Читать книгу The Dull Miss Archinard - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 4

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MRS. ODD and Miss Odd, Peter’s eldest and unmarried sister, were having an only half-veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry clothes, came into the morning-room just before lunch. Miss Odd sat by the open French window cutting the leaves of a review. There were several more reviews on the table beside her, and with her eyeglasses and fine, severe profile, she gave one the impression of a woman who would pass her mornings over reviews and disagree with most of them for reasons not frivolous.

Mrs. Odd lay back in an easy-chair. She was very remarkable looking. The adjective is usually employed in a sense rather derogatory to beauty pure and simple, yet Mrs. Odd’s dominant characteristic was beauty, pure and simple; beauty triumphantly certain of remark, and remarkable in the sense that no one could fail to notice her, as when one had noticed her it was impossible not to find her beautiful. It was not a loveliness that admitted of discussion. In desperate rebellion against an almost tame conformity, a rash person might assert that to him her type did not appeal; but the type was resplendent. Perhaps too resplendent; in this extreme lay the only hope of escape from conformity. The long figure in the uniform-like commonplace of blue serge and shirt-waist was almost too uncommonplace in elegance of outline; the white hand too slender, too pink as to finger-tips and polished as to nails; the delicate scarlet splendor of her mouth, the big wine-colored eyes, too dazzling.

Mrs. Odd’s red-brown hair was a glory, a burnished, well-coiffed, well-brushed glory; it rippled, coiled, and curved about her head. Her profile was bewildering—lazily, sweetly petulant. “Is this the face?” a man might murmur on first seeing Alicia.

Odd had so murmured when she had flashed upon his vision over a year ago. He was still young and literary, and, as he was swept out of himself, had still had time for a vague grasp at self-expression.

Mrs. Odd was speaking as he entered the room.

“I don’t really see, Mary, what duty has got to do with it.” Without turning her head, she turned her eyes on Odd: “How wet your hair is, Peter!”

Mary Odd looked up from the review she was cutting rather grimly, and her cold face was irradiated with a sudden smile.

“Well, Peter,” she said quietly.

“I fished a little girl out of the river,” said Odd, taking a seat near Alicia, and smiling responsively at his sister. “Captain Archinard’s little girl.” He told the story.

“An interesting contrast of physical and moral courage.”

“I have seen the children. They are noticeable children. They always ride to hounds.” Hunting had been Miss Odd’s favorite diversion during her father’s lifetime. “But the pretty one, as I remember, has not the pluck of her sister—physical, as you say, Peter, no doubt.”

“What sort of a person is Mrs. Archinard?”

“Very pretty, very lazy, very selfish. She is an American, and was rich, I believe. Captain Archinard left the army when he married her, and immediately spent her money. Luckily for him poor Mr. Archinard died—Jack Archinard; you remember him, Peter? A nice man. I go to see Mrs. Archinard now and then. I don’t care for her.”

“You don’t care much for any one, Mary,” said Mrs. Odd, smiling. “Your remarks on your Allersley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only tolerate perfection.”

“Yet I have many friends, Alicia.”

“Not near Allersley?”

“Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. Maynard, Lady Mainwaring, and Miss Hibbard among my friends.”

“Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, isn’t she? What big caps she does wear! Lady Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry off her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, that she was an inveterate matchmaker.”

“She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you understood me to mean.”

“But she does interfere a great deal with the course of events, when events are marriageable young men, doesn’t she?”

“Does she?”

“Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary. There was no disloyalty in saying so, for it is known by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring.”

“And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not be, perfect.”

During this little conversation, Odd sat with the unhappy, helpless look men wear when their women-kind are engaged in such contests.

“I am awfully hungry. Isn’t it almost lunch-time?” he said, as they paused.

Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. “It only wants five minutes.”

Odd walked to the window and looked out at the sweep of lawn, with its lime-trees and copper beeches. The flower-beds were in all their glory.

“How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary,” he said, looking down at the fragrant greenness that came to the window. Alicia got up and joined her husband, putting her arm through his.

“Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter,” she smiled at him; and although he understood, with the fatal clearness that one year of life with Alicia had given him, that the walk was only proposed as a slight to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her beauty—a rather sickly, pallid pleasure—and an inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he and Mary understood one another so well that there need be no fear of hurting her.

After one year of married life, he and Mary knew the nearness of the sympathy that allows itself no words.

There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Alicia’s lonely complacency—a pathos emphasized by her indifferent unconsciousness.

“Mary is so disagreeable to-day,” said Alicia, as they walked slowly across the lawn. “She has such a strong sense of her own worth and of other people’s worthlessness.”

Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word to his wife. He had chosen to marry her. The man who would wreak his own disillusion on the woman he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be a sorry wretch. He met the revealment of Alicia’s shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She had been shallow and selfish when he had married her, and he had not found it out—had not cared to find it out. He contemplated these characteristics now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She was born so.

“It will be dull enough here, at all events,” Alicia went on, pressing her slim patent-leather shoe into the turf with lazy emphasis as she walked, for Alicia was not bad-tempered, and took things easily; “but if Mary is going to be disagreeable—“

“You know, Alicia, that Mary has always lived here. It is in a truer sense her home than mine, but she would go directly if either you or she found it disagreeable. Had you not assented so cordially she would never have stayed.”

“Don’t imply extravagant things, Peter. Who thinks of her going?”

“She would—if you made it disagreeable.”

“I? I do nothing. Surely Mary won’t want to go because she scolds me.”

“Come, Ally, surely you don’t get scolded—more than is good for you.” Odd smiled down at her. Her burnished head was on a level with his eyes. “Like everybody else, you are not perfection, and, as Mary is somewhat of a disciplinarian, you ought to take her lectures in a humble spirit, and be thankful. I do. Mary is so much nearer perfection than I am.”

“I am afraid I shall be bored here, Peter.” Alicia left the subject of Mary for a still more intimate grievance.

“The art of not being bored requires patience, not to say genius. It can be learned though. And there are worse things than being bored.”

“I think I could bear anything better.”

“What would you like, Ally?” Odd’s voice held a certain hopefulness. “I’ll do anything I can, you know. I believe in a woman’s individuality and all that. Does your life down here crush your individuality, Alicia?”

Again Odd smiled down at her, conscious of an inward bitterness.

“Joke away, Peter. You know how much I care for all that woman business—rights and movements and individualities and all that; a silly claiming of more duties that do no good when they’re done. I am an absolutely banal person, Peter; my mind to me isn’t a kingdom. I like outside things. I like gayety, change, diversion. I don’t like days one after the other—like sheep—and I don’t like sheep!”

They had passed through the shrubbery, and before them were meadows dotted with the harmless animals that had suggested Mrs. Odd’s simile.

“Well, we won’t look at the sheep. I own that they savor strongly of bucolic immutability. You’ve had plenty of London for the past year, Ally, and Nice and Monte Carlo. The sheep are really the change.”

“You had better go in for a seat in Parliament, Peter.”

“Longings for a political salon, Ally? I have hardly time for my scribbling and landlording as it is.”

“A salon! Nothing would bore me so much as being clever and keeping it up. No, I like seeing people and being seen, and dancing and all that. I am absolutely banal, as I tell you.”

“Well, you shall have London next year. We’ll go up for the season.”

“You took me for what I was, Peter,” Mrs. Odd remarked as they retraced their steps towards the house. “I have never pretended, have I? You knew that I was a society beauty and that only. I am a very shallow person, I suppose, Peter; I certainly can’t pretend to have depths—even to give Mary satisfaction. It would be too uncomfortable. Why did you fall in love with me, Peter? It wasn’t en caractère a bit, you know.”

“Oh yes, it was, Ally. I fell in love with you because you were beautiful. Why did you fall in love with me?”

The mockery with which Alicia’s smile was tinged deepened into a good-humored laugh at her own expense.

“Well, Peter, I don’t think any one before made me feel that they thought me so beautiful. I am vain, you know. Your enthusiasm was awfully flattering. I am very sorry you idealized me, Peter. I am sure you idealized me. Shall we go in? Lunch must be ready, and you must be hungrier than ever.”