A Study In Shadows. William John Locke

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СКАЧАТЬ in which pursuit he spent half his days among the musty manuscripts in the Geneva University Library. In consequence, they looked upon him with a certain awe. They saw very little of him, except at meals, and then only those who were within easy conversational distance profited much by his society. Now and then, on rare occasions, he came into the salon after dinner, where he would take a hand at piquet with Mme. Popea, whose conspicuously best behaviour on these occasions was a subject of satirical pleasure to the others. But as a general rule he retired to his own room and his private avocations.

      As a matter of fact, he was an Oxford scholar of considerable repute, honoured and welcomed in every Common Room. In his middle age he had filled a professorial chair in a Scotch University, which after some years he had resigned for reasons of climate and failing health. At present he was engaged on critical work dealing with the Swiss Reformers, and involving accurate documentary research. He had already spent the latter part of the summer at Zürich, examining the Zwinglius MSS., and now he was busy with the Calvinistic treasures of Geneva. How long his task would last would depend upon his rate of progress. But as he had let his small house in Oxford for a year, and as the quiet of the Pension Boccard suited him, he had decided upon staying at Geneva for a considerable time.

      A strange anomaly, with his learning and industry, in the midst of the heterogeneous feminine idleness of the Pension. In a vague way all the women felt it. His appearance, too, was strikingly suggestive of a personality inaccessible to the trivialities round which their own souls centred. Once a strong, thick-set man, he retained at seventy-two, great breadth of bent shoulders. His hair, scanty at the top and long, was still black, as were his heavy eyebrows, beneath which gleamed lustrous black eyes. The sombre depth of the latter and the deep furrowings on his dark, square face gave it, in moments of repose, a stern expression but when a smile or the play of fancy or interest lit it up, it was like the sunshine breaking upon a granite scaur. The very magic of the change had in it something eerie, incomprehensible. And a rare tenderness could sometimes well from the heart into the eyes, making the old face beautiful; but that was not displayed for the benefit of the ladies of the Pension.

      The fresh instincts of the young girl, however, divined the underlying tenderness and brought it to the surface. It was a natural intimacy, which cheered both lives. The old scholar's genial humour, delicate, playful fancy, evoked in Felicia spontaneity of merry thought and speech. The meals, which once had been such ordeals, when eaten under the whirlwind of Mme. Boccard's half-intelligible platitudes, became invested with a rare charm. Instead of sitting shy and silent, she laughed and jested with the inconsequence of twenty. The change was so marked, that one day, when a mock quarrel arose between the old man and herself, over the exact halving of a pear, Mme. Popea elevated surprised eyebrows, and nudged Frau Schultz her neighbour.

      “Voilà bien les femmes! a man—a mummy will suffice—but let it be masculine!”

      “And the men, they are all the same,” said Frau Schultz, in her thick South German. “Give them a pretty face, and no matter how old, they are on fire.”

      Frau Schultz applied herself again seriously to her meal, whilst Madame Popea repeated her own observation to Madame Boccard, who laughed, and prophesied a wedding in the pension. But as all this was whispered, it did not reach the ears of the parties concerned, at the other end of the table.

      Mrs. Stapleton listened amusedly to the light talk between Mr. Chetwynd and Felicia, though with a certain surprise and wistfulness. Charming and courteous as the old man was when the mood for conversation was on him, she had never been able to open in him that light playful vein. What Frau Schultz had expressed coarsely, Katherine, with a finer nature, felt delicately. It was Felicia's fresh maidenhood that had instinctively gladdened the old man—a possession she herself had lost for ever, with which she could gladden no man's heart. She looked across the table and smiled at her own thought. What did it matter, after all? She had had the roses and lilies in her time, and they had not brought her any great happiness. Her life had been lived. Still, a woman of thirty mourns her lost youth—all the more if it has been a failure—just as an older woman mourns the death of a scrapegrace son. And though Katherine smiled at herself, she wished for some of it back, even to charm such an old, old man as Mr. Chetwynd. There will ever be much that is feminine in woman.

      “You haye made a conquest,” she said soon afterwards to Felicia.

      “Haven't I?” laughed the girl. “He is so sweet. Do you know, I think sweet people, when they grow very, very old, become quite young again.”

      “Or, in this case, more accurately, isn't it that extremes touch?”

      “Do you think I am so very young?” asked Felicia, seizing the objective. “I am twenty.”

      “Happy girl,” said Katherine, smiling. “But what I meant was, that if you were thirty and he was fifty, you probably would have fewer points of contact.”

      “Or, if I were ten and he were eighty, we would play together like kittens,” said Felicia, with girlish irreverence. “Well, it doesn't matter. He is the dearest old man in the world, and it was very nice of you to arrange for me to sit next to him.”

      “It seems to have brightened you, Felicia.”

      “Oh, yes, wonderfully. I was getting so bored and dull and miserable. It is not very gay now, but I have something to look forward to every day. And your letting me talk to you has made a great difference.”

      “I am afraid I am not very entertaining,” said Katherine.

      “Sometimes you are so sad,” said Felicia, sympathetically. “I wish I could help you.”

      “I am afraid you would have to upheave the universe, my dear.”

      Felicia looked at her with such wonderful gravity in her brown eyes that Katherine broke into a laugh.

      “Well, you can do it gradually. Begin with my work-basket, will you? and find me a spool of No. 100 thread.”

      Without overstepping the bounds of kindly friendship, they saw much of each other. An imperceptible shadow of reserve in Katherine's manner, a certain variability of mood, a vein of hardness in her nature ever liable to be exposed by a chance thought, checked in the young girl the impulses of a more generous affection. Katherine was conscious of this; conscious, too, of no efforts to win more from the girl. Now and then she sounded a note of explanation.

      Once they were talking of the pension's dreariness—an endless topic. It happened that Felicia was disposed to take a cheerful view.

      “Every cloud has a silver lining,” she said.

      “By way of heightening its blackness, my dear,” said Katherine. “Besides, the lining is turned to heaven and the blackness to earth, so it does not help us much.”

      “Oh, why are you so bitter?”

      “Bitter?” echoed Katherine, musingly. “Oh, no! I am not, really. But perhaps it were better that you should think so.”

      But for all her refusal to admit Felicia any deeper into her heart, Katherine welcomed her companionship frankly. She had looked forward almost shudderingly to the dreary isolation of the winter. Whom could she choose as a companion, to exchange a thought with beyond those of ordinary civility? By a process of elimination she had arrived at little Miss Bunter, with her canaries, her Family Herald and Modern Society, her mild spinsterish chit-chat. It was a depressing prospect; but Felicia had saved her. Her society relieved the monotony of those terrible dreary, idle days, took her out of herself, stilled for a few odd hours the yearnings СКАЧАТЬ