The Red House. Эдит Несбит

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      “Look out—you'll kick me.”

      She had climbed up the ivy behind me. I said nothing till I had pulled her up to stand safely beside me, and then I fairly shook her.

      “You wicked,” I said. “Suppose you had slipped? You might have broken that little, silly neck of yours.”

      She laughed.

      “My dear boy, I was climbing trees when you were in your cradle!”

      As I was out of my cradle twenty-two years ago, and that was three years before she was even in hers, this insult called for no reply.

      “Did you really think I should allow you to see an inch of even the apple-room without me?” she said. “Come on—oh!—how jolly the garden looks from here! Is this the window?”

      It was. I broke one of the cobwebby panes, and opened the window, but, of course, it was barred.

      “Idiot that I am—I remember now—I used to creep through. I've grown since then. It's no good. We must give it up.”

      Chloe was looking at the bars. Suddenly she took her hat off.

      “I'm not so very big,” she said. “You called me a shrimp only yesterday.”

      The bottom of the window was level with the leads. She twisted her skirt round her ankles as she sat down, and pushed both feet between the bars.

      “You can hold on to my arm if you like till I feel the floor. Oh, don't be silly. I must.”

      She twisted herself like an eel through the bars.

      “Right. Let go,” and the next moment she was laughing at me out of the dark window.

      “Mind the stairs,” I said.—“Open the door at the top, and I can come in, too.”

      She disappeared. The little door shook to her withdrawal of the rust-locked bolts. I bent my head and stepped in. A kiss met my face in the dark.

      “Welcome to your house,” she said.

      We went down the little, dark, rickety staircase. At the bottom was a door. Locked.

      “Oh, this is too much!” said Chloe.

      “Go back a few steps,” I said, for my blood was up now, and, besides, the door did not feel very firm.

      “Broad shoulders are useful sometimes,” she said, when the door had given way to the pressure of mine, and we found ourselves standing in the great, dark kitchen, where the thin, dusty shafts of yellow sunlight shot through the shutter-cracks.

      We had down those shutters, and looked out through the dingy windows on the moat.

      “Oh, Len, what a place!” she said, and kissed me again. “Just look at the roasting-jack, and the rack for guns, and the hooks in the roof to hang hams and things—and, oh—there's a great bacon-rack. It is too beautiful!”

      We explored the pantry and the servants' hall, the little bedrooms above, and then along the flagged passage to the great hall, tiled with white and red marble, with the oak staircase winding up out of it.

      We explored the living-rooms that led from it, and before we had climbed the first flight of stairs to the great drawing-room, my wife was breathless with enthusiasm. She kissed me in every room—“for luck,” as she explained—and when at last even the great attics held nothing concealed from us, I calculated that I had received twenty-nine kisses.

      “It ought to let for a good bit,” I said, thoughtfully, when at last I had replaced all the shutters, and had persuaded her to come out and let me bang the big door after us.

      “It'll want some doing up, won't it?” said Chloe. “That's a very dangerous hole in the staircase. Come, let's go round the garden.”

      We went. The old garden had always been beautiful to me, even in the days when I used secretly to eat gooseberries there, and plums, and peaches in an unripe state; and it was beautiful now, even as I remembered it, only now its trees and bushes were incredibly grown—moss-cushioned its paths. Its fountains were dry and weed grown, and its sun-dial was covered with briony and woody nightshade. I put aside the green trails to show Chloe the motto, Horas numero nisi serenas (“I chronicle only the sunny hours”).

      She leaned her elbows on the top of the sundial, and looked at me.

      “There now, you see,” she said. “We must live here! We simply must. Only sunny hours!”

      “My dear, it's madness. We can't live here. We can let it for two hundred pounds a year.”

      “I don't care if we could let it for two thousand,” said she.

      “And our furniture would about fill the servants' hall and the kitchen.”

      “Then we'll live in the servants' hall and the kitchen.”

      “And we could never keep up the garden. It would take three men all their time.”

      “It wouldn't. And I'd get up at three in the morning and weed.”

      “But you promised to be reasonable.”

      “I am; it's you who aren't; and if I did I don't care. It's what I've wanted all my life. Oh, Len, you must.”

      “If you're so keen on the place we might live in one of the cottages.” There were four on the estate.

      “I hate the cottages. Poky little things.”

      “They're bigger than the Bandbox,” I said.

      “I hate the Bandbox,” she said, mutinously. Then I laughed.

      “After that heresy,” I said, “I shall take you home. My darling lunatic, come away. The Red House has turned your brain.”

      Chloe mounted in silence, and in silence we rode away. In the village I stopped at the plumber's—he is also a builder and a house agent, and though it was Saturday, he was, after all, at home—and rather hurriedly told him to try and let the Red House.

      Chloe said nothing, but stood beside me pale with the strain of her inward protest.

      We rode on.

      “How could you?” she said, presently. “When shall we ever have such a chance again? That glorious green garden, and the orchard, all pinky and white, and the drawing-room—it must be forty feet long—and the cottages, and the still-room, and the dear, darling, little apple-room. The whole place is like a picture out of Silas Marner. I'm sure that long, low room where you have to go down two steps was called the white parlor. It's like all the houses I've ever dreamed of. And after I've kissed you in every room for luck, too, and everything! Oh, Len, you don't really love me, or you'd let me live there!”

      “You certainly put a great strain on my love, madam,” I said, “when you cry for the moon in this disgraceful manner on the king's high-road. Cheer up! Perhaps you'll feel saner in the morning. СКАЧАТЬ