Читать книгу Adrienne Toner - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 7

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MISS TONER did not come down to breakfast next morning and Oldmeadow was conscious of a feeling of disproportionate relief at not finding her in the big, bare, panelled dining-room where a portrait of Mrs. Chadwick in court dress presided over one wall and Meg and Barney played with rabbits, against an imitation Gainsborough background, on another. Both pictures were an affliction to Barney; but to Mrs. Chadwick’s eye they left nothing to be desired in beauty, and, when Barney was not there to protest, she would still fondly point out the length of eyelash that the artist had so faithfully captured in the two children.

The sense of change and foreboding that he and Nancy, with differences, had recognized in their talk, must have haunted Oldmeadow’s slumbers, for he had dreamed of Miss Toner, coming towards him along the terrace, in white, as she had been at dinner, with the beautiful pearls she had worn, lifting her hand and saying as the rooks cawed overhead—for the rooks cawed though the moon was brightly shining: “I can hear them, too.”

There had been nothing to suggest such a dream in her demeanour at dinner; nothing portentous, that is. Simple for all her competence, girlish for all the splendour of her white array, she had spoken little, looking at them all, and listening, gravely sometimes, but with a pervading gentleness; and once or twice he had found her eyes on his; those large, light eyes, dispassionately and impersonally benignant, giving him, with their suggestion of seeing around but also very far beyond you, a curious sense of space. Once or twice he had felt himself a little at a loss as he met their gaze—it had endeared her to him the less that she should almost discompose him—and he had felt anew the presence of power in her ugly little face and even of beauty in her colourless skin, her colourless yet so living eyes, and her crown of wondrous gold. It had been, no doubt, this element of aesthetic significance, merging with Nancy’s words, that had built up the figure of his dream; for so he had seen her, grey and white and gold in the unearthly light, while the rooks cawed overhead.

His friends this morning, though they were all talking of her, possessed in their gaiety and lightness of heart an exorcising quality. So much gaiety and lightness couldn’t be quenched or quelled—if that was what Miss Toner’s influence menaced. Between them all they would manage to quench and quell Miss Toner, rather, and he recovered his sense of her fundamental absurdity as he felt anew their instinctive and unself-conscious wisdom.

“Isn’t it odd, Roger, she hardly knows England at all,” said Mrs. Chadwick, as he finished his porridge, made his tea at the side-table, and took his place beside her. “She’s been so little here, although she seems to have travelled everywhere and lived everywhere.”

“Except in her own country,” Oldmeadow ventured the surmise, but urbanely, for Barney sat opposite him.

“Oh, but she’s travelled there, too, immensely,” said Barney. “She’s really spent most of her life in America, I think, Mother. She has a little sort of bungalow on the coast in California, orange-trees and roses and all the rest of it; a fairy-tale place; and a house in the mountains in New England, high up among the pine-woods.”

“And a private train, I suppose, to carry her from one to the other. What splendid pearls,” said Oldmeadow, buttering his toast. “Haven’t you asked for them yet, Meg?”

Meg was not easily embarrassed. “Not yet,” she said. “I’m waiting for them, though. Meanwhile this is pretty, isn’t it?” The pendant hung on her breast.

“I believe she would give Meg her pearls, or any of us. I believe she’d give anything to anyone,” sighed Mrs. Chadwick. “She doesn’t seem to think about money or things of that sort, material things you know, at all. I do wish I could get the map of America straight. All being in those uneven squares, like Turkish Delight, makes it so difficult. One can’t remember which lump is which—though Texas, in my geography, was pale green. The nice tinned things come from California, don’t they? And New England is near Boston—the hub of the universe, that dear, droll Oliver Wendell Holmes used to call it. I suppose they are very clever there. She has been wonderfully educated. There’s nothing she doesn’t seem to have learned. And her maid adores her, Roger. I was talking to her just now. Such a nice French woman with quite beautiful dark eyes, but very melancholy; we make a mistake, I believe, in imagining that the French are a gay people. I always think that’s such a good sign. So kind about my dreadful accent.”

“A good sign to have your maid like you, Mummy, or to have melancholy eyes?” Meg inquired. “I think she’s a rather ill-tempered looking woman. But of course anybody would adore Adrienne. She’s an angel of patience, I’m sure. I never met such an angel. We don’t grow them here,” said Meg, while Barney’s triumphant eyes said: “I told you so,” to Oldmeadow across the table.

After breakfast, in the sunlight on the terrace, Mrs. Chadwick confided her hopes to him. “She really is an angel, Roger. I never met anyone in the least like her. So good, and gifted, too, and all that money. Only think what it would mean for dear Barney. He could take back the farm; the lease falls in next year, and come back here to live.”