The Lady Paramount. Harland Henry

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ it is to be a musical boot-and-knife boy. And Wickersmith will be at his devotions. He tells me he never gets leisure for his morning meditation till luncheon 's cleared away. And that's what it is to be a pious butler. I 'm doubting whether there was anyone to disembarrass that flyman of yours of your luggage. So he 's probably driven off with it all to his humble, happy home. I see none of it about. Never mind. There 'll be some of your old things in Mrs. W.'s camphor-chest, perhaps; or if it comes to a pinch, I can lend you a garment or so of my own—and then won't Craford of Craford cut a figure of fun! You will make her acquaintance … Let me see. To-day is Wednesday. We 'll call on her to-morrow."

      "On whom?" asked Anthony, looking blank.

      "Have we been talking of Queen Berengaria?" Adrian, with his nose in the air, enquired. "On whom? says you. We 'll call to-morrow afternoon."

      "Not I," said Anthony.

      "Not to-morrow?" Adrian raised his eyebrows, well-marked crescents of reddish-brown above his ruddy face, and assumed thereby a physiognomy of almost childlike naïveté. "Ah, well, on Friday, then;—though Friday is unlucky, and one rarely shines on a day of abstinence, anyhow. It's all a fallacy about fish being food for the brain. Meat, red meat, is what the brain requires." He slapped his forehead. "But Friday, since you prefer it."

      Anthony seated himself on the arm of a leather chair, and, with calculated deliberation, produced his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, returned his cigarette-case to his pocket, took out his matchbox, struck a match, and got his cigarette alight.

      "No, dear Nimbletongue," he said at last, through a screen of smoke, "not Friday, either." He smiled, shaking his head.

      Disquiet began to paint itself in Adrian's mien.

      "Name your own day." He waited, anxious, in suspense.

      Anthony chuckled.

      "My own day is no day. I have n't the faintest desire to make the good woman's acquaintance, and I shall not call on her at all."

      Adrian stretched out appealing hands.

      "But Anthony—" he adjured him.

      "No," said Anthony, with determination. "I 'm not a calling man. And I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I 'll pay no calls. And as for making acquaintances—save me from those I 've made already. In broad England I can recall but three acquaintances who are n't of a killing sameness;—and one of those," he concluded sadly, with a bow to his companion, "one of those is fat, and grows old."

      "Poor lad," Adrian commiserated him. "You are tired and overwrought. Go to your room, and have a bath and a brush up. That will refresh you. Then, at half-past four, you can renew the advantages of my society at tea in the garden. Oh, you 'll find your room quite ready. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months. Shall I send Wick?"

      "Yes, if you will be so good," said Anthony. He rose, and moved towards the staircase.

      Adrian waited till he had reached the top.

      Then, "You 'll meet her whether you like or not on Sunday. Where on earth do you suppose she hears her Mass?" he called after him.

      "Oh, hang," Anthony called back.

      For, sure enough, unless she drove seven miles to Wetherleigh, where could she hear her Mass, but as his guest, in the chapel of his house?

III

       Table of Contents

      Susanna was seated on the moss, at the roots of a wide-spreading oak. She was leaning back, so that she could look up, up, through vistas of changing greens—black-green to gold-green—through a thousand labyrinthine avenues and counter-avenues of leaves and branches, with broken shafts of sunlight caught in them here and there, to the glimpses of blue sky visible beyond. The tree gave you a sense of great spaces, and depths, and differences, like a world; and it was full of life, like a city. Birds came and went and hopped from bough to bough, twittering importantly of affairs to them important; squirrels scampered over the rough bark, in sudden panic haste, darting little glances, sidewise and behind, after pursuers that (we will hope) were fancied; and other birds, out of sight in the loftier regions, piped their insistent calls, or sang their tireless epithalamiums. Spiders hung in their gossamer lairs, only too tensely motionless not to seem dead; but if a gnat came—with what swift, accurate, and relentless vigour they sprang upon and garotted him. Sometimes a twig snapped, or a young acorn fell, or a caterpillar let himself down by a long silken thread. And the air under the oak was tonic with its good oaken smell.

      Susanna was leaning back in a sort of reverie, held by the charm of these things. "We have no trees like this in Italy," she was vaguely thinking. "The trees and the wild creatures are never so near to one there; one never gets so intimate with them; Nature is not so accessible and friendly." She remembered having read somewhere that such enjoyment as she was now experiencing, the enjoyment of commune with the mere sweet out-of-door things of the earth, was a Pagan enjoyment, and un-Christian; and her mind revolted at this, and she thought, "No. There would n't be any enjoyment, if one did n't know that 'God's in His Heaven, all 's right with the world.'"

      And just then her reverie was interrupted …

      "He has arrived. I have seen him—what you call seen—with my own eyes seen. There are about two yards of him; and a very spruce, gentlemanlike, well-knit, and attractive two yards they are."

      Thus, with a good deal of animation, in a pleasant, crisp old voice, thus spoke Miss Sandus: a little old lady in black: little and very daintily finished, with a daintily-chiselled profile, and a neat, small-framed figure; in a black walking-skirt, that was short enough to disclose a small, high-instepped, but eminently business-like pair of brown boots. Miss Sandus (she gave you her word for it) was seventy-four;—and indeed (so are the generations linked), her father had been a middie with Nelson at Trafalgar, and a lieutenant aboard the Bellerophon during that ship's historic voyage to St. Helena;—but she confronted you with the lively eyes, the firm cheeks, the fresh complexion, the erect and active carriage, of a well-preserved woman of sixty; and in her plentiful light-brown hair there was scarcely a thread of grey. She stepped trippingly across the grass, swinging a malacca walking-stick, with a silver crook-handle.

      "He has arrived. I 've seen him."

      So her voice broke in upon Susanna's musings; and Susanna started, and got up. She was wearing a muslin frock to-day, white, with a pattern of flowers in mauve; and she was without a hat, so that one could see how her fine black hair grew low about her brow, and thence swept away in loose full billows, and little crinkling over-waves, to where it drooped in a rich mass behind. But as she stood, awaiting Miss Sandus's approach, her face was pale, and her eyes were wide open and dark, as if with fright.

      "Dear me, child. Did I startle you? I 'm so sorry," said Miss Sandus, coming up to her. "Yes, Don Antonio has arrived. I saw him as he disembarked at his native railway-station. I was ordering a book at Smith's. And such luggage, my dear. Boxes and bags, bags and boxes, till you could n't count them; and all of stout brown leather—so nice and manny. He looks nice and manny himself: tall, with nice СКАЧАТЬ