Читать книгу The Winding Stair - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 7

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Though Paul left Mr. Ferguson’s office with a calm enough face, his mind was bewildered and fear clutched at his heart. Things were happening to him which he had never imagined at all. He had been confident with all the perfect confidence of eighteen years and his confidence in a second was gone. He was in real distress, which made him ache like some physical hurt and tortured him at night so that he could not sleep till long after daybreak. He could not adjust himself to the new conditions of his life. He looked with surprise upon other people, in the streets or in the public rooms of his hotel, who were unaware of the troubles which had hold of him.

He had planned his visit to London full with many a pilgrimage. The London of Dickens and De Quincey—its inns, its gardens and churches! That old mansion at the northwest corner of Greek Street, where Mr. Brunell had given a lodging and a bundle of law papers for a pillow, to his youthful client—all were to be visited with a thrill of excitement and a hope that they would not fall short of the images he had made of them in his thoughts. But the glamour had faded from all these designs. He paced the streets, and indeed all day, but it was to get through the long dismal hours and he walked like one in a maze.

He knew no one and throughout the four days no one spoke to him at all. He moved through the crowded thoroughfares unnoticed as a wraith; he sat apart in restaurants; and as his father had done, he tramped by night the hollow-sounding streets of the city where the lamp-posts kept their sentry guard. On the fifth day, however, the expected letter did come by the first post from Mr. Ferguson.

“If you will travel to Pulburo’ in Sussex by the 3.55 P. M. train from Victoria on the day you receive this, Colonel Vanderfelt will send a car to meet you at the station and will put you up for the night. Will you please send a telegram to him”; and the Colonel’s address followed.

Paul sent off his telegram at once and followed it in the afternoon. Outside Pulboro’ station a small grey car was waiting and a girl of his own age, with brown eyes and a fresh pretty face and a small bright blue hat sitting tightly on her curls, was at the wheel.

“I am Phyllis Vanderfelt,” she explained. “My father asked me to drive in and fetch you. He has had to be away to-day and won’t get home much before dinner time, I’m afraid.”

She turned the car and drove westwards under the railway arch talking rather quickly as people who are uneasy and dread an awkward silence will do. They passed through a little town of narrow winding streets and high walls clustered under a great church with a leaping spire, like a piece of old France, and swung out onto a high wide road which dipped and rose, with the great ridge of the South Downs sweeping from Chanctonbury Ring to Hampshire on their left, forests and bush-strewn slopes of emerald and cliffs of chalk silver-white in the sun, and from end to end of the high rolling barrier the swift shadows of the clouds flitting like great birds.

They had ceased to talk now and there was no awkwardness in the silence. Paul was leaning forward gazing about him with a queer look of eagerness upon his face.

“To come home to country like this!” he said in a low voice. “You can’t think what it means after months of brown earth and hot skies.”

Upon their right a low wall bordered the road, and on the other side of the wall fallow-deer grazed in a Park. Beyond, a line of tall oaks freshly green was the home of innumerable rooks who strewed the air about the topmost branches, wheeling and cawing. The square tower of a church stood upon a little hill.

“It’s friendly, isn’t it?” he cried, and a look of commiseration made the eyes of the girl at his side tender. Would he think this countryside so friendly when the evening was over and he had got to his room?

“Do you know our Downs?”

Phyllis spoke at random and hastily as he turned towards her.

“I wonder,” he answered. “Could I have forgotten them if I had once known them? I seem to have been within a finger’s breadth of recognising something.”

“When you have seen my mother we will walk through the village. We shall have time before dinner,” said Phyllis, and she turned the car into the carriage-way of a square old house with big windows level with the wall, which stood close to the road.

Mrs. Vanderfelt, a middle-aged woman with shrewd and kindly eyes received him with a touch of nervousness in her manner and, as her daughter had done, talked volubly and a little at random whilst she was giving him some tea.

“I don’t know what you would like to do until dinner time,” she said, and Phyllis said:

“I am going to show Mr. Ravenel the village.”

A glance of comprehension was swiftly exchanged between the mother and the daughter, but not so swiftly but that Paul intercepted it.

“You can get the key at Rapley’s,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt.

The two young people came to four cross-roads, and Paul exclaimed:

“Up the hill to the right, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

They mounted the hill and Paul stopped. He pointed with his stick towards the signboard of an inn built on the high bank above the road.

“Now I know. I lived here once as a child. I always wondered why the Horse Guards had an inn here, and what sort of people they were. I used to imagine that they were half-horse, like the Centaurs, and I always hoped to see them.”

Phyllis Vanderfelt laughed.

“Isn’t that like a man? I show you a place as beautiful as any in England and the only thing which you have remembered of it from the time when you were four is the place where you could get a drink.”

“Yes, the Horseguards’ Inn,” repeated Paul cheerfully. “Let us go on!”

But it was now Phyllis who stopped with a face from which the merriment had gone.

“I don’t know,” she said indecisively. “It shall be as you wish. But I wonder. We talked it all over at home. We couldn’t tell whether it would be helpful to you, whether you would care to remember everything to-morrow—whether you already remembered. My father was quite clear that you should see everything. But I am not sure—”

Paul felt the clutch of fear catching his breath once more as he looked into the girl’s compassionate eyes.

