A Rose of Yesterday. F. Marion Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ Sylvia, mother," said Archie, glaring at the girl. "But isn't she grown! And isn't she lovely? Oh, Ju-u-ukes!"

      His heavy lips thickened outwards as he repeated the mysterious ejaculation, and there was more colour than usual in his dark face. He was but little older than Sylvia, and the two had played together as small children, but he had never shown any special preference for her as a playmate. What struck him, now, was evidently her beauty. There was a look in his eyes, and a sort of bristling of the meeting eyebrows that reminded Helen of his father, and her white lids quivered for an instant at the recollection, while she felt a little chill run through her.

      The colonel also saw.

      "Shall we cross over and speak to them?" he asked in a low voice. "Or shall we just go on?"

      "Let us go on," answered Helen. "I will go and see them later. Besides, we have passed them now. Let us go on and get into the shade; it is dreadfully hot here."

      "Won't you stop and speak to them, mother?" asked Archie Harmon, in a tone of deep disappointment. "Why, we have not seen them for ever so long!"

      "We shall see them by and by," answered his mother. "It's too hot to go back now."

      The young man turned his head and lagged a little, looking after the girl's graceful figure, till he stumbled awkwardly against a curbstone. But he did not protest any more. In his dull way, he worshipped his mother as a superior being, and hitherto he had always obeyed her with a half-childish confidence. His arrested intelligence still saw her as he had seen her ten years earlier, as a sort of high and protecting wisdom incarnate for his benefit, able to answer all questions and to provide him with unlimited pocket-money wherewith to buy bright-coloured posters and other gaudy things that attracted him. Up to a certain point, he could be trusted to himself, for he was almost as far from being an idiot as he was from being a normally thinking man. He was about as intelligent and about as well informed as a rather unusually dull schoolboy of twelve years or thereabouts. He did not lose his way in the streets, nor drop his money out of his pockets, and he could speak a little French and German which he had learned from a foreign nurse, enough to buy a ticket or order a meal. But he had scarcely outgrown toys, and his chief delight was to listen to the stories his mother told him. She was not very inventive, and she told the same old ones year after year. They always seemed to be new to him. He could remember faces and names fairly well, and had an average recollection of events in his own life; but it was impossible to teach him anything from books, his handwriting was the heavy, unformed scrawl of a child, and his spelling was one long disaster.

      So far, at least, Helen had found only his intellectual deficiency to deal with, and it was at once a perpetual shame to her and a cause of perpetual sorrow and sympathy. But he was affectionate and docile enough, not cruel as some such beings are, and certainly not vicious, so far as she could see. Dull boys are rarely mischievous, though they are sometimes cruel, for mischief implies an imagination which dulness does not possess.

      Archie Harmon had one instinct, or quality, which redeemed him from total insignificance and raised him above the level of an amiable and harmless animal. He had a natural horror of taking life, and felt the strongest possible impulse to save it at any risk to himself. His mother was never quite sure whether he made any distinction between the value of existence to a man, and its worth to an animal, or even to an insect. He seemed not to connect it with its possessor, but to look upon it as something to be preserved for its own sake, under all circumstances, wherever it manifested itself. At ordinary times he was sufficiently cautious for his own safety, and would hesitate to risk a fall or scratch in climbing, where most boys would have been quite unaware of such possibilities. But at the sight of any living thing in danger, a reckless instinct to save it took possession of him, and his sluggish nature was roused to sudden and direct activity, without any intermediate process of thought. He had again and again given proof of courage that might have shamed most men. He had saved a child from drowning in the North River, diving after it from a ferryboat running at full speed, and he had twice stopped bolting horses--once, a pair with a heavy brougham in the streets of New York, and once, in the park, a dog-cart driven by a lady. On the first of these two occasions he had been a good deal cut and bruised, and had narrowly escaped with his life. His mother was too brave not to be proud of his deeds, but with each one her fears for his own daily safety increased.

      He was never violent, but he occasionally showed a strength that surprised her, though he never seemed to care about exhibiting it. Once, she had fallen and hurt her foot, and he had carried her up many stairs like a child. After that, she had felt now and then as men must feel who tame wild beasts and control them.

      He worshipped her, and she saw that he looked with a sort of pity on other women, young or old, as not worthy to be compared with her in any way. She had begun to hope that she might be spared the humiliation of ever seeing him in love, despised or pitied, as the case might be, by some commonplace, pretty girl with white teeth and pink cheeks. She feared that, and she feared lest he should some day taste drink, and follow his father's ways to the same ruin. But as yet he had been like a child.

      It was no wonder that she shuddered when, as he looked at Sylvia Strahan, she saw something in his face which had never been there before and heard that queer word of his uttered in such a tone. She wondered whether Colonel Wimpole had heard and seen, too, and for some time the three walked on in silence.

      "Will you come in?" asked Mrs. Harmon, as they reached the door of her hotel.

      The colonel followed her to her little sitting-room, and Archie disappeared; for the conversation of those whom he still, in his own thoughts, regarded as 'grown-up people' wearied him beyond bearing.

      "My dear friend," said Colonel Wimpole, when they were alone, "I am so very glad to see you!"

      He held one of her hands in his while he spoke the conventional words, his eyes were a little misty, and there was a certain tone in his voice which no one but Helen Harmon had ever heard.

      "I am glad, too," she said simply, and she drew away her hand from his with a sort of deprecation which he only half understood, for he only knew that half of the truth which was in himself.

      They sat down as they had sat many a time in their lives, at a little distance from each other, and just so that each had to turn the head a little to face the other. It was easier to talk in that position because there was a secret between them, besides many things which were not secrets, but of which they did not wish to speak.

      "It is terribly long since we last met," said the colonel. "Do you remember? I went to see you in New York the day before we started for Japan. You had just come back from the country, and your house was in confusion."

      "Oh yes, I remember," replied Mrs. Harmon. "Yes, it is terribly long; but nothing is changed."

      "Nothing?" The colonel meant to ask her about Harmon, and she understood.

      "Nothing," she answered gravely. "There was no improvement when the doctor wrote, on the first of last month. I shall have another report in a day or two. But they are all exactly alike. He will just live on, as he is now, to the end of his life."

      "To the end of his life," repeated the colonel, in a low voice, and the two turned their heads and looked at each other.

      "He is in perfect health," said Mrs. Harmon, looking away again.

      She drew out a long hat-pin and lifted her hat from her head with both hands, for it was a hot afternoon, and she had come into the sitting-room as she was. The colonel noticed how neatly and carefully she did the thing. It seemed almost unnecessary to do it so slowly.

      "It is so hot," she said, as she laid the hat on СКАЧАТЬ