The Devourers. Annie Vivanti

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СКАЧАТЬ black, too; and the nurse is horrid. And what is the matter with my nose?"

      "Eh?" said Jim Brown.

      "Yes. Look at my nose. What's wrong with it?"

      The Brown boy looked at it. Then he looked closer. Little by little an expression of horror came over his face. "Oh!" he exclaimed. "Oh my! Just think of it!"

      "What? What is it?" cried Edith. "It was all right just now." And as the boy kept staring at her nose with growing amazement, she screamed: "Tell me what it is! Tell me, or I'll hit you!"

      Then the Brown boy got up and danced round her in a frenzy of horror at what was the matter with her nose; so she took a small stone and threw it at him. Whereupon he went back to his strawberry-plants, and declined to speak to her any more.

      When he saw her walking forlornly away with her hand to her nose, and her two plaits dangling despondently behind, he felt sorry, and called her back.

      "I was only larking, Miss Edith. Your nose is all right." So she was comforted, and sat down on the grass to talk to him.

      "Valeria speaks Italian to the baby, and they have come to stay always," she said. "The baby is going to have my room, and I am going to be upstairs near Florence. We are all going to dress in black, because of my brother Tom having died. And mamma has been crying about it for the last four days. And that baby is my niece."

      "Your brother, Master Tom, was the favourite with them all, wasn't he?" said Jim.

      "Oh, yes," said Edith. "There were so many of us that, of course, the middle ones were liked best."

      "I don't quite see that," said Jim.

      "Oh, well," explained Edith, "I suppose they were tired of the old ones, and did not want the new ones, so that's why. Anyhow," she added, "it doesn't matter. They're all dead now."

      Then she helped him with the strawberry-plants until it was time for tea.

      Her grandfather came to call her in—a tall, stately figure, shuffling slowly down the gravel path. Edith ran to meet him, and put her warm fingers into his cool, shrivelled hand. Together they walked towards the house.

      "Have you seen them, grandpapa?" she asked, curvetting round him, as he proceeded at gentle pace across the lawn.

      "Seen whom, my dear?" asked the old gentleman.

      "Valeria and the baby."

      "What baby?" said the grandfather, stopping to rest and listen.

      "Why, Tom's baby, grandpapa," said Edith. "You know—the baby of Tom who is dead. It has come to stay here with its mother and nurse. Her name is Wilson."

      "Dear me!" said the grandfather, and walked on a few steps.

      Then he paused again. "So Tom is dead."

      "Oh, you knew that long ago. I told you so."

      "So you did," said the old gentleman. He took off his skullcap, and passed his hand over his soft white hair. "Which Tom is that—my son Tom or his son Tom?"

      "Both Toms," said Edith. "They're both dead. One died four days ago, and the other died six years ago, and you oughtn't to mix them up like that. One was my papa and your son, and the other was his son and the baby's papa. Now don't forget that again."

      "No, my dear," said the grandfather. Then, after a while: "And you say his name is Wilson?"

      "Whose name?" exclaimed Edith.

      "Why, my dear, how should I know?" said the grandfather.

      Then Edith laughed, and the old gentleman laughed with her.

      "Never mind," said Edith. "Come in and see the baby—your son Tom's son's baby."

      "Your son's Tom's sons," murmured the grandfather, stopping again to think. "Tom's sons your son's Tom's sons … Where do I put in the baby?"

      Edith awoke in the middle of the night, listening and alert. "What is that?" she said, sitting up in bed.

      Florence's voice came from the adjoining room: "Go to sleep, my lamb. It's only the baby."

      "Why does it scream like that?"

      "It must have got turned round like," explained Florence sleepily.

      "Then why don't they turn it straight again?" asked Edith.

      "Oh, Miss Edith," replied Florence impatiently, "do go to sleep. When a baby gets 'turned round,' it means that it sleeps all day and screams all night."

      And so it did.

      II

      A gentle blue February was slipping out when March tore in with screaming winds and rushing rains. He pushed the diffident greenness back, and went whistling rudely across the lands. The chilly drenched season stood still. One morning Spring peeped round the corner and dropped a crocus or two and a primrose or two. She whisked off again, with the wind after her, but looked in later between two showers. And suddenly, one day, there she was, enthroned and garlanded. Frost-spangles melted at her feet, and the larks rose.

      Valeria borrowed Edith's garden-hat, tied it under her chin with a black ribbon, and went out into the young sunshine across the fields. Around her was the gloss of recent green, pushing upwards to the immature blue of the sky. And Tom, her husband, was dead.

      Tom lay in the dark, away from it all, under it all, in the distant little cemetery of Nervi, where the sea that he loved shone and danced within a stone's-throw of his folded hands.

      Tom's folded hands! That was all she could see of him when she closed her eyes and tried to recall him. She could not remember his face. Try as she would, shutting her eyes with concentrated will, the well-known features wavered and slipped away; and nothing remained before her but those dull white hands as she had seen them last—terrible, unapproachable hands!

      Were those the hands Tom was so particular about and rather vain of—the hands she had patted and laid her cheek against? Were those hands—fixed, cessated, all-relinquishing—the hands that had painted the Italian landscapes she loved, and the other pictures she hated, because in them all stood Carlotta of Trastevere, rippling-haired, bare, and deliberate? Were those the hands that had rowed her and Uncle Giacomo in the little boat Luisa on the Lake Maggiore?—the hands that had grasped hers suddenly at the Madonna del Monte the day she had put on her light blue dress, with the sailor collar and scarlet tie? She seemed to hear him say, with his droll English accent: "Volete essere sposina mia?" And she had laughed and answered him in the only two English words she knew, and which he himself had taught her across the table d'hôte: "Please! Thank you!" Then they had both laughed, until Zio Giacomo had said that the Madonna would punish them.

      The Madonna had punished them. She had struck him down in his twenty-sixth year, a few months after they were married, shattering his youth like a bubble of glass. Valeria had heard him, day after day, night after night, coughing his life away in little hard coughs and clearings of his throat; then in racking paroxysms that left him breathless and spent; then in a loose, easy cough that he scarcely noticed. They had gone from Florence, where it was too windy, to Nervi, where it was too hot; from Nice, where it was too noisy, to Airolo, where it was too dull; then, with a rush of hope, with hurried packing of coats and shawls, of paint brushes and colours, of skates and СКАЧАТЬ