He turned to go.
"There's no use talking this way. You know Charlotte Barnard as well
as I do," he said. "You know she's one of the women that never love
any man but one. I don't want another man's wife, if she'd have me."
Suddenly he faced Barney again. "For God's sake, Barney," he cried
out, "be a man and go back to her, and marry her!"
Barney shook his head; with a kind of a sob he turned around and went
his way without another word. Thomas Payne said no more; he stared
after Barney's retreating figure, and again the look of bewilderment
and horror was in his face.
That afternoon he asked his father, with a casual air, if he had
heard anything about Barney Thayer getting his back injured in any
way.
"Why, no, I can't say as I have," returned the squire.
"I saw him this morning, and I thought his back looked as if it was
growing like Royal Bennet's. I dare say I imagined it," said Thomas.
Then he went out of the room whistling.
But, during his few weeks' stay in Pembroke, he put the same question
to one and another, with varying results. Some said at once, with a
sudden look of vague horror, that it was so. That Barney Thayer was
indeed growing deformed; that they had noticed it. Others scouted the
idea. "Saw him this morning, and he's as straight as he ever was,"
they said.
Whether Barney Thayer's back was, indeed, bowed into that terrible
spinal curve or not, Thomas Payne could not tell by any agreement of
witnesses.
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