Читать книгу Musk and Amber - A. E. W. Mason - Страница 9
ОглавлениеMr. Elliot Gives an Opinion with Consequences of Which He Is Unaware
At three o’clock Mr. Elliot, his wig powdered to the last curl, his ruffles frothing to his knuckles, presented himself at Lady Frances’ apartment. One didn’t dine in linsey-woolsey at Naples half way through the eighteenth-century. Already the guests were assembling. Elliot heard Princes announced. He saw an ecclesiastic of the most distinguished appearance, with a scarlet sash about his waist, and to his astonishment, his hostess leave that ecclesiastic in the middle of a sentence and hurry to greet him, as if he were the oldest of her friends.
“It is the most fortunate circumstance that we should meet again in Naples,” she said as he bowed over her hand. “I have been reproaching myself and you, I think, might perhaps set me at my ease one way or the other. My cousin Henry—well, no doubt you remember him and his ideas?”
She looked around her. Her guests were talking. No new ones were arriving.
“We have a moment perhaps.” She led the way through a glass doorway on to a wide balcony and continued: “It is about Julian. His father, as you no doubt know, gave what seemed to us in England too much of the boy’s time to his musical education. Henry of course had little sympathy with it, but since I have been once more in Naples, where music is in the air, I have been wondering whether Henry was right.”
Mr. Elliot bowed. It seemed to him that he was listening to a carefully conned speech. This was the preamble. She motioned him to a chair and herself took one at her side.
“Will you tell me, Mr. Elliot, for you, I know, have knowledge where I have not, would you say that Julian had a remarkable voice?”
Mr. Elliot sat back in his chair. To him music was almost a religion. He could not talk of it lightly. He must weigh his words. He must speak only what he believed.
“Julian has a remarkable voice for an Earl of Linchcombe,” he replied. “It is pure, it is clear, it has a moving note like a bird’s. But whether it would be a remarkable voice, singing behind a screen the Miserere on Good Friday at St. Peter’s, that, Madam, is a thing which I am not qualified to say.”
“It is not trained, you mean?”
What Elliot meant was that it never would be trained, Julian being not a chorister, but Lord Linchcombe.
“I am a mere dilettante, Madam,” said Elliot, “and I speak without authority.”
But dilettantes are of two kinds. One kind believes that the amateur, free from the necessity to practise the tricks of the trade, has thereby a superiority with which the professional cannot cope; the other that the pursuit of perfect command can only be obtained by the incessant concentration of the professional. Mr. Elliot belonged to the latter kind.
“Julian has a lovely voice. It is moving. In a room it can provoke tears. Believe me who have heard it! But of course it has not the volume of the great singers, it cannot swell and diminish on a sustained note like an organ; and of course in a few years it may be nothing at all—a pleasant compliment to his guests at an evening assembly in his house.”
Lady Frances was listening carefully to his words. It seemed to Elliot that she was in some way relieved by them. He understood hers too, or thought that he did. Julian would have work for which he must fit himself, sterner work, work dealing with the management of estates and the government of the realm. Music, singing? So many decorations, charming, enervating, perhaps, ample enough to occupy the life of Mr. James Elliot, but pure waste for the chief of a great Whig family with—how many was it?—a dozen pocket boroughs to echo his politics. Lady Frances nodded her head.
“I am glad to hear you say so. I had a fear last night that I had left a great gift to tend itself more than Julian’s father would have done, a plant unwatered as no doubt our good vicar would have said. For Julian sang last night and in this town, where the best singers in the world are familiar to the ear, and a crowd gathered.”
“Madam, you could gather a crowd in Naples with a cracked accordion.”
“But it would laugh and go on. It would not stay, planted there,” and she pointed her finger to the roadway beneath them. “It would not demand an encore.”
“And yet, Madam,” said Elliot with a laugh, “not one of that crowd to-day would do more than say, ‘Last night I heard a pretty voice from the first floor apartment of the Inn of “The Golden Ox”,’ and to-morrow it would not even be remembered.”
He heard his companion draw a long breath. For these words then she had waited. So great was her relief that she must needs hear them again. With a bubble of joy she cried:
“It would not be remembered?”
“Neither the song nor the singer.”
“It would not,” and she sought for a word, “it would not be recognized—after a time—as something once heard from the first floor of ...” and she stopped rather suddenly as though some new question had slipped in amongst the others to trouble her.
“No, indeed,” said Mr. Elliot, a little puzzled by the lady’s insistence. “It would be lost amongst the recollections of a thousand voices.”
“You speak as if you yourself had heard Julian last night,” she said rather sharply.
“But I did. My carriage, I am afraid, for a moment scattered his audience.”
