A Modern Chronicle — Complete. Winston Churchill

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      It is simply impossible to give any adequate notion of the industry of the days that followed. No sooner was Uncle Tom out of the house in the morning than Anne Rory marched into the sitting-room and took command, and turned it, into a dressmaking establishment. Anne Rory, who deserves more than a passing mention, one of the institutions of Honora's youth, who sewed for the first families, and knew much more about them than Mr. Meeker, the dancing-master. If you enjoyed her confidence—as Aunt Mary did—she would tell you of her own accord who gave their servants enough to eat, and who didn't. Anne Rory was a sort of inquisition all by herself, and would have made a valuable chief of police. The reputations of certain elderly gentlemen of wealth might have remained to this day intact had it not been for her; she had a heaven-sent knack of discovering peccadilloes. Anne Rory knew the gentlemen by sight, and the gentlemen did not know Anne Rory. Uncle Tom she held to be somewhere in the calendar of the saints.

      There is not time, alas, to linger over Anne Rory or the new histories which she whispered to Aunt Mary when Honora was out of the room. At last the eventful day of departure arrived. Honora's new trunk—her first—was packed by Aunt Mary's own hands, the dainty clothes and the dresses folded in tissue paper, while old Catherine stood sniffing by. After dinner—sign of a great occasion—a carriage came from Braintree's Livery Stable, and Uncle Tom held the horses while the driver carried out the trunk and strapped it on. Catherine, Mary Ann, and Bridget, all weeping, were kissed good-by, and off they went through the dusk to the station. Not the old Union Depot, with its wooden sheds, where Honora had gone so often to see the Hanburys off, that grimy gateway to the fairer regions of the earth. This new station, of brick and stone and glass and tiles, would hold an army corps with ease. And when they alighted at the carriage entrance, a tall figure came forward out of the shadow. It was Peter, and he had a package under his arm. Peter checked Honora's trunk, and Peter had got the permission—through Judge Brice—which enabled them all to pass through the grille and down the long walk beside which the train was standing.

      They entered that hitherto mysterious conveyance, a sleeping-car, and spoke to old Mrs. Stanley, who was going East to see her married daughter, and who had gladly agreed to take charge of Honora. Afterwards they stood on the platform, but in spite of the valiant efforts of Uncle Tom and Peter, conversation was a mockery.

      “Honora,” said Aunt Mary, “don't forget that your trunk key is in the little pocket on the left side of your bag.”

      “No, Aunt Mary.”

      “And your little New Testament at the bottom. And your lunch is arranged in three packages. And don't forget to ask Cousin Eleanor about the walking shoes, and to give her my note.”

      Cries reverberated under the great glass dome, and trains pulled out with deafening roars. Honora had a strange feeling, as of pressure from within, that caused her to take deep breaths of the smoky air. She but half heard what was being said to her: she wished that the train would go, and at the same time she had a sudden, surprising, and fierce longing to stay. She had been able to eat scarcely a mouthful of that festal dinner which Bridget had spent the afternoon in preparing, comprised wholly of forbidden dishes of her childhood, for which Bridget and Aunt Mary were justly famed. Such is the irony of life. Visions of one of Aunt Mary's rare lunch-parties and of a small girl peeping covetously through a crack in the dining-room door, and of the gold china set, rose before her. But she could not eat.

      “Bread and jam and tea at Miss Turner's,” Uncle Tom had said, and she had tried to smile at him.

      And now they were standing on the platform, and the train might start at any moment.

      “I trust you won't get like the New Yorkers, Honora,” said Aunt Mary. “Do you remember how stiff they were, Tom?” She was still in the habit of referring to that memorable trip when they had brought Honora home. “And they say now that they hold their heads higher than ever.”

      “That,” said Uncle Tom, gravely, “is a local disease, and comes from staring at the tall buildings.”

      “Uncle Tom!”

      Peter presented the parcel under his arm. It was a box of candy, and very heavy, on which much thought had been spent.

      “They are some of the things you like,” he said, when he had returned from putting it in the berth.

      “How good of you, Peter! I shall never be able to eat all that.”

      “I hope there is a doctor on the train,” said Uncle Tom.

      “Yassah,” answered the black porter, who had been listening with evident relish, “right good doctah—Doctah Lov'ring.”

      Even Aunt Mary laughed.

      “Peter,” asked Honora, “can't you get Judge Brice to send you on to New York this winter on law business? Then you could come up to Sutcliffe to see me.”

      “I'm afraid of Miss Turner,” declared Peter.

      “Oh, she wouldn't mind you,” exclaimed Honora. “I could say you were an uncle. It would be almost true. And perhaps she would let you take me down to New York for a matinee.”

      “And how about my ready-made clothes?” he said, looking down at her. He had never forgotten that.

      Honora laughed.

      “You don't seem a bit sorry that I'm going,” she replied, a little breathlessly. “You know I'd be glad to see you, if you were in rags.”

      “All aboard!” cried the porter, grinning sympathetically.

      Honora threw her arms around Aunt Mary and clung to her. How small and frail she was! Somehow Honora had never realized it in all her life before.

      “Good-by, darling, and remember to put on your thick clothes on the cool days, and write when you get to New York.”

      Then it was Uncle Tom's turn. He gave her his usual vigorous hug and kiss.

      “It won't be long until Christmas,” he whispered, and was gone, helping Aunt Mary off the train, which had begun to move.

      Peter remained a moment.

      “Good-by, Honora. I'll write to you often and let you know how they are. And perhaps—you'll send me a letter once in a while.”

      “Oh, Peter, I will,” she cried. “I can't bear to leave you—I didn't think it would be so hard—”

      He held out his hand, but she ignored it. Before he realized what had happened to him she had drawn his face to hers, kissed it, and was pushing him off the train. Then she watched from the platform the three receding figures in the yellow smoky light until the car slipped out from under the roof into the blackness of the night. Some faint, premonitory divination of what they represented of immutable love in a changing, heedless, selfish world came to her; rocks to which one might cling, successful or failing, happy or unhappy. For unconsciously she thought of them, all three, as one, a human trinity in which her faith had never been betrayed. She felt a warm moisture on her cheeks, and realized that she was crying with the first real sorrow of her life.

      She was leaving them—for what? Honora did not know. There had been nothing imperative in Cousin Eleanor's letter. She need not have gone if she had not wished. Something within herself, she felt, was impelling her. And it is curious to relate that, in her mind, going to school had little or nothing СКАЧАТЬ