Ransome

“ Ransome’s name,” he said. “When we are gone from here you must promise that it shall never again pass your lips. Mrs. Ransome is not a good woman, Delight.”
It was a lie yet his manner of speaking it, and the look with which he now approached me, made me feel helpless again, and I made haste to rush from the room, ostensibly to prepare for our trip down town, in order to escape my own weakness and gain a momentary self-possession before we faced the outside world. Only eighteen years old and confronted by such a diabolical problem! ”

“ I said; then, with a rising sense of having by this speech suggested a falsehood, I hastily dropped the topic, and, with an entire change of manner, remarked, airily:
“Mrs. Ransome must have gone off very suddenly, to leave everything so exposed in a house as splendid as that. Most people, however rich, see to their choice things more carefully.”
She rose to the bait. “Mrs. Ransome is a queer woman. Her things are of but little account to her; to save her daughter from a moment’s pain she would part with the house itself, let alone the accumulations it contains. ”

“ When she was outside, Ransome fought to give her time to get back to the Hawk of Darion. Also, he fought for the sheer joy of it. The air in his lungs was fresh again, and the taste of treachery was out of his mouth.
It took all of Mytor's guards and the priests to overpower him, but they were too late to save Mytor from the knife that left him gasping out his life on the floor.
Ransome did not struggle in the grip of the guards. He stood quietly, waiting.
"Your death will not be made prettier by what you have done," a priest told him. The knife was poised. ”

“ He signed to his son to sit near him.
"How old are those children?" he said.
"Dossie was five in March, and Stanny was three in April."
"And they've been—how long without their mother?"
"It'll be three years next October."
"Why don't you get rid of that woman?" said Mr. Ransome. It was as if with effort and with pain and out of the secret, ultimate sources of his being that he drew the energy to say it. They would never know what he was thinking, never know (as Ranny had once said) what was going on inside him. ”

“ And underneath Ranny's rooms, between the bedroom at the back and the back parlor, between the parlor and the shop, between the shop and the dispensing-room, Fulleymore Ransome dragged himself to and fro, more than ever weedy, more than ever morose, more than ever sublime in his appearance of integrity; and with it all so irritable that Ranny's children had to be kept out of his way. He would snarl when he heard them overhead; he would scowl horribly when he came across the "pram," pushed by the little girl, in its necessary progress through the shop into the street and back again. ”

“ He felt with the most entire sincerity that now that the Humming-bird was dead he would never be happy again.
On the Sunday after the funeral, which was on the Saturday, he sat in the front parlor with his mother and Mr. and Mrs. Randall, listening with a dumb but poignant acquiescence to all that they were saying about his father. Their idea now was that Mr. Ransome was not only a good man, a man of indissoluble integrity, but a man of unimaginably profound emotions, of passionate affections concealed under the appearance of austerity. ”

“ Ranny, with his venturesomeness, had carried it a step further. For Ranny, not only did Mr. Ransome's inebriety conceal itself under the name of Headache, but in those hours when the Headache cast its intolerable gloom over the household Ranny persisted—from his childhood he had persisted—in regarding his father, perversely, as the source and fount of joy.
It was in this happy light he saw him on Sunday morning, when Mrs. Ransome came into the back parlor, where he was hiding his paper, The Pink 'Un, behind him under the sofa cushions. ”

“ He would hardly answer my questions, and only grumbled. Couldn’t a man take an afternoon off duty with a bad headache—for once?
That evening, as I sat in the saloon after dinner, I could hear him muttering continuously in his room. Ransome, who was clearing the table, said to me:
“I am afraid, sir, I won’t be able to give the mate all the attention he’s likely to need. I will have to be forward in the galley a great part of my time.”
Ransome was the cook. The mate had pointed him out to me the first day, standing on the deck, his arms crossed on his broad chest, gazing on the river. ”

