Читать книгу Adrienne Toner - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 6

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“COME out and have a stroll,” said Oldmeadow to Nancy. Tea was over and a primrose-coloured sunset filled the sky. They walked up and down the gravelled terrace before the house.

Coldbrooks stood high, yet encircled by still higher stretches of bare or wooded upland. Its walled garden, where vegetable beds and lines of cordon apple-trees were pleasingly diversified by the herbaceous borders that ran beneath the walls, lay behind it; most of the bedroom windows looked down into the garden. Before it, to the south, lawns and meadows dropped to a lake fed by the brooks that gave the place its name. Beyond the lake were lower copses, tinkling now with the musical run of water and climbing softly on either side, so that from the terrace one had a vast curved space of sky before one. The sun was setting over the woods.

It was Barney’s grandfather, enriched by large shipping enterprises in Liverpool, who had bought the pleasant old house, half farm, half manor, and Barney’s father had married the daughter of a local squire. But the family fortunes were much dwindled, and though Barney still nursed the project of returning one day to farm his own land there was little prospect of such a happy restoration. In spite of the Russian ballet and London portents, he was fonder, far, of Coldbrooks than of all of them put together. But he could afford neither time nor money for hunting, and his home was his only for week-ends and holidays. It was the most loveable of homes, more stately without than within, built of grey-gold Cotswold stone with beautiful stone chimneys and mullioned windows and three gables facing the southern sky. Within, everything was rather bare and shabby. There was no central heating, and no bathrooms. The tiger-skin that lay on the stone flags of the hall had lost all its hair. The piano rattled and wheezed in many of its notes. The patterns of the drawing-room chintzes were faded to a mere dim rosy riot, and stuffing protruded from the angles of the leather arm-chairs in the smoking-room. But it was, all the same, a delightful house to stay in. Eleanor Chadwick’s shrewdness showed itself in her housekeeping. She knew what were the essentials. There was always a blazing fire in one’s bedroom in the evening and the hottest of water with one’s bath in the morning. Under the faded chintz, every chair in the drawing-room was comfortable. The toast was always crisp; the tea always made with boiling water; the servants cheerful. Mrs. Chadwick had a great gift with servants. She could reprove with extreme plaintiveness, yet never wound a susceptibility, and the servants’ hall, as she often remarked with justice, was smarter and prettier than the drawing-room. Johnson, the old butler, had been at Coldbrooks since before her marriage, and the grey-haired parlourmaid had come with her when she had come as a bride. These familiar faces added depth to the sense of intimacy that was the gift of Coldbrooks. Oldmeadow loved the place as much as any of the Chadwicks did, and was as much at home in it.

“There is a blackcap,” said Nancy, “down in the copse. I felt sure I heard one this morning.”

“So it is,” said Oldmeadow. They paused to listen.

“It’s the happiest of all,” said Nancy.

He had been wondering about Nancy ever since he had come. It was not her voice, gentle and meditative, that told him now she was unhappy. It was rather in contrast to the bird’s clear ecstasy that he felt the heaviness of her heart.

“It’s wilder than the thrush and blackbird, isn’t it?” he said. “Less conscious. The thrush is always listening to himself, I feel. Do you want to go to the Alps with Miss Toner, Nancy?”

Nancy would not see Miss Toner as an angelic being and he wanted to know how she did see her. The others, it was evident, thought her angelic by a sort of group suggestion. She thought herself so, to begin with; snow, flowers, bells and all the rest of it; and they, ingenuous creatures, saw the mango-tree rising to heaven as the calm-eyed Yogi willed they should. But Nancy did not see the mango-tree. She was outside the group consciousness—with him.

“Oh, no!” she now said quickly; and she added: “I don’t mean that I don’t like her. It’s only that I don’t know her. How can she want us? She came only yesterday.”

“But, you see, she means you to know her. And when she’s known she couldn’t imagine that anyone wouldn’t like her.”

“I don’t think she’s conceited, if you mean that, Roger.”

“Conceit,” he rejoined, “may be of an order so monstrous that it loses all pettiness. You’ve seen more of her than I have, of course.”

“I think she’s good. She wants to do good. She wants to make people happy; and she does,” said Nancy.

“By taking them about in motors, you mean.”

“In every way. She’s always thinking about pleasing them. In big and little ways. Aunt Eleanor loves her already. They had a long talk last night in Aunt Eleanor’s room. She’s given Meg the most beautiful little pendant—pearl and amethyst, an old Italian setting. She had it on last night and Meg said how lovely it was and she simply lifted it off her own neck and put it around Meg’s. Meg had to keep it. She gave it in such a way that one would have to keep it.”