Lady Frances recoiled. Elliot could think of no other word for that swift startled movement. Uneasiness began once more to take hold of him. He looked forward over the bay, trying to set a cause to it; and he heard her asking him in a voice he hardly recognized, and with an effort at carelessness which he did:
“So you are staying at ‘The Golden Ox’? I imagined that you kept always an apartment in the town.”
“Oh, no, Lady Frances,” he answered with a smile, still occupied with his puzzle, “I am lodged above you. See!” and he turned and pointed upwards to the windows of his room.
“There?”
Some queer sound as though the little trivial word was strangled in her throat made Mr. Elliot turn his head quickly towards her. He met the same bleak, hard indecipherable stare which had once before startled him at Grest. But it did more than startle him now. It frightened him and he had a suspicion now that it was really fear which he had felt at Grest. So utterly did that look change her, make a stranger of her, strip her of all her friendliness, of the polite and engaging ways which went with her dress and the tiring of her hair. She was plucked out of her century, she became—primæval. Just for a flash it lasted. She rose and as she rose, Elliot remembered, without so far as he could see any reason why he should remember, the omitted lines which he had restored to his written account of the dialogue exchanged on this balcony the night before.
“Not unless there is something you have planned of which you have never told me.”
“No! Henry! How could there be anything?”
It was Henry who brought the conversation to an end. He came out upon the balcony looking for Lady Frances.
“You are there?” His eyes lit upon Mr. Elliot none too pleasantly; and he glanced from him to his cousin.
“My dear,” he said reproachfully, “your guests are waiting.”
She followed Henry back into the room and made her apologies. Mr. Elliot saw Julian in front of him, rather shy and very dignified.
“I have grown?” Julian confided hopefully as he shook Elliot by the hand.
“A young giant.”
The boy had grown, certainly, and he blushed with pleasure at its recognition. He was dressed, too, to make the most of his new inches. His brown hair was drawn back with a blue ribbon. He wore a great cambric bow at his throat and lace ruffles at his wrists. A coat of navy blue embroidered with gold and a white satin waistcoat set off his figure.
“Admiral Timbertoes, bless me if it isn’t,” said Elliot, shaking the boy’s hand, “but I see you haven’t lost it yet.” He looked down upon a slim pair of legs as straight as the box trees in his garden at Grest, sheathed in white satin breeches and silk stockings and finished off with small polished shoes with red heels and gold buckles.
“I hear, Sir, that you were sailing your frigate in the bay this morning.”
Julian laughed delightedly.
“I held the rudder. It jumped against me. It was glorious.”
Folding doors were thrown back. A major-domo appeared with a gold aiguillette across his chest.
“Your Ladyship is served.”
A look of disappointment clouded the boy’s face.
“You are not hungry?” cried Mr. Elliot in alarm. “That will never do. You must go to bed.”
Julian laughed.
“Oh, I’m hungry. I could eat a sheep. But I wanted to sit next to you.”
“That was charming of you,” Elliot returned. “But the ladies have a prior claim upon your society.”
The cloud of disappointment still remained.
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Elliot,” Julian said gravely, “I am not very interested in ladies.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Well, take heart! That will come later on and, let us hope, before the wooden leg.”
“You see, they talk of such silly things.”
“Not ships, for instance?” said Mr. Elliot.
“No, nor of miracles,” and the boy’s face lit up. His eyes danced. “I am going to see the miracle at the Duomo.”
“San Januarius?”
“Yes. I hoped that you would tell me all about it first. I am going with our courier Domenico.” And he added, “I do hope we shan’t sit long over dinner.”
“It doesn’t happen till the evening,” said Elliot.
“I know. But I want to get close. I want to see it really happen.”
But at that moment the party began to move in due order into the dining-room and no more was said between them. In any case, Mr. Elliot reflected, he could never have hoped to dissuade an eager boy from the spectacle of an actual miracle to take place before his eyes. But wasn’t there some risk? Rossi, the innkeeper, had hinted that there might be, if the miracle were delayed. And Julian meant to get close in the forefront of the crowd. It was true that the courier would be with him, and no doubt Lady Frances had assured herself that there was no ground for any fear. Still Mr. Elliot was troubled. But he saw the scarlet sash of the Monsignor in front of him. Perhaps if he were near enough, the Monsignor might have a word to say.
As it happened, the Monsignor had a good deal to say but it was not all in the vein which Mr. Elliot expected or hoped for. Julian was placed at the far end of the table between one woman, fat and maternal, whom Elliot put down as his great-aunt, Lady Fritton, and a pretty Italian woman who had eyes only for Henry. A question asked by the tutor with the horn-rimmed glasses set off the ecclesiastic.