“I am with your father,” he said. “My recollections are too faint. I can only remember what I see. Let us go on!”

“Very well!”

Phyllis Vanderfelt went into one of the cottages and came out again with a big key in her hand. Beyond the cottages a thick high hedge led on to an old rose-red house with an oriel window looking down the road from beneath a gable and a tiled roof golden with lichen. Wisteria draped the walls in front with purple.

“It is empty,” said Phyllis, as she put the key into the lock and opened the door. The rooms were all dismantled, the floors uncarpeted. Paul Ravenel shook his head.

“I remember nothing here.”

Phyllis led him through a window into a garden. A group of beech trees sheltered the house from the southwest wind and beyond the beech trees from a raised lawn their eyes swept over meadows and a low ridge of black firs and once more commanded the shining Downs. Paul stood for a little while in silence, whilst Phyllis watched his face. There came upon it a look of perplexity and doubt. He turned back towards the house. On its south side, a window had been thrown out; on its tiled roof a wide band of white clematis streamed down like a great scarf. On the wall beside the window a great magnolia climbed.

“Wait a moment,” cried Paul; and as he gazed his vision cleared. He saw, as the gifted see in a crystal, a scene small and distant and very bright.

There was a table raised up on some sort of stand upon the gravel paths outside this window. A man was sitting at the table and a small crowd of people, laughing and jeering a little—an unkindly crowd—was gathered about him. And furniture and ornaments were brought out. He turned to Phyllis. “There was a sale here, ever so long ago—and I was present outside the crowd, looking on. I lived here, then?”

“Yes,” said Phyllis.

“And it was our furniture which was being sold?”

“Yes.”

So far there was no surprise for Paul Ravenel, nothing which conflicted with his conception and estimate of his father. Monsieur Ravenel had sold off his furniture, just as he had changed his name and abode. It was part of the process of destroying all his associations with the country and people of his birth. Only—his recollections had revealed something new to him—and disquietingly significant.

“Why were those who came to buy unfriendly and contemptuous?” he asked slowly.

“Are you sure that they were?” Phyllis returned. But she did not look at Paul’s face and her voice was a little unsteady.

“I am very sure about that,” said Paul. “A woman was with me, holding my hand. She led me away—yes—I was frightened by those noisy, jeering people, and she led me away. It was my nurse, I suppose. For my mother was dead.”

“Yes,” replied Phyllis, and then, not knowing how hard she struck, she added, “Your mother had died a couple of months before the sale.”

Paul Ravenel, during the last days, had been schooling himself to a reserve of manner, but this statement, as of a thing well known which he too must be supposed to know, loosened all his armour. A startled cry burst from his lips.

“What’s that?” he exclaimed, and with a frightened glance at his white face Phyllis repeated her words.

“I thought you knew,” she added.

“No.”

Paul walked a little apart. One of the garden paths was bordered by some arches of roses. He stood by them, plucking at one or two of the flowers and seeing none of them at all. The keystone of the explanation which he had built in order to account for and uphold his father was down now and with it the whole edifice. It had all depended upon the idea of a passionate, enduring love in his father’s heart for the wife who had died in giving birth to her son, the enemy. And in that idea there was no truth at all!

Paul reflected now in bitterness that there never had been any reason why he should have held his belief—any wild outburst from Monsieur Ravenel, any word of tender remembrance. He had got his illusion—yes, he reached the truth now in this old garden—from an instinct to preserve himself from hating that stranger with whom he lived and on whom he depended for his food and the necessities of his life. He turned suddenly back to Phyllis Vanderfelt.

“What I don’t understand, Miss Phyllis, is how it is that remembering so much of other things here, I can remember nothing of my mother.”

“She only came home here to die,” Phyllis replied gently.

Paul pressed his hands over his eyes for a moment or two in a gesture of pain which made the young girl’s heart ache for him. But he looked at her calmly afterwards and said: “I am afraid that Colonel Vanderfelt has very bad news to tell me to-night.”

Phyllis Vanderfelt laid her hand gently upon his arm.

“You will remember that you have made very real friends here in a very short time, won’t you?” she pleaded. “My mother and myself.”

“Thank you,” said Paul.

Yet another shock was waiting for him in Colonel Vanderfelt’s house. For as he entered the drawing room three-quarters of an hour later, a tall man lifted himself with an effort from an easy chair and with the help of a stick limped across the room towards him.

“This is my husband,” said Mrs. Vanderfelt, and before Paul could check his tongue, the cry had sprung from his lips:

“The man with the medals!”

The older man’s eyes flashed with a sudden anger. Mrs. Vanderfelt gasped and flushed red. Phyllis took a step forward. All had a look as if they had suffered some bitter and intolerable insult.

Paul quickly explained. “My father and I crossed you one night a long time ago when you were coming from a banquet at the Guildhall. You called to my father. I was a child, and I always remembered you as the man with the medals. The phrase jumped out when I saw you again.”

The fire died out of Colonel Vanderfelt’s eyes. A look of pity sheathed them.

“We will talk of all these things after dinner,” he said gently, and his hand clasped the youth’s arm. “Let us go in now.”