“Rather useful, mustn’t it be, to have pendants so plentifully about you that you can hand them out to the first young lady who takes a fancy to them? Has she given you anything, Nancy?”

“I’m sure she would. But I shall be more careful than Meg was.”

“Perhaps Meg will practise carelessness, since it’s so remunerative. What has she given Palgrave? He seems absorbed.”

“Isn’t it wonderful,” said Nancy. “It’s wonderful for Palgrave, you know, Roger, because he is rather sad and bitter, really, just now; and I think she will make him much happier. They went off to the woods together directly after breakfast.”

“What’s he sad and bitter about? You mean his socialism and all the rest of it?”

“Yes; and religion. You remember; when you were here at Christmas.”

“I remember that he was very foolish and made me lose my temper. Is there a chance of Miss Toner turning him into a good capitalist and churchman?”

Nancy smiled, but very faintly. “It’s serious, you know, Roger.”

“What she’s done to them already, you mean?”

“Yes. What she’s done already. She had Meg, after lunch, in her room. Meg looked quite different when she came out. It’s very strange, Roger. It’s as if she’d changed them all. I almost feel,” Nancy looked round at the happy house and up at the tranquil elms where the rooks were noisily preparing for bed, “as if nothing could be the same again, since she’s come.” Her clear profile revealed little of the trouble in her heart. They had not named Barney; but he must be named.

“It’s white magic,” said Oldmeadow. “You and I will keep our heads, my dear. We don’t want to be changed, do we? What has she done to Barney? He is in love with her, of course.”

“Of course,” said Nancy.

He had never been sure before that she was in love with Barney. She was nine years younger and had been a child during years of his manhood. Oldmeadow had thought it in his own fond imagination only that the link between them was so close. But now he knew what Nancy herself, perhaps, had hardly known till then. The colour did not rise in her cheek, but through her voice, through her bearing, went a subtle steadying of herself. “Of course he is in love with her,” she repeated and he felt that she forced herself to face the truth.

They stopped at the end of the terrace. A little path turned aside towards the copse and the grass beneath the trees was scattered with the pale radiance of primroses. Nancy seemed to look at the flowers, but she sought no refuge in comment on them; and as they looked in silence, while the rooks, circling and cawing above, settled on their nests, a sense of arrested time came to Oldmeadow, and a phrase of music, blissful in its sadness, where gentle German words went to a gentle German strain, passed through his mind. Something of Schubert’s—Young Love—First Grief. It seemed to pierce to him from the young girl’s heart and he knew that he would never forget and that Nancy would never forget the moment; the rooks; the primroses; the limpid sky. The blackcap’s flitting melody had ceased.

“Do you think she may make him happy?” he asked. It was sweet to him to know that she had no need of a refuge from him. She could take counsel with him as candidly as if there had been no tacit avowal between them. She looked round at him as they went on walking and he saw pain and perplexity in her eyes.

“What do you think, Roger?” she said. “Can she?”

“Well, might she, if Barney is stupid enough?”

“I don’t feel he would have to be stupid to be happy with her, Roger. You are not fair to her. What I wonder is whether he will be strong enough not to be quite swept away.”

“You think she’ll overpower him? Leave him with no mind of his own?”

“Something like that perhaps. Because she’s very strong. And she is so different. Everything in her is different. She has nothing—nothing with us, or we with her. We haven’t done the same things or seen the same sights or thought the same thoughts. I hardly feel as if the trees could look the same to her as they do to us or the birds sound the same. And she’ll want such different things.”

“Perhaps she’ll want his things,” Oldmeadow mused. “She seems to like them quite immensely already.”

“Ah, but only because she’s going to do something to them,” said Nancy. “Only because she’s going to change them. I don’t think she’d like anything she could do nothing for.”

Nancy had quite grown up. She had seen further than he had. He felt her quiet comment big with intuitive wisdom.

“You see deep, my dear,” he said. “There’s something portentous in your picture, you know.”

“There is something portentous about her, Roger. That is just what I feel. That is just what troubles me.”

“She may be portentous, in relation to us, and what she may do to us,” said Oldmeadow, “but I’m convinced, for all her marvels, that she’s a very ordinary young person. Don’t let us magnify her. If she’s not magnified she won’t work so many marvels. They’re largely an affair, I’m sure of it, of motors and pendants. She’s ordinary. That’s what I take my stand on.”

“If she’s ordinary, why do you feel, too, that she’ll sweep Barney away?” Nancy was not at all convinced by his demonstration.

“Why, because he’s in love with her. That’s all. Her only menace is in her difference; her complacency. What it comes to, I suppose, is that we must hope, if they’re to be happy, that he’ll like her things.”

“Yes; but what it comes to then, Roger, is that we shall lose Barney,” Nancy said.