Ramshackle House. Footner Hulbert

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СКАЧАТЬ discrepancies of her house, but as a matter of fact Counsell was astonished when he entered. Pen had full control within the house and the squalor was left out of doors. The furniture, what there was left of it, dated from the same ugly period as the house, but there were certain touches; the lofty rooms were cool, inviting, full of charm. Poor as the Broomes were one could never mistake it for other than a lady’s house. Particularly the dining-room with its velvety smooth walnut table, the hand-made mats, the dull old silver, the flowers, the delicious looking food.

      “Oh! but I’m hungry!” Counsell said involuntarily, showing all his white teeth.

      Glancing at Pen he found her eyes obstinately hidden, but she betrayed a dimple.

      Not until she heard Counsell pick up his knife and fork did she venture to look at him. She had been waiting for the moment when his attention would be distracted by food. The smooth turn of his ruddy cheek and his long, curved lashes hurt her with delight. There was something affectingly boyish about him for all his strength and his assured air. Pen yearned to mother that shining head against her breast. She never looked at him but the once, yet she was aware of every mouthful he took, and every mouthful gave her satisfaction.

      Pendleton Broome opened his eyes rather at the spread. The glance of reproof that he sent across to Pen suggested that while hospitality was the first law of the Broomes, still there should be reason in all things. From that moment with true male consistency he began to cool towards their young guest.

      Nevertheless, charmed to have a sophisticated listener, he aired all his quaint and impractical theories. He dabbled in chemistry amongst other things, and had a great store of pseudo-scientific patter. Counsell listened politely and made the suitable rejoinders, but never lost an opportunity of trying to draw Pen into the talk. Pen, resisting his efforts, was nevertheless secretly delighted with his adroitness. It made her realize how she had been hungering for the graces of intercourse.

      Once Counsell asked her directly: “Do you know New York?”

      “I went to school there.” She named a famous finishing school.

      Counsell could not but look his surprise.

      “I had a legacy,” said Pen demurely. Her father frowned.

      “Then you know people in New York?” Counsell said eagerly.

      She shook her head. “I have not kept up with the girls.”

      “She deliberately dropped them!” her father put in with an aggrieved air. “It is the infernal Broome pride. She was most popular in school.”

      Pen laughed lightly. “Northerners are different,” she said. “They don’t make a merit of their departed glories.”

      It was her way of letting Counsell know, without being disloyal to her father, that she did not share in her elder’s delusions. The young man looked at her in a new way. It was the first inkling of her real nature that she had given him. Pen felt his look through and through her.

      Pendleton took advantage of the pause to secure the floor again, and held it for some time. But he had to eat too, and as soon as he stopped talking to chew, Counsell turned to Pen.

      “Isn’t it rather lonely here?”

      “Mercy, no!” laughed Pen. “Far too much to do!”

      “I suppose there are lots of agreeable people in the neighborhood?”

      “Up the county, oh yes,” said Pen.

      “And you have all sorts of jolly parties?”

      “They do,” said Pen briefly.

      “Not you?”

      Pen explained. “The road from here up the Neck that connects us with the world has become impassable for motors, even if we had one. Even a buggy can scarcely get through now. By road it’s twelve miles to the nearest white man’s house. Excepting the squatters. Our only way of communication is by motor-boat with the Island. Our friends do not live on the Island. And we’ve no way of getting up the county.”

      “Have you no white neighbors at all?” he asked aghast.

      “Old Mr. Weems Locket who keeps the lighthouse.”

      “No white woman near?”

      Pen shrugged. “No special hardship in that. I like men just as well as women.”

      “Nobody but the light-keeper?”

      “Oh yes, in bad weather the bug-eyes and the pungy-boats lie under our bank and the skippers come ashore to call on father and use the telephone.”

      “In winter it must be hard.”

      “Oh things are never really as bad as they seem to one who doesn’t know them.”

      Just the same his sympathetic voice drew something out of her. For the first time she gave him her eyes freely. Wonderful dark, glowing eyes that won something of him that he never got back again. Her laughing, somber glance said as plainly as if the words had been spoken: “The winter here is Hell!” His eyes laughed back in hers, surrendering, and for an instant they were one.

      This brief interchange was terribly sweet to Pen; so sweet that it scared her. For some time afterwards she was quite stiff with him, and his eyes reproached her.

      When they left the table and went out on the porch Counsell made a deliberate move to separate her from her prosy father. With all his politeness the young man had a resolute air.

      “I think this is simply the finest site for a house that I have ever seen,” he said to Pen. “Let’s walk out and look over the edge of the bank.”

      Pen’s heart leaped—then sank again, remembering the morning’s work still undone, and the afternoon’s work all to do. Pendleton looked injured, but as no one paid the slightest attention to him he made believe to recollect something important that he had to do, and went into the house. Pen pleaded with her sterner self: “Just for a few minutes!” Meanwhile she was being firmly urged towards the boxes. Before she was aware of having given in, she found herself well on the way.

      They strolled across the neglected lawn, matted with horse-mint, too spicy a vegetable to the taste of the stock that wandered over the place. The drive once paved with shell, made a wide circular sweep in front of the house, but the shell had disappeared under the horse-mint too. Part of the old bed enclosed within the drive Pen had dug up and put in a few dahlias. These she had essayed to protect from the horses and cows and sheep by a miscellaneous barricade of boxes and boards. She blushed for it now. She couldn’t explain to him that she had an instinct for flowers that had to find some outlet.

      The earthen bank was sixty feet high. In the days of the place’s glory an ingenious gardener had planted honeysuckle at the base to keep it from washing and now the tangled vines swept all the way up to their feet in a bottle green wave flecked with the foam of its pale blossoms. The scent of it was dangerously enervating to youth.

      “The whole world down here is full of honeysuckle,” murmured Don. “In the evening you can smell it far out in the Bay.”

      An ineffably lovely panorama was spread before them, which the light haze customary to that soft land, endowed with a curiously moving quality. СКАЧАТЬ