“ Ransome's eyes were weary now that the woman's dancing no longer held them. And there was little hope in his voice.
A man can put off a date across ten years, and across a hundred worlds, and there can be whiskey and women to dance for him. But there was a ship with burned-out jets lying in the desert outside this crumbling city, and it was the night of Bani-tai, the night of expiation in distant Darion, and Ransome knew that for him, this was the last world.
After tonight the priests would proclaim the start of a new Cycle, and the old debts, if still unpaid, would be canceled forever. ”

“ Ransome opened his eyes suddenly and looked at her again, and Dossie, terrified, turned away and burst out crying.
"She's shy. She's a silly little girl," said Ranny, as he led her away. He knew that, in the moment when the child had turned from him, his father had felt outcast from life and utterly alone.
Mr. Ransome stirred and looked after him. "You come back here," he said. "I've something to say to you."
Ranny took the children to his mother and went back. Mr. Ransome was sitting up in his chair. He had roused himself. He looked strangely intelligent and alert. ”

“ For, as Ranny's mother said to Mrs. Randall, You should see her own white blouses. There was washing for you! Mrs. Ransome owned quite handsomely that the girl "paid for it." By which she meant that Violet's appearance justified the extravagant amount of time she spent on it. And it was not that Granville demanded from her the downright hard work Mrs. Usher had considered salutary in her case. Ransome had seen to that. He had not agreed with Mrs. Usher. If he couldn't keep a servant, he could, and did, engage a charwoman for all the heavy work. ”

“ This was the only complaint uttered. I don't know what we should have done without Ransome. He worked with us, silent, too, with a little smile frozen on his lips. From time to time I murmured to him: "Go steady"--"Take it easy, Ransome"--and received a quick glance in reply.
When we had done all we could do to make things safe, he disappeared into his galley. Some time afterward, going forward for a look round, I caught sight of him through the open door. He sat upright on the locker in front of the stove, with his head leaning back against the bulkhead. His eyes were closed ”

“ Ransome stood silent, his arm halfway to his blaster. The woman had begun to dance again in the red glare of the torch.
"There will be other women," the Venusian was murmuring. "The woman who dances now, I will give her to you, to take with you in your new ship."
Ransome looked slowly from the glowing body of the woman to the guards around the walls, down into Mytor's confident face. His arm dropped away from the blaster.
"Any man—for a price." The Venusian's murmur was lost in the blare of the music. Ransome had eased his lean body back into the chair. ”

“ So they talked of other matters, and the conversation soon fell on that which was far more interesting to Little than the capture of all the coiners in creation.
He asked Ransome how long he was to go on like this, contenting himself with the mere sight of her.
“Why;” said Ransome, “even that has made another man of you. Your eye is twice as bright as it was a month ago, and your color is coming back. ”

“ From the doctor's manner, from his Uncle Randall's manner and his Aunt Randall's, from Mr. Ponting's and the assistant's manner, and from the manner, the swollen grief, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, of the servant Mabel, he would have gathered that his father was a good man.
But Ransome never doubted it. He spoke, he thought, he felt as if his father's death had left him inconsolable. It was the death of a man who had made them all ashamed and miserable; who had tried to take the joy out of Ranny's life as he had already taken it out of Ranny's mother's face ”

“ Ransome didn't know what she was talking about."
"Rats! When you told her—"
"It's immaterial," said Ranny, with great dignity, "what I told her. For I've changed my mind. See?"
"You can't change it. You can't play fast and loose like that. I've engaged those rooms from a week to-day. Where am I to go to?"
"You can go to hell if you like," said Ranny, with marked amiability.
Up to that point Mercier had been amiable too. But when Ranny told him where he might go to he began to look unpleasant. ”

“ I asked, satisfied at having been able to catch a glimpse of a full-length portrait of a lady who could be no other than Mrs. Ransome. “See! my shadow does not even fall across the carpet. I won’t do the room any harm, and I am sure that Mrs. Ransome’s picture won’t do me any.”
“Come! come away!” he cried; and humoring his wishes, I darted away, this time in the direction of the dining-room and Ambrose. “My dear,” remonstrated my husband, quickly following me, “what has brought you back here?”
“I want to see,” said I, “what Ambrose does with the food we did not eat. Such a lot of it!” ”

