Last Pages. Oscar Mandel

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СКАЧАТЬ I may be obliged to make you change your mind. Or not. I need time to think. To think profoundly.”

      Whereupon she rose and rang the bell for dinner.

      Afterward Aimée took her wonted nap—it was good for one’s complexion, she said—and Madeleine wrote a note she intended to give Colonel Mayhew. She recalled Nicholas mentioning, during their excursion round the island, and a propos of—she could not remember what, that his uncle liked to sit and read, afternoons, by the Brant Point lighthouse, weather permitting. She would give herself a little more time to steady her resolve and then find the Colonel.

      The note she wrote was a short one. At ease with her conscience, Madeleine returned to a serene reading of Athalie, where she had reached the third act and made little pencil notes of her very own in the margins. For her dream was to be modest Mademoiselle Pichot teaching school in Lyon some day not too far in the future.

      12

      AT THE MAYHEW residence, the midday meal in the dining room, cooked by Ruth and served by Priscilla, was shared with Cottle and Wallace, and the conversation, discreetly alluding to the imminent departure of the principals of the house, concerned itself chiefly with the business duties of the two others. There was talk of timber and whale oil and pitch and tar and tobacco, orders to fill, merchandise to receive, accounts to settle, customers to please. The Colonel’s probity was universally known, and he meant his house to maintain its reputation, as well as its efficiency, during their absence.

      After coffee, Cottle and Wallace withdrew for an hour’s leisure, and Nicholas, saying he had something particular to impart to his uncle, took the latter to his sitting-room upstairs, inviting the Colonel to make himself comfortable. He looked unusually grave. Mayhew lit his pipe.

      “Nothing suddenly amiss, I hope,” he said.

      “Oh no! Perhaps on the contrary. At least I hope so. I must tell you, my dear uncle, that this morning I spoke at length with Madeleine. I—I am in love with her.”

      The Colonel smiled paternally.

      “You cannot be blamed for that, my fine fellow. Who wouldn’t be? You told her so?”

      “I did. And I proposed to her.”

      “That was a tremendous next step. She was delighted?”

      “I think so.”

      “And you will be married when the—what shall we call the thing?—when the troubles are over?”

      “I hope so. Perhaps before. However, she did not quite give her consent, I mean, not in so many words.”

      “Perhaps a little maidenly reserve.”

      “I don’t think so. Uncle, she is an aristocrat.”

      “Ah, I see. And we are but commoners. I see.”

      “Yet at heart she is ardently with us.”

      “As is her mother; so that is good. And then?”

      “This is the difficult part, my dear uncle. I found myself obliged to speak to her at length about our…our means…our wealth…our standing…our prospects…persuade her that, commoners though we may be, we are not nothing.”

      “I cannot blame you, nephew.”

      “And then—I swore her to secrecy. But I needed to say more. It was necessary to tell her everything. She swore—”

      Mayhew interrupted, pipe aloft in alarmed surprise.

      “You told her about our leap to the mainland?”

      “I needed to. The call that has come for us. The important call. Your rank. That was important. She was in rapture.”

      Mayhew puffed at his pipe. Nicholas went on.

      “She will not even tell her mother. ‘Your secret shall die with me’, she said.”

      Mayhew nodded. There was a rather long pause.

      “You may have said too much, Nick,” he brought out at last; “but—I believe the girl. Will not even tell her mother, eh? I believe her.” Then, standing up, he shook Young Nick’s hand. “I judge her to be a fine, honest and very smart young woman. Besides, the time has come for you to be married. I was much, much younger than you when my turn came to the altar. So fine a girl she was, so fine, so honest, and very smart. But so brief our bliss…. However, my boy, there will be a mountain of details. Presbyterian and Catholic. American and French. The Tourville family, unknown to us: who are they? Marriage contract. But of course the chief point is love, the Yes on both sides.”

      “She hasn’t yet said Yes,” Nicholas reminded his uncle, smiling.

      “A detail! You must attack again.”

      “I will.”

      And there, trifles aside, the conversation ended.

      Later that afternoon, Josh Mamack was shown in by Priscilla. It was going to be his business to drive his cart twice a day to the southern cove to look for the Enterprise anchored off-shore. No one would be suspicious, since Mamack the jack-of-all-trades was ever on the road looking for work or performing it. He would also discreetly transport a solid rowboat to the place.

      13

      NEXT MORNING Nicholas tried to call on Madeleine at the inn but was told that she was indisposed. He returned home slightly but only slightly alarmed. To some extent it may be said that the young woman was indeed unwell, but the trouble was purely spiritual, it came of reflections about her ungrateful enjoyment of the pampered life she led thanks to the mother she was betraying by her silence. Five hundred pounds! Still, Madeleine was not a brooder. A mission awaited her. When she rose to it that afternoon—a sunny afternoon, the mildest of winds giving a freshness to the land—her spirits were high again. This weighed against that, she was doing what was right and best.

      The lighthouse was clasped round its base by a long circular bench. One could thus sit in the sun or the shade as the day went by. The Colonel, however, was not to be seen when she arrived. She sat where she could watch the harbor alive with all the prosperous bustle that was going to be so cruelly diminished by the long war, and where she saw again the waters in which, so recently, a handsome young man had leaped to save—not a stranger, but a needed business agent of his.

      Deep in her thoughts, she was almost surprised by the very person she had been waiting for. The Colonel had arrived, book in hand. His face lit up, as one says, when he saw and greeted her. She invited him to sit beside her. Doing so, he quickly decided not to speak to her of what was, after all, not yet an engagement. She on her side intended to keep the conversation as light as possible before coming to the point. After replying to his inquiry about the well-being of her charming mother, she asked him, “What is your book, Colonel? Perhaps a treatise on whaling ships?”

      “No,” he replied with a smile; “guess again.”

      “The poems of some refined but ailing gentlewoman of Connecticut.”

      “Not quite.”

      “I give up. You СКАЧАТЬ