Читать книгу The Night of Temptation - Victoria Cross - Страница 4

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The next morning Everest, after a troubled and restless night, found himself the first in the breakfast-room, and when the door opened it was Regina who came in. She was dressed in a morning cotton of rose-colour, and either by contrast to that, or from emotion, her face looked pale as their eyes met and he took her hand in his.

"You were all in silver armour last night when I saw you," he said gently, "like an image of Diana." The colour came then in soft waves to her cheeks and beat there; her gaze seemed locked in his and could not get away.

"Diana was a horrid and cruel divinity, I like her least of any of them; Venus was kinder," she murmured.

"Well, you must be Venus to me," returned Everest, smiling down upon her; his face had a gentle, tender expression, the tones of his voice were very soft, and the girl's heart beat to suffocation as she heard them.

She could not answer. Just then the door opened and the Rector, with the entire family group behind him, appeared in the doorway. Everest and Regina moved a little apart, their hands, which had remained in each other's, fell to their sides. Everest moved forward to greet his host.

"Glad to see you are an early riser," remarked the Rector genially. "Did you sleep well?"

"No, I can't say I did, there are so many disturbing influences in the country: nightingales and church clocks and all sorts of things; then when I did go to sleep I dreamt, which I never do in town."

"What did you dream about?" asked Jane Marlow. She looked very pretty this morning in a fresh white cambric, with a green ribbon round her slim throat.

"Of silver images," replied Everest, and his eyes went to Regina, who stood by her place at the table. She looked down as she heard these words; a tremor went through her whole frame.

"How funny dreams are, they never seem to correspond to anything one has seen or done in the day, do they?" replied Jane, and Everest answered calmly, "Hardly ever."

The coffee was brought in and they all closed round the table while the Rector began to say grace.

Breakfast was generally a most unpleasant meal at the Rectory. From the last word of the long grace at the beginning, to the first word of the long grace at the end, it was a series of surly, grumbling wrangles, in which everyone showed their early-morning ill-humour to the utmost. Mrs. Marlow, according to the Rector, had always done something wrong: either she was late, or she had had the coffee made too weak, or too strong, or the housemaid had not called him early enough, or too early, or his bath was cold. Mrs. Marlow generally argued out the respective points, until she was clearly proved in the right, or at least her husband was reduced to an exhausted silence. Then the two sisters had various complaints to make, or else the continuation of some personal quarrel begun upstairs absorbed them.

Regina, for herself, took no part in either the grace or the wrangling. To her the first seemed rendered ludicrous by the Rector gabbling over it, in a tremendous hurry, that he might begin abusing his wife; and further, if the Creator gave them their breakfast, He presumably gave them everything else, and of His gifts she would not certainly have picked out this detestable breakfast to thank Him for. She would sooner have thanked Him, sitting before her easel in solitude: "For what I am about to paint," for the powers He had given her, than for what she was about to eat in hostility at the table.

She used to sit quite silent, while the waves of querulous, complaining or angry voices rose and fell round her, and when she had finished her meal, which she naturally did long before the others, since so much disputing takes time, she would sit looking through the window, watching the robins at their singing matches on the lawn, and longing to be away with her painting or music, her Latin or Greek, or in the enchanted garden, out of earshot at least of her amiable family and their incessant discussion of things that to her view mattered so little.

She wondered to-day how the meal would go, because she believed they were not bad-mannered enough to quarrel before a guest, and she was astonished to find that the conversation, as a matter of fact, was kept up entirely between her and Everest. For the latter, with a strenuous resolve to ban the sick poor at breakfast, steered away from Miss Marlow's opening remarks on almshouses, and plunged resolutely into the heart of Africa, continuing the conversation with Regina which had been interrupted last night.

Regina had read much on Africa, and followed the history of many explorers through Uganda, and wandered with many authors in the pigmy forests and by the Great Lakes. Consequently, although she made some mistakes, she had a good general knowledge of the subject, and her eager enthusiasm, her perfect attention, her quick comprehension, made her a naturally good and easy talker on any subject.

As the rest of the family knew absolutely nothing about Africa, except, as regards the Rector, that it was a country "full of black heathen," as regards the mother, "that it was a swampy, unhealthy place, where there were snakes and one got fever and things," and as regards the sisters, that it was one of the places where "missions were sent to cannibals," they remained out of the conversation and sat silent, listening in wonder to the brilliant talk flying across the table, much of which they could barely comprehend.

After breakfast, when they had all risen, the Rector claimed Everest to go with him to see his model cottages, recently erected in the village, and Everest, grateful for having escaped the sick poor at breakfast, felt it his duty to put up with some poor now, since his host wished it, and consented pleasantly.

"What are we going to do this afternoon?" he asked.

He put the question in a general way, but his eyes sought Regina, who turned hers aside with a singing gladness in her heart.

Miss Marlow answered him:

"We are going to drive you over to Lady Delamere's for tea—we start from here about three."

"I'll join you outside, Everest," called the Rector from the door. "I have to look into my study for half-a-minute."

Everest nodded and went up to his own room for his hat. Coming down he met Regina alone, on the stairs, and paused.

"You are coming this afternoon?" he asked.

She was by a long window, through which the sun fell on her. Her face looked just like a rose, in its pink and white colour, as she lifted it towards him, standing two or three steps above her.

"No," she answered, smiling, "mother and Jane and Violet are going, and the carriage holds only four comfortably."

"You and I could walk?" suggested Everest promptly.

Regina laughed outright as the picture of her sisters' faces came before her, as they would look if, when the carriage was starting, Everest left his seat to walk with her.

