The Challenge of Love. Victorian Romance Novel
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Название: The Challenge of Love
Автор: Victorian Romance Novel
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066387457
isbn:
The woman with the wet rag answered him through her blubberings.
“Not an hour past, doctor.”
“After a meal, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And plenty of drink?”
She looked at him with humid eyes pleading pitifully in a wrinkled, ugly face.
“ ’E be’n’t dying, doctor?”
Wolfe was silent, feeling the beat of the man’s heart.
“Oh, don’t say it be death, sir. He was such a lusty chap. He was laughing over ’is beer.”
“I’m sorry. But he’s bad.”
The woman began to sob, the strings of her sunbonnet twitching upon her shoulders.
Wolfe was raising the man’s lids when a voice came from somewhere, a deep, languid, mellow voice, and if colour can be ascribed to voices, the colour of gold under trees at twilight. The country folk moved aside. The woman in the blue bodice sat up and wiped her eyes with the wet rag.
“Who is it?”
“Tom Bett, ma’am.”
“A sunstroke.”
“Dr. Threadgold’s man be here.”
Wolfe, half turning, saw a woman in a white dress moving from the open sunlight into the shade of the oak. She seemed to glide rather than to walk in the cloud-like expanse of her crinoline. She was a very tall woman, and a mass of auburn hair surrounded a face that was white and smooth as ivory. This hair of hers was the colour of copper in certain lights; in others—all dusted over with reddish gold; and though her face was so smooth and white, the red mouth streaked it with a colour that was almost the colour of blood. Her eyes, dark and large, were filled with an expression as of inexpressible ennui that drowned the light in them, and made them resemble the eyes of one who suffered.
Wolfe rose. He knew by instinct that this woman was the mistress of “Pardons,” owner of a third of Navestock town, mother of that rough-riding youngster whom he had pulled up once in Bridge Street. Mrs. Brandon moved across the grass under the shade of the oak. She was still young, not more than thirty, but her face lacked all animation, the proud, bored, dead face of a woman who no longer enjoyed anything. She looked at the unconscious man and the weeping woman as though she were staring at some picture crowded amid a thousand others into the gallery of life. She had grown tired of looking at pictures. Her eyes said as much.
“Is it a bad case?”
“I am afraid so.”
“Give any orders that you wish. He can be taken up to any of my cottages.”
“Thank you.”
Wolfe called some of the men and told them to fetch a hurdle or a door and a sheet wrung out in cold water. Happening to turn again towards Mrs. Brandon, he found her eyes fixed on him with a vague and careless curiosity.
Wolfe was struck by one of those flashes of surprise that strike across the clear calm of a strong man’s consciousness. He felt suddenly and unaccountably embarrassed, like a raw youth in a drawing-room. He looked at her and realised that she was a woman to whom he had nothing at all to say.
His abrupt uneasiness betrayed itself in a certain brusquerie.
“I may send to the house for anything I want?”
“Please do.”
“I suppose there is not such a thing as ice to be had?”
“No, I suppose not.”
She turned away to speak to the woman in the blue bodice and white apron, and Wolfe bent over the unconscious man. Yet he could not prevent himself from listening to the beautifully casual voice of the woman in white. She spoke as a statue might be expected to speak, coldly, perfectly, yet without sympathy. Wolfe felt a strange mingling of repulsion and interest. He found himself wondering whether this woman who had so fair a face and body had always carried a half-dead soul.
When he rose again, Mrs. Brandon had moved away, and her hair gleamed in the sunlight. The white figure showed up in isolation against the shorn grass. The sunlight seemed to fall away from it as though there was nothing that the golden arms could clasp.
The men came back with a hurdle covered with horse-cloths, and one of them carried a wet sheet. The summer day, that had stood slothfully still in the presence of the great lady, moved on again into action. Wolfe drew a deep breath of relief. Here was something to fight for, the life of a man.
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