Читать книгу Paths of Judgement - Anne Douglas Sedgwick - Страница 7

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MRS. MERRICK sent a cart for her niece’s box next morning, and Felicia set out in the afternoon to walk the two miles to Trensome Hall, happy in the buoyancy of a sunny, breezy day. She responded easily to sunshine and buoyancy, and, in spite of her pessimistic education, easily expected happiness. Sometimes it seemed that it might be waiting for her behind every bush, for youth and an ardent temperament are more potent mood-makers than rational reflection. And, indeed, it did lurk, smiling, behind all the bushes to-day, for Felicia’s mood was happy. She saw it in the blue and white of the high summer sky, in the sun-dappled woods, in the wild-flowers of the hedge-row; she heard it in the mazurka-like song of a bird hidden in green mysteries of shade; she felt it in the warm, fresh breeze that swayed light shadows across the road. It was only an intensifying of the sense of response when, at a turning of the road, she met a young man, who seemed quite magically to personify the breeziness, the brightness, the mazurka-like element of the day. Coming thus upon each other, both smiling to themselves, both looking, listening, and, as it were, expectant, it seemed only natural that their eyes should dwell upon each other with frank interest. Their steps slackened, a mute, pleased query passed between them, and the young man, doffing his hat, and giving Felicia as he did so a vivid impression of sunlit auburn hair, said, “I beg your pardon, but I am sure that you are Miss Merrick.”

“And you are Mr. Wynne,” said Felicia, for she was quite sure he was not the ambitious politician. Their certainty about one another was as natural as all the rest.

“I came to meet you,” said Mr. Wynne. “I heard that you were arriving this afternoon, and that you lived on top of a hill and had a wonderful garden; and as I love gardens and hill-tops I thought I would try to meet you as near them as possible.”

Maurice Wynne was also telling himself that he loved meeting Miss Merrick.

Felicia on this day was dressed in white. Her hat had a wreath of white roses, and, tying under her chin, shaded her thick, smooth hair—hair the colour of sandal-wood—and her pale face. He would have climbed any number of hills to see the face—so significant, so resolute, so delicate.

Her small, square chin, narrowing suddenly from rounded cheeks, her wide, firm lips, her nose and forehead, and the broad sweep of her eye-brows, had all this quality of resolute delicacy. In the pale yet vivid tints of her face her clear grey eyes seemed dark, and her eyelashes slanted across them like sunshine on deep pools of woodland water. Maurice was seeing all this, delightedly,—and that through the child-like moulding of the cheek, the lips’ sweetness, the eyes’ tranquillity, ran a latent touch of mischievous gaiety—a dryad laughing a little at her own new soul.

“You have missed the climb and the garden in meeting me,” said Felicia, “unless you follow this road straight on, and that will lead you to them——“

“Perhaps you will show me both on some other day,” said Maurice, “since I haven’t missed you.” He had turned to walk beside her, and Felicia, also making inner comments, reflected that a person so assured of his own graceful intentions could hardly be anything but graceful. His looks, his words, implied happy things with as much conviction as the bird still sang on behind them.

“It isn’t in any way an unusual garden, though the view from it is unusual.”

“I am sure that your garden is unusual—just as this first stage of my journey towards it has been. It is very unusual to meet a Watteau figure in a Watteau landscape.”

“If you had started a little earlier,” Felicia said, smiling, “and met me on the hill-side, I shouldn’t have been so in harmony. There the pine-woods are very grave, and a Watteau figure would have been incongruous.”

“Incongruous, but almost more delightfully unusual,” he returned; “there would have been a pathos in it then. I am a painter of sorts, and so I may tell you, may I not, that the picture you made as you fluttered in the shadow and sunlight around that green turn of the road, was quite bewilderingly radiant and charming?”

Felicia was amused and a little confused by the fact that he might say it, so oddly this young man seemed to have taken possession of her. Once more, that he should express his pleasure in her picturesqueness seemed as inevitable as the bird’s song. She could hardly feel that his rights were only those of a stranger. Anything she said, she felt sure, he would like, and a person who likes anything one says is no stranger. So, if he would, he might say that she was like a Watteau and had made a picture. She had experienced, for her part, something of the same sensation. Maurice had been a radiant and delightful apparition.

He was a slender young man, tall, narrow-shouldered, lightly made. Hair, small pointed beard, and the slight moustache that swept up from his lips, were of that vivid auburn. His skin was feminine in its clear pink and white. One might have felt the brilliancy of his eyes as hard had not their blue been so caressing. His look, with its intent sympathy, his smile, claiming intimacy with child-like trust, were all response and understanding. He enveloped one like a sunbeam. A species of sparkling emotion shone from him. He really dazzled Felicia a little. He was so much an incarnation of sunlight that her own happy mood seemed to have walked with her straight into a sort of fairy-tale—into a veritable Watteau landscape, at all events, where happiness was the only natural thing in the world.

As they approached the lodge-gates—they had been talking without pause of music, books, pictures, even about life—he asked her how she had guessed that he was Maurice Wynne—“Because there is only one of you—but there are several of us—Mrs. Merrick’s guests, I mean.”

“She told me about her guests. There were only two young men, and one of them sounded rather stately, overpowering, so I knew you were the other.”

“Poor Geoffrey!” Maurice ejaculated with a laugh, “how you have guessed at him! But he is a good deal more than that, all the same. And he is a tremendous friend of mine.”

“Is he? I hope you don’t mind my flippancy; it was founded on the merest scrap of conjecture.”

“It isn’t flippancy; it’s intuition. Geoffrey is that, only he is more. I don’t mind a bit—I wouldn’t mind flippancy, only I feel bound to testify. Geoffrey is the best of friends to me, you see; has been since our boyhood.” His smiling homage was an even nicer indication of character than his charm and happiness. Felicia inwardly accorded a cool approval to the stately friend.

“I suppose you have heard about the others, too,” Maurice went on; “Angela Bagley is another great chum of mine. I wonder how she will strike you. You must tell me—even if it’s flippant. She is clever, too; at all events, she is very effective.”

“Do you think they are the same thing?”

“Effectiveness is the only test of cleverness, isn’t it?”

“If the people one affects are clever, one must be clever to affect them, I suppose.”

“But if they are stupid?” smiled Maurice, “and such heaps of people are, aren’t they?”

“Yet it is clever to take that into account and to make what one wants out of their stupidity.”

“Ah, exactly; that is what Geoffrey does,” said Maurice. It was what she had imagined of him. “And such cleverness is, to you, a very ugly thing,” he added.

“Oh; I don’t know.” Felicia flushed a little, realizing that they were going rather far since it was of his friend they were talking. “It would depend, wouldn’t it, on what he wanted to get out of their stupidity?”

“He wants to get power.”

“Well, there again, for what end?”

“Isn’t power an end in itself?”

“I should think it ought to have an aim.”

“Such as making the stupid less stupid? raising the masses? all that sort of thing?”

“It is the part of the powerful person to say that.”

Maurice continued smilingly to look at her. “You won’t like Geoffrey,” he observed. “But though he hasn’t ideals I will say of him that he is dear of the usual reproach of the politician—he claims none. Now Lady Angela does,” he went on, in a sequence that again gave Felicia that rather alarming sense of sudden intimacy. “She lives under tremendously high pressure, you know.” They had passed down the uninteresting avenue, its trees marking sections of flat, green country, and as the house was reached Felicia felt the moment deferred for learning more precisely in what this pressure consisted.