The Amazing Marriage — Complete. George Meredith

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ golden; and great heights were cut with them, and bounding waters took the leap in a silvery radiance to gloom; the bright and dark-banded valleys were like night and morning taking hands down the sweep of their rivers. Immense was the range of vision scudding the peaks and over the illimitable Eastward plains flat to the very East and sources of the sun.

      Carinthia said: ‘When I marry I shall come here to live and die.’

      Her brother glanced at her. He was fond of her, and personally he liked her face; but such a confident anticipation of marriage on the part of a portionless girl set him thinking of the character of her charms and the attraction they would present to the world of men. They were expressive enough; at times he had thought them marvellous in their clear cut of the animating mind.—No one could fancy her handsome; and just now her hair was in some disorder, a night without sleep had an effect on her complexion.

      ‘It’s not usually the wife who decides where to live,’ said he.

      Her ideas were anywhere but with the dream of a husband. ‘Could we stay on another day?—’

      ‘My dear girl! Another night on that crazy stool! ‘Besides, Mariandl is bound to go to-day to her new place, and who’s to cook for us? Do you propose fasting as well as watching?’

      ‘Could I cook?’ she asked him humbly.

      ‘No, you couldn’t; not for a starving regiment! Your accomplishments are of a different sort. No, it’s better to get over the pain at once, if we can’t escape it.

      ‘That I think too,’ said she, ‘and we should have to buy provisions. Then, brother, instantly after breakfast. Only, let us walk it. I know the whole way, and it is not more than a two days’ walk for you and me. Consent. Driving would be like going gladly. I could never bear to remember that I was driven away.

      And walking will save money; we are not rich, you tell me, brother.’

      ‘A few florins more or less!’ he rejoined, rather frowning. ‘You have good Styrian boots, I see. But I want to be over at the Baths there soon; not later than to-morrow.’

      ‘But, brother, if they know we are coming they will wait for us. And we can be there to-morrow night or the next morning!’

      He considered it. He wanted exercise and loved this mountain-land; his inclinations melted into hers; though he had reasons for hesitating. ‘Well, we’ll send on my portmanteau and your boxes in the cart; we’ll walk it. You’re a capital walker, you’re a gallant comrade; I wouldn’t wish for a better.’ He wondered, as he spoke, whether any true-hearted gentleman besides himself would ever think the same of this lonely girl.

      Her eyes looked a delighted ‘No-really?’ for the sweetest on earth to her was to be prized by her brother.

      She hastened forward. ‘We will go down and have our last meal at home,’ she said in the dialect of the country. ‘We have five eggs. No meat for you, dear, but enough bread and butter, some honey left, and plenty of coffee. I should like to have left old Mariandl more, but we are unable to do very much for poor people now. Milk, I cannot say. She is just the kind soul to be up and out to fetch us milk for an early first breakfast; but she may have overslept herself.’

      Chillon smiled. ‘You were right, Janet’, about not going to bed last night; we might have missed the morning.’

      ‘I hate sleep: I hate anything that robs me of my will,’ she replied.

      ‘You’d be glad of your doses of sleep if you had to work and study.’

      ‘To fall down by the wayside tired out—yes, brother, a dead sleep is good. Then you are in the hands of God. Father used to say, four hours for a man, six for a woman.’

      ‘And four and twenty for a lord,’ added Chillon. ‘I remember.’

      ‘A lord of that Admiralty,’ she appealed to his closer recollection. ‘But I mean, brother, dreaming is what I detest so.’

      ‘Don’t be detesting, my dear; reserve your strength,’ said he. ‘I suppose dreams are of some use, now and then.’

      ‘I shall never think them useful.’

      ‘When we can’t get what we want, my good Carin.’

      ‘Then we should not waste ourselves in dreams.’

      ‘They promise falsely sometimes. That’s no reason why we should reject the consolation when we can’t get what we want, my little sister.’

      ‘I would not be denied.’

      ‘There’s the impossible.’

      ‘Not for you, brother.’

      Perhaps a half-minute after she had spoken, he said, ‘pursuing a dialogue within himself aloud rather than revealing a secret: ‘You don’t know her position.’

      Carinthia’s heart stopped beating. Who was this person suddenly conjured up?

      She fancied she might not have heard correctly; she feared to ask and yet she perceived a novel softness in him that would have answered. Pain of an unknown kind made her love of her brother conscious that if she asked she would suffer greater pain.

      The house was in sight, a long white building with blinds down at some of the windows, and some wide open, some showing unclean glass: the three aspects and signs of a house’s emptiness when they are seen together.

      Carinthia remarked on their having met nobody. It had a serious meaning for them. Formerly they were proud of outstripping the busy population of the mine, coming down on them with wild wavings and shouts of sunrise. They felt the death again, a whole field laid low by one stroke, and wintriness in the season of glad life. A wind had blown and all had vanished.

      The second green of the year shot lively sparkles off the meadows, from a fringe of coloured glovelets to a warm silver lake of dews. The firwood was already breathing rich and sweet in the sun. The half-moon fell rayless and paler than the fan of fleeces pushed up Westward, high overhead, themselves dispersing on the blue in downy feathers, like the mottled grey of an eagle’s breast: the smaller of them bluish like traces of the beaked wood-pigeon.

      She looked above, then below on the slim and straightgrown flocks of naked purple crocuses in bud and blow abounding over the meadow that rolled to the level of the house, and two of these she gathered.

CHAPTER V. A MOUNTAIN WALK IN MIST AND SUNSHINE

       Table of Contents

      Chillon was right in his forecast of the mists. An over-moistened earth steaming to the sun obscured it before the two had finished breakfast, which was a finish to everything eatable in the ravaged dwelling, with the exception of a sly store for the midday meal, that old Mariandl had stuffed into Chillon’s leather sack—the fruit of secret begging on their behalf about the neighbourhood. He found the sack heavy and bulky as he slung it over his shoulders; but she bade him make nothing of such a trifle till he had it inside him. ‘And you that love tea so, my pretty one, so that you always laughed and sang after drinking a cup with СКАЧАТЬ