Читать книгу Musk and Amber - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 5
ОглавлениеMr. Elliot Is Puzzled
Mr. Elliot followed her along a corridor towards the east side of the house. Ever since Grest had been built there had been a great bedroom and a dressing-room on the ground floor which had been used by the owner of the house. It was Julian’s room by right of birth; but when the lights were all out, and servants and guests were all comfortably bedded on the upper floor, it was a lonely part of the house, given over to echoes and all those sly, menacing, mysterious sounds which emanate when darkness and silence bring furniture to life.
“Julian is alone down here amongst these big black empty rooms?” Elliot asked in a low voice.
“Gurton sleeps in the dressing-room.”
That was all very well. But a boy of twelve? Imaginative too. Wouldn’t a woman have been more desirable?
“His old nurse for instance?” Mr. Elliot asked.
“Old nurses are difficult to please when the tutors come,” said Frances Scoble, and Elliot had no answer. She put her finger to her lips as she stopped at a high pedimented door. She opened it gently and looked in. Then she turned her head and nodded to Mr. Elliot. He followed her into a dark room, big as a wilderness. The walls were hung with brown silk, the windows shuttered and curtained. A door at the side led into the dressing-room and far away, in a great bed of blue and gold with a shaded night light on a stand at the side, the boy was lost. He was asleep. They could just hear him breathing regularly, normally. Frances Scoble picked up her skirt so that it should not rustle. As they approached the bed, Mr. Elliot upon his tip-toes, they could see Julian. The bed-clothes were tucked up under his chin, his mouth was open just enough to show the gleam of his teeth, the dark eyelashes lay quiet upon his cheeks. There was colour in his face. Except for the lift and fall of his chest, he lay without movement, untroubled by dark dreams, a boy just stoking himself with sleep to seize his handfuls of the glory and wonder of the next day. Mr. Elliot could hardly refrain from a chuckle of sheer pleasure.
But Frances Scoble was not satisfied. She lifted a hand to ensure Mr. Elliot’s silence. She drew up a chair to the side of the bed without a sound; she sat down, she drew out her watch from her bosom, looked at it with a shake of the head and held the face of it towards Elliot. The time was still two minutes short of ten. She replaced the watch and leaned forward, watching Julian, her face above and near to his. The night light burned on the stand beyond her. Elliot could only see the dark side of her profile. It was set like ivory, the eyes open and steady like the eyes of an image. Of the two, Elliot would have said that the boy lived, the woman had ceased. But the change came.
Julian stirred. He frowned, his eyelids tightened over his eyes, his face puckered and creased until it was the face of a little old man; and a cry like an old man’s whimper broke from his lips. He pushed the bed-clothes down from his chin, but before he could struggle up, Frances had slipped her hands behind his shoulder-blades and lifted him against her breast. For a moment or two he fluttered in her arms, his head thrown back, his mouth working and such small sobs bursting from his throat as a boy makes who for his boyhood’s sake will not, though he wants to, give way and weep.
For a little while—about a minute Mr. Elliot reckoned—this agitation continued. Then the whimpering ceased, the small body grew still and Frances Scoble laid him gently back upon his pillow and drew up the clothes to his chin. His breath was as easy, his face as composed as when she and Elliot had first entered the room. Elliot, who had been closely watching the boy with a trouble at his heart which quite surprised him, turned towards the young woman and was startled. Her gaze was fixed upon his face with an extraordinary intensity. Her eyes stared, not at Julian but at him. In the dim gleam of the candle under the shade, they seemed to him black as night—and as unfathomable. Elliot actually recoiled a step as they watched him. Then with a sign to him she rose. He followed her to the door of the big, long room.
“In the morning,” she said in a whisper, “he will not remember one thing about this troubled dream of his.”
“And you of course do not remind him?”
“Never,” she agreed. “Come!”
She opened the door silently and went out. Again Mr. Elliot followed her, but as he was carefully drawing the door shut, he looked back to the bed and now he was more than startled, he was shocked. The boy’s eyes were wide open. They looked to him enormous. They were watching him as he went. Julian lay quite still; not a hand fluttered outside the sheet. But he was awake, completely awake, and Elliot read in those wide, staring eyes—or seemed to read, he could not be sure whether his imagination played him tricks—a warning, a prayer not to betray him. Elliot nodded his head to reassure him and silently latched the door. Frances was waiting for him in the passage and together they went back to the dining-room where Henry was sitting over his port. Henry half rose from his chair as he saw Elliot’s face.
“Here, sit down!” he cried. “You look a bit white. You are fond of the boy, eh? Like the rest of us, yes!” and as Elliot sat down a trifle heavily and wiped his face with his handkerchief, Henry passed the decanter across the table to him.
“Try a glass of that! It’ll renew the blood in you. So you saw, eh, you saw?”
Elliot filled his glass with a shaking hand.
“Yes, I saw.”
But what he had seen he did not say. With another glance at him Henry turned a little anxiously to Frances.
“Something new?”
“No,” she answered.
Henry leaned back. He was undoubtedly easier in his mind. “But disturbing.” He sat pursing his lips and nodding his head thoughtfully. “You’ll have to call in the doctors, coz. Though we know what they’ll say.” He laughed contemptuously. “They’ll suck the gold heads of their canes and look as wise as owls and say in a chorus, ‘A change of scene.’ I can hear ’em. There’s some little trouble deeper than that will reach. But that’s what they’ll say, my dear, and you’ll have to try it. A change of scene!”
Mr. Elliot had by this time recovered sufficiently from his shock to wonder whether the half-sister and her cousin were not making too much of this nightly interruption of the boy’s placid sleep. Queer little things which they themselves forgot entered the minds of children and remained somehow to come to life again in their dreams; and they grew out of them, as Julian would. Only—and he pondered a good deal over that word “only”, as he went to bed—only, Julian woke and wanted his waking not to be known. Why? Fear could not be the reason. Yet Mr. Elliot slept ill with the vision of the boy staring at him with open eyes across the room.
But in this odd world of sevens and sixes
Nothing is quite as it ought to be.
