Read Online The Young Clementina by D. E. Stevenson - Free Book Online Page B

chatter was amusing. She was a human being to me.
    â€œMrs. Wisdon is tired,” I said gently. “Don’t bother about tea, Mrs. Cope. I will get it myself.”
    â€œHo!” said Mrs. Cope. “So Mrs. Wisdon is tired, is she?” She looked at Kitty with a curious expression upon her small determined face.
    â€œYes,” I told her. “Mrs. Wisdon has had a tiring day.”
    â€œHo! She’s ’ad a tiring d’y, ’as she? Fancy that now!”
    â€œYou will be glad to get home a little earlier,” I insinuated.
    She took off her apron and folded it up and fetched her battered old straw hat which hung on a peg behind the kitchen door.
    â€œI knows when I’m not wanted,” she said in surly tones.
    â€œWhat a frightful woman!” exclaimed Kitty, before the door had shut behind Mrs. Cope’s retreating figure. “How on earth do you bear her, Charlotte? It would kill me to have a woman like that in my house.”
    I asked her if she would like some tea.
    â€œHaven’t you got anything else?” she inquired. “Brandy or something—anything—I’m all in, Charlotte. Absolutely dead to the world.”
    I gave her some brandy that I kept for medicinal purposes—it was all I had—and made some tea for myself. Kitty sipped the brandy slowly and with some distaste.
    â€œI suppose it is brandy,” she said. “It isn’t the least like the brandy Garth has.”
    â€œI never thought it was like Garth’s brandy,” I replied a trifle bitterly. “Garth can afford to pay for the best—I can’t.”
    â€œDon’t be cross, Char,” she said. “You’re all I’ve got now. Garth has gone mad—stark staring mad.”
    I paused and looked at her with the teapot in my hand.
    â€œI should never have married Garth,” she continued. “He changed—you know—changed utterly. He wasn’t like the same man. We never got on, never from the first. He was always sneering at me, sneering at my friends. Oh, Charlotte, it’s been ghastly! What a life I’ve had! What a life! Never any fun, never any amusement with him.”
    â€œBut you went about—to theaters,” I said in a dazed way. Kitty had never spoken like this before. I had realized vaguely that she and Garth did not get on well together, but not that things were serious.
    â€œTheaters!” cried Kitty. “ Garth never took me. I went with—with other people. Why shouldn’t I? If he chose to live like a hermit, writing all day when he was at home, or starting off at a moment’s notice for some outlandish place that nobody ever heard of, was I to sacrifice everything to him? Was I to sit at home waiting for him to come back to me when he chose? I knew he hated my friends and despised them, but I didn’t care. They amused me. He never bothered to amuse me. I had to find my own amusement. And now—now this.”
    â€œNow what?” I asked her. “What has happened?”
    She took a long envelope from her bag and showed it to me—there were papers in it, typewritten papers, I drew them out of the envelope and gazed at them incredulously. The words upon them swam before my eyes—“In the High Court of Justice…Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division…In the Matter of the Petition of Mr. Garth Wisdon…”
    â€œKitty, what does it mean?”
    â€œThey’re Divorce Papers. Garth is trying to get a divorce from me,” she cried wildly. “That’s what it means. It has come to that…Do you hear, Char? He’s trying to divorce me— me .”
    â€œBut why?” I asked, stupidly.
    â€œWhy? Because I’ve been out to lunch with other men, and to a play occasionally. He’s so dull. He wants me to be dull too. He wants to spoil my whole life and make me old and dull like himself. He must be mad…you see that,