has to explain matters to her as simply and patiently as if she were a four-year-old; yet Gavinia affected to be unconvinced, and for several days she led Corp the life of a lodger in his own house.

“Hands off that poor innocent,” she said when he approached the baby.