"Oh, no," she said; "we could not do that. My sisters have set their hearts on taking you with them to the Delameres'."

"Well, where are you going then?" he asked.

"I shall go, I think, to the enchanted garden—it is such a lovely day."

"How nice that sounds! The enchanted garden! I wish I were coming there too."

"Why do you wish it?"

"I don't know. One cannot always trace the birth and growth of one's desires." Regina gazed at him as he stood there, one hand on the banister rail, thinking how truly wonderful he was in his difference from all the other men she had ever seen. The crowded country church on Sundays, what a mass of more or less ungainly, shambling, shuffling figures it contained, representatives of the middle-aged or old inhabitants; and the young men seen on the cricket and football ground, how fat and round and stodgy they looked, or else how thin and weedy, leaning over, as it were, the hollow of their own chests!

But here in Everest's case how all was changed! It was difficult to say whether the strength or grace of his figure left the greater impression on the eye, so perfectly were the two united in it. It was a form beautifully planned out by Nature, which the ceaseless activity of its owner had enhanced. It suggested potential energy; the balance and the poise of it, whether in action or repose, were always perfect. It had that curious symmetry, that look of its perfect adaptability to every possible movement, that one sees in the wild animal while at the height of its beauty and power. To Regina's mind came, as she looked at him, the thought of the slim and graceful fox, treading deftly with its sure, trim feet the edge of the covert, with all that tremendous power of swift, enduring speed locked in its beautiful, sinuous body. And again the red deer of Exmoor occurred to her, with their splendid carriage, their proud beauty of line, their clean-cut elegance of form.

Everest was forty-six, but so lightly had the feet of the years touched him in their flight over him that he looked hardly more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine. His hair had not a single white strand in it, nor had the dark moustache that flowed in a straight line across his face, not pulled downwards nor twisted up, and of which some of the threads glowed with a red-gold sheen on their blackness, if the sun struck across them. Very few lines marked the clear, warm tan of the skin; the teeth were even, perfect, untouched by dentistry. Life and experience had added power and intellect to the face, had deepened the mental charm without, as yet, taking from its physical beauty. Out of the beautiful youth he had been at eighteen, Nature had built up through all these years one of her masterpieces, and it seemed that she was so pleased with it, now that it had reached its perfection, that even she, fidget though she is, always doing and undoing, was loath to begin her task of pulling it all to pieces.

Regina gazed and gazed upon him in silence that was thrilled through and through with joy, for to the artist there is no delight more keen than looking on what is beautiful and perfect, and Everest asked her with a little smile of what she was thinking.

"Of an Exmoor deer that I saw standing, once, on a little tor at sunrise, surveying the sleeping moor," she said slowly and in a low tone, and then went on up the stairs, as she heard doors shutting, and steps approaching from below.

Everest passed on down. The beautiful imagery of her words won his quick, artistic sense, and, little conceited as he was, the flattery from the fresh, girlish lips pleased him. He went on, feeling well able to grapple even with the model cottages and the sick poor.

Regina in her room could do nothing; she tried to read, but she only heard his voice speaking; she turned to the paintings, but she hardly saw them: his face hung before her. Finally she descended to the drawing-room and sought to play, but her hands dropped from the keyboard, and she sat silent, gazing before her.

So, she remembered, had she felt once before in her life, when Nature's voice first called to her to leave her dolls and playthings and begin to prepare herself for her life's work.

How well she remembered that day, when first the scales of childhood had fallen from her eyes, and her dolls, formerly living things, had been seen for the first time as they were: bits of rag and wood and stone. How she remembered the keen wonder she had felt, the astonishment that she could play no more!

Then had come the period of fierce intelligence, the appetite and desire for work, the longing to know and to expand the brain. For since Nature has made woman to be not only the mother but the nurse of the child, and it is the mother's brain and not the father's that is transmitted to the child, she gives to the female, with the first development of sex, this sharp desire for knowledge, for learning, for mental endowment, so that it may be duly passed on to the offspring. Hence that overwhelming thirst for mental work, for study, which is so common in the developing girl for these few years in her life, so unusual in the male, who rarely learns, except for material and worldly considerations. And as Nature's voice had peremptorily called her from her playthings, and forced her to her studies, so now, her time for study being over, Nature again summoned her to leave her accomplished duties, and prepare herself for the new ones in store for her.

Nature was strong in Regina; she was its child. The cramped artifices of civilisation had not got hold of her and stifled out of her the breath of Nature. So after a time she abandoned all work, finding it impossible, and sat gazing out of the window, thinking.

At luncheon, Everest, having quite made up his mind as to his afternoon's programme, which was to include other items besides the Delamere call, took comparatively little notice of Regina, and talked chiefly to the Rector on model cottages, and their morning's inspection.

The Rector delightedly expounded his views, which seemed to Everest to have for their aim the increasing dependence of the poor upon the rich, the incompetent upon the capable, the weak and idle upon the strong and industrious, and the undermining of what thrift the poor possessed by removing the urgent necessity for it.

The model cottages were to be practically free, with only a nominal rent; old people were to be kept by the parish; sick people were to be tended gratis; young people were to be encouraged to marry early and bring into the world large families for their neighbours to keep; chance immorality was to be avoided at all costs, and punished mercilessly; large broods of infants, no matter from what drunken, vicious, idle parents, were to be favoured and cared for out of the money of the honest and sober, provided only the brood was born in wedlock, and the father and mother had the sanction of the Church.

Finally he gleefully totted up the subscriptions he had dragged out of the unwilling hands of the hard-working and thrifty portion of the villagers, for his doors, his windows, his model baths, his new sinks, and only lamented that he was still short a hundred pounds for finishing the hearths.