The Incomplete Amorist. Эдит Несбит

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      "That's a let-off anyhow," said Betty to herself, and she propped up a Stevenson against the tea-pot.

      After tea parishioners strolled up by ones and twos and threes to change their books at the Vicarage lending library. The books were covered with black calico, and smelt of rooms whose windows were never opened.

      When she had washed the smell of the books off, she did her hair very carefully in a new way that seemed becoming, and went down to supper.

      Her step-father only spoke once during the meal; he was luxuriating in the thought of the Summa Theologiae of Aquinas in leather still brown and beautiful, which he had providentially discovered in the wash-house of an ailing Parishioner. When he did speak he said:

      "How extremely untidy your hair is, Lizzie. I wish you would take more pains with your appearance."

      When he had withdrawn to his books she covered three new volumes for the library: the black came off on her hands, but anyway it was clean dirt.

      She went to bed early.

      "And that's my life," she said as she blew out the candle.

      Said Mrs. James to Mrs. Symes over the last and strongest cup of tea:

      "Miss Betty's ailing a bit, I fancy. Looked a bit peaky, it seemed to me. I shouldn't wonder if she was to go off in a decline like her father did."

      "It wasn't no decline," said Mrs. Symes, dropping her thick voice, "'e was cut off in the midst of his wicked courses. A judgment if ever there was one."

      Betty's blameless father had been killed in the hunting field.

      "I daresay she takes after him, only being a female it all turns to her being pernickety in her food and allus wanting the windows open. And mark my words, it may turn into a decline yet, Mrs. Symes, my dear."

      Mrs. Symes laughed fatly. "That ain't no decline," she said, "you take it from me. What Miss Betty wants is a young man. It is but nature after all, and what we must all come to, gentle or simple. Give her a young man to walk out with and you'll see the difference. Decline indeed! A young man's what she wants. And if I know anything of gells and their ways she'll get one, no matter how close the old chap keeps her."

      Mrs. Symes was not so wrong as the delicate minded may suppose.

      Betty did indeed desire to fall in love. In all the story books the main interest of the heroine's career began with that event. Not that she voiced the desire to herself. Only once she voiced it in her prayers.

      "Oh, God," she said, "do please let something happen!"

      That was all. A girl had her little reticences, even with herself, even with her Creator.

      Next morning she planned to go sketching; but no, there were three more detestable books to be put into nasty little black cotton coats, the drawing-room to be dusted—all the hateful china—the peas to be shelled for dinner.

      She shelled the peas in the garden. It was a beautiful green garden, and lovers could have walked very happily down the lilac-bordered paths.

      "Oh, how sick I am of it all!" said Betty. She would not say, even to herself, that what she hated was the frame without the picture.

      As she carried in the peas she passed the open window of the study where, among shelves of dull books and dusty pamphlets, her step-father had as usual forgotten his sermon in a chain of references to the Fathers. Betty saw his thin white hairs, his hard narrow face and tight mouth, the hands yellow and claw-like that gripped the thin vellum folio.

      "I suppose even he was young once," she said, "but I'm sure he doesn't remember it."

      He saw her go by, young and alert in the sunshine, and the May air stirred the curtains. He looked vaguely about him, unlocked a drawer in his writing-table, and took out a leather case. He gazed long at the face within, a young bright face with long ringlets above the formal bodice and sloping shoulders of the sixties.

      "Well, well," he said, "well, well," locked it away, and went back to De Poenis Parvulorum.

      "I will go out," said Betty, as she parted with the peas. "I don't care!"

      It was not worth while to change one's frock. Even when one was properly dressed, at rare local garden-party or flower-show, one never met anyone that mattered.

      She fetched her sketching things. At eighteen one does so pathetically try to feed the burgeoning life with the husks of polite accomplishment. She insisted on withholding from the clutches of the Parish the time to practise Beethoven and Sullivan for an hour daily. Daily, for half an hour, she read an improving book. Just now it was The French Revolution, and Betty thought it would last till she was sixty. She tried to read French and German—Télémaque and Maria Stuart. She fully intended to become all that a cultured young woman should be. But self-improvement is a dull game when there is no one to applaud your score.

      What the gardener called the gravel path was black earth, moss-grown. Very pretty, but Betty thought it shabby.

      It was soft and cool, though, to the feet, and the dust of the white road sparkled like diamond dust in the sunlight.

      She crossed the road and passed through the swing gate into the park, where the grass was up for hay, with red sorrel and buttercups and tall daisies and feathery flowered grasses, their colours all tangled and blended together like ravelled ends of silk on the wrong side of some great square of tapestry. Here and there in the wide sweep of tall growing things stood a tree—a may-tree shining like silver, a laburnum like fine gold. There were horse-chestnuts whose spires of blossom shewed like fat candles on a Christmas tree for giant children. And the sun was warm and the tree shadows black on the grass.

      Betty told herself that she hated it all. She took the narrow path—the grasses met above her feet—crossed the park, and reached the rabbit warren, where the chalk breaks through the thin dry turf, and the wild thyme grows thick.

      A may bush, overhanging a little precipice of chalk, caught her eye. A wild rose was tangled round it. It was, without doubt, the most difficult composition within sight.

      "I will sketch that," said Eighteen, confidently.

      For half an hour she busily blotted and washed and niggled. Then she became aware that she no longer had the rabbit warren to herself.

      "And he's an artist, too!" said Betty. "How awfully interesting! I wish I could see his face."

      But this his slouched Panama forbade. He was in white, the sleeve and breast of his painting jacket smeared with many colours; he had a camp-stool and an easel and looked, she could not help feeling, much more like a real artist than she did, hunched up as she was on a little mound of turf, in her shabby pink gown and that hateful garden hat with last year's dusty flattened roses in it.

      She went on sketching with feverish unskilled fingers, and a pulse that had actually quickened its beat.

      She cast little glances at him as often as she dared. He was certainly a real artist. She could tell that by the very way he held his palette. Was he staying with people about there? Should she meet him? Would they ever be introduced to each other?

      "Oh, what a pity," said Betty from the heart, "that we aren't introduced now!"

      Her sketch grew worse and worse.

      "It's no СКАЧАТЬ