50+ Space Action Adventure Classics. Жюль Верн

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СКАЧАТЬ can’t even tell where she is,” he said, turning the thing round in a hopeless manner, and then desisting. “It’s hard on us, Willie. Here she is; she hadn’t anything to complain of; a sort of pet for all of us. Not even made to do her share of the ‘ousework. And she goes off and leaves us like a bird that’s learnt to fly. Can’t TRUST us, that’s what takes me. Puts ‘erself — But there! What’s to happen to her?”

      “What’s to happen to him?”

      He shook his head to show that problem was beyond him.

      “You’ll go after her,” I said in an even voice; “you’ll make him marry her?”

      “Where am I to go?” he asked helplessly, and held out the envelope with a gesture; “and what could I do? Even if I knew — How could I leave the gardens?”

      “Great God!” I cried, “not leave these gardens! It’s your Honor, man! If she was my daughter — if she was my daughter — I’d tear the world to pieces!” . . I choked. “You mean to stand it?”

      “What can I do?”

      “Make him marry her! Horsewhip him! Horsewhip him, I say! — I’d strangle him!”

      He scratched slowly at his hairy cheek, opened his mouth, and shook his head. Then, with an intolerable note of sluggish gentle wisdom, he said, “People of our sort, Willie, can’t do things like that.”

      I came near to raving. I had a wild impulse to strike him in the face. Once in my boyhood I happened upon a bird terribly mangled by some cat, and killed it in a frenzy of horror and pity. I had a gust of that same emotion now, as this shameful mutilated soul fluttered in the dust, before me. Then, you know, I dismissed him from the case.

      “May I look?” I asked.

      He held out the envelope reluctantly.

      “There it is,” he said, and pointing with his garden-rough forefinger.

       “I.A.P.A.M.P. What can you make of that?”

      I took the thing in my hands. The adhesive stamp customary in those days was defaced by a circular postmark, which bore the name of the office of departure and the date. The impact in this particular case had been light or made without sufficient ink, and half the letters of the name had left no impression. I could distinguish —

      I A P A M P

      and very faintly below D.S.O.

      I guessed the name in an instant flash of intuition. It was Shaphambury. The very gaps shaped that to my mind. Perhaps in a sort of semi-visibility other letters were there, at least hinting themselves. It was a place somewhere on the east coast, I knew, either in Norfolk or Suffolk.

      “Why!” cried I — and stopped.

      What was the good of telling him?

      Old Stuart had glanced up sharply, I am inclined to think almost fearfully, into my face. “You — you haven’t got it?” he said.

      Shaphambury — I should remember that.

      “You don’t think you got it?” he said.

      I handed the envelope back to him.

      “For a moment I thought it might be Hampton,” I said.

      “Hampton,” he repeated. “Hampton. How could you make Hampton?” He turned the envelope about. “H.A.M. — why, Willie, you’re a worse hand at the job than me!”

      He replaced the letter in the envelope and stood erect to put this back in his breast pocket.

      I did not mean to take any risks in this affair. I drew a stump of pencil from my waistcoat pocket, turned a little away from him and wrote “Shaphambury” very quickly on my frayed and rather grimy shirt cuff.

      “Well,” said I, with an air of having done nothing remarkable.

      I turned to him with some unimportant observation — I have forgotten what.

      I never finished whatever vague remark I commenced.

      I looked up to see a third person waiting at the greenhouse door.

      Section 7

      It was old Mrs. Verrall.

      I wonder if I can convey the effect of her to you. She was a little old lady with extraordinarily flaxen hair, her weak aquiline features were pursed up into an assumption of dignity, and she was richly dressed. I would like to underline that “richly dressed,” or have the words printed in florid old English or Gothic lettering. No one on earth is now quite so richly dressed as she was, no one old or young indulges in so quiet and yet so profound a sumptuosity. But you must not imagine any extravagance of outline or any beauty or richness of color. The predominant colors were black and fur browns, and the effect of richness was due entirely to the extreme costliness of the materials employed. She affected silk brocades with rich and elaborate patterns, priceless black lace over creamy or purple satin, intricate trimmings through which threads and bands of velvet wriggled, and in the winter rare furs. Her gloves fitted exquisitely, and ostentatiously simple chains of fine gold and pearls, and a great number of bracelets, laced about her little person. One was forced to feel that the slightest article she wore cost more than all the wardrobe of a dozen girls like Nettie; her bonnet affected the simplicity that is beyond rubies. Richness, that is the first quality about this old lady that I would like to convey to you, and the second was cleanliness. You felt that old Mrs. Verrall was exquisitely clean. If you had boiled my poor dear old mother in soda for a month you couldn’t have got her so clean as Mrs. Verrall constantly and manifestly was. And pervading all her presence shone her third great quality, her manifest confidence in the respectful subordination of the world.

      She was pale and a little out of breath that day, but without any loss of her ultimate confidence, and it was clear to me that she had come to interview Stuart upon the outbreak of passion that had bridged the gulf between their families.

      And here again I find myself writing in an unknown language, so far as my younger readers are concerned. You who know only the world that followed the Great Change will find much that I am telling inconceivable. Upon these points I cannot appeal, as I have appealed for other confirmations, to the old newspapers; these were the things that no one wrote about because every one understood and every one had taken up an attitude. There were in England and America, and indeed throughout the world, two great informal divisions of human beings — the Secure and the Insecure. There was not and never had been in either country a nobility — it was and remains a common error that the British peers were noble — neither in law nor custom were there noble families, and we altogether lacked the edification one found in Russia, for example, of a poor nobility. A peerage was an hereditary possession that, like the family land, concerned only the eldest sons of the house; it radiated no luster of noblesse oblige. The rest of the world were in law and practice common — and all America was common. But through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathy of СКАЧАТЬ