Flower o' the Peach. Gibbon Perceval

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СКАЧАТЬ small voice tinkled indefatigably, and she worked through all the motions of hospitable politeness. But behind her smile her eyes were haggard and stale, and Paul thought that she looked at the girl, as they went in, with the very hate of envy.

      CHAPTER III

      In the years of his innocence, when the art and practice of medicine were rich with enticements like a bride, Dr. Jakes had taken his dreams in hand to mold them to the shape of his desire. A vision had beckoned to him across the roofs and telegraph wires of South London, where he scuffled for a livelihood as the assistant of a general practitioner; and when he fixed his eyes upon it, it spread and took shape as a great quiet house, noble and gray, harboring within its sober walls the atmosphere of distinguished repose which goes with a practice of the very highest class. Nothing of all its sumptuous appointment was quite so clear to him as that flavor of footfalls muffled and voices subdued; to summon it was to establish a refuge in which he might have brief ease between a tooth-drawing and a confinement. Kindly people who excused a certain want of alacrity in the little doctor by the reflection that he was called out every night might have saved their charity; his droop, his vacancy were only a screen for the splendid hush and shadow of that great visionary mansion. It was peopled, too, with many dim folk, resident patients in attitudes of relaxation; and among them, delicate and urbane, went Dr. Jakes, the sweet and polished vehicle of healing for the pulmonary complaints of the well-bred. Nor was there lacking a lady, rather ghostlike and faint in conformity with the dreamer's ideal of the highest expression of a lady-like quality, but touched, none the less, with warm femininity, an angel and a houri in one, and answering, in the voice of refinement, to the title of Mrs. Jakes.

      She had no Christian name then; she was a haunting mellowness, a presence delicate and uplifting. In the murk of the early morning, after a night spent behind drawn blinds in a narrow, tragic room, where another human being entered the world between his hands, he would go home along empty furtive streets, conscious of the comfort of her and glad as with wine, and in such hours he would make it clear to himself that she, at any rate, should never bear a child.

      "No," he would say, half aloud and very seriously. "No; it's not in the part. No!"

      That gracious and mild presence – he did not entirely lose it even when its place was assailed by the advent of the timid and amiable lady whom he married. She was a daughter of the landed interest; her father owned "weekly property" about Clapham Junction, two streets of forlorn little houses, which rang day and night with the passing of trains, and furnished to the population a constant supply of unwelcome babies. Dr. Jakes knew the value of property of that kind, and perhaps his knowledge did something to quicken his interest in a sallow, meager girl whom he encountered in the house of his employer. She brought him a thousand pounds in money, means ready to his hand to anchor the old vision to earth and run it on commercial lines; it puzzled him a little that the vision no longer responded to his summons so readily as of old. It had degenerated from an inspiration to a mere scheme, best expressed in the language of the prospectus; the fine zest of it was gone beyond recovery. There was no recapturing its gentle languors, the brooding silence of it; still less was it possible when, by the mere momentum of his plans, he had moved to South Africa and found him a house, to reproduce that reposefulness as the main character of the establishment. Such effects as he gained, during the brief strenuousness that he manifested on taking possession, were the merest caricatures of the splendid original, mocking his impotence. The thousand pounds, too, which at first had some of the fine, vague, inexhaustible quality of a dream, proved inelastic, and by the time the baby came, Dr. Jakes was already buying whisky by the case. The baby was a brief incident, a caller rather than a visitor, so ephemeral that it was scarcely a nuisance before it departed again in search of a peace less dependent on the arrangement of furniture than that which Dr. Jakes had sought to bring into being.

      All life is a compromise; between the dream and the exigencies of Dr. Jakes' position the Sanatorium had emerged. The fine, simple, old house had an air of its own, which no base use could entirely destroy. Its flat front, pedestaled upon a wide, flagged stoep, faced to the southeast and made a stronghold of shade in the noonday vehemence of the sun. Its rooms were great and low, with wide solemn windows regarding the monotony of the level veld; they stood between straight corridors where one's footsteps rang as one walked. The art of its builders had so fashioned it that it stood on the naked ground like a thing native to it, not interrupting nor affronting that sweep of vacant miles, but enhancing it. The stolid Dutch builders knew how to make their profit out of wide horizons. They had conceived a frame for lives which should ripen in face of the Karoo, gleaming on its barrenness a measure of its tranquillity. They built a home; and of it Dr. Jakes had made a Home.

      There remained yet, of all the decorous and ceremonial processes which were to maintain and give color to the life of the Sanatorium as he had conceived it of old, only one function. The two men patients who were left to him did as they pleased in most respects, but if they took tea in the afternoon they took it from Mrs. Jakes in the drawing-room after an established usage, with formal handing to and fro of plates and cups in the manner of civilized society. Jakes was seldom too unwell to be present at this function, and it was here, with his household at his back, that Margaret saw him first.

      Weariness had come upon her with the rush of an overtaking pursuer as Mrs. Jakes brought her into the house and away from the spreading dawn, and that lady had cut short the forms of politeness to bid her go to bed. She woke to the warmth of afternoon and the glow of its sun slanting upon the floor of her room and was aware at once of a genial presence. At the window a tall, stout Kafir woman, her head bound in a red and yellow handkerchief in a fashion which reminded Margaret of pictures of pirates, was tweaking the tails of the spring-blinds and taking delight in watching them run up with a whir and click. She turned at the sound of Margaret's movement, and flashed a brilliant smile upon her.

      "Missis sleeping too long," she observed. "Tea now."

      The mere good humor of her was infectious and Margaret smiled in return.

      "Who are you?" she asked.

      "Me? Fat Mary," was the answer. She laughed easily, willing to make or be a joke according to Margaret's humor. "Fat Mary, because – " she sought for a word in the unfamiliar English and then gave it up. "Because," she repeated, and traced her ample circumference with a black finger. "You see?"

      "I see," said Margaret, and prepared to get up.

      Her long sleep had restored her and there was comfort, too, in waking to the willing humanity of Fat Mary's smiles, instead of to the starched cuffs and starched countenance of some formal trained and mechanical nurse. Fat Mary was not a deft maid; she was too easily amused at niceties of the toilet, and Margaret could not help feeling that she regarded the process of dressing as a performance which she could discuss later with her friends; but at least she was interested. She revolved helpfully about the girl, to the noise of bumped furniture and of large bare feet scraping on the mats, like a bulky planet about a wan and diminutive sun, and made mistakes and laughed and was buoyant and alight with smiles – all with a suggestion of gentle and reverent playfulness such as a more than usually grown person might use with a child.

      "Too much clothes," was her final comment, when Margaret at last was ready and stood, slim and sober, under her inspection. "Like bundles," she added, thoughtfully. "But Missis is skinny."

      "Where do we go now?" asked Margaret.

      "Tea," replied Fat Mary, and led the way downstairs by a wide and noble staircase to the gray shadows of the stone hall. There was a simple splendor about the house which roused the connoisseur in Margaret, a grandeur which was all of proportion and mass, and the few articles of furniture which stood about were dim and shabby in contrast to it. She had only time to note so much when Fat Mary opened a door for her, and she was facing across a wide room to broad windows flooded with sunlight and aware of Mrs. Jakes rising from behind a little tea-table and coming forward to meet her. Two men, a young one and an old one, СКАЧАТЬ