“ Now and then you see big men like Pardy bending nearly double, painfully "treading the mazy" with bits of kids of twelve or thereabout, as there are often not ladies enough to go round. Now and again the chatter of voices is stilled and we hear, "Mr. Ransome will oblige the comp'ny with a song." Mr. Ransome forthwith proceeds to oblige, in a voice hoarse from long and fervent swearing at refractory bullocks, and is inclined to crack on the high notes. ”

“ Pritchard's questions stung him to silent, bottled-up fury; he answered in monosyllables.
"Friend Speed has the air of a thoughtful man," remarked Ransome in his oblique, half-sarcastic way. And Speed smiled at this, not because it amused him at all, but because Ransome possessed personality which submerged to some extent his own.
Finally, when Clanwell asked him up to coffee he declined, courteously, but with a touch of unboyish reserve which he had never previously exhibited in his relations with Clanwell. "I've got such a lot of work at Lavery's," he pleaded. ”

“ Ransome's reasons was beyond him.
He left Ranny struggling with the question: If it isn't weakness—what is it?
For Violet persisted in her strange refusal, in spite of Ranny's remonstrances, his entreaties, his appeals.
"It's been trouble enough," she said, "without that."
She was sitting up in her chair before the bedroom fire. They were alone. The nurse was downstairs at her supper. The Baby lay between them in its cradle, wrapped in a white shawl. Ranny was watching it. ”

“ At his seventh failure he turned with the dignity of a man overmastered by outrageous circumstance.
"Mercier not in?" he asked, sternly. (You would have said it was his son Randall that he admonished and reproved.)
"Not yet," said Ranny. And as he said it he possessed himself very gently of the measuring-glass and bottle. (Mr. Ransome affected not to notice this man [oe] uver.) ”

“ What did young Adriance call you? Did he know?"
"Oh, yes. 'Andy' is a noncommittal nickname."
"All right; here is your card."
Mr. Ransome watched the new employee cross the floor, with a meditative consideration of the uselessness of the shadow of the purple without its comfortable substance; but he was not especially surprised after the first moment. Few wealthy men trouble themselves about the distant branches of their families, and babies are frequently named after them by hopeful kinsmen. ”

“ He had them ever before him, and associated them, absurdly but inveterately, with a pharmaceutical chemist's occupation; of Weediness his father being the prime example; while for Flabbiness, young Mercier, his father's assistant—well, Mercier, as he said, "took the biscuit." It was horrible for young Ransome to inhabit the same house with young Mercier, because of his flabbiness.
In all cities there are many thousand Ransomes, more or less confined in mahogany cages, but John Randall Fulleymore stands for all of them. ”

“ Then the little good one threw herself on her knees before him, weeping.
"O little father, Tzar," she says, "take my transparent apple and my silver saucer; only forgive my sisters. Do not kill them because of me. If their heads are cut off when the sun goes down, it would have been better for me to lie under the blanket of black earth in the shade of the birch tree in the forest." ”

“ His general attitude is kind but patronizing; he displays none of the effusive desire to please which is his correct demeanor towards his richer congregants. The elder Ransomes regard him as their spiritual leader, and worship him along with God at a respectful distance.)
Tanner (He speaks in a hushed voice, glancing towards the kneeling figure of Janet) . Bear up, Mrs. Ransome. Bear up, I beg of you! (Mrs. Ransome howls more vigorously; Tanner is embarrassed.) This is very distressing, Mrs. Ransome.
Mrs. Ransome (Between her sobs) . It certainly is kind of you to come, Mr. ”

“ Well, they came to the palace, and waited on the steps; and the Tzar came out to take the morning air, and he saw the old merchant, and the two sisters with their hands tied, and the little pretty, one, as lovely as a spring day. And the Tzar saw her, and could not take his eyes from her. He did not see the shepherd boy, who hid away among the crowd.
Says the great Tzar to his soldiers, pointing to the bad sisters, "These two are to be put to death at sunset. When the sun goes down their heads must come off, for they are not fit to see another day." ”