Читать книгу The Perennial Bachelor - Anne Parrish - Страница 4

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Victor Campion met Margaret Southmayd a few years after he graduated from Harvard, when he went to visit her brother Henry, who had been a classmate.

There had been guests in his honor on the afternoon before he went home—young men a little stand-offish and suspicious of the stranger who had so much money, and had made the “Grand Tour,” and was just home from England and inclined to talk about the opening of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park; arch young ladies not at all stand-offish, tossing their ringlets and shrugging their shoulders and making “saucy” replies. There had been strawberries and cream, and croquet with tiny mallets and huge balls banded with bright colors that they sent trundling through wide wickets. The shadows grew long on the gold-green turf, and the girls’ great crinolines, swinging and swaying as they bent above their balls, took on the tender colors of flowers at twilight. And through the laughter and the calling there sometimes sounded a note of sadness, though they were all so happy.

Now they were gone; and Henry had gone with them to get the mail, while Victor and Margaret collected the strawberry saucers and put the mallets and balls to bed in their box in the dark summer-house that smelled of moss and old rotting wood.

She wanted to talk to him, to say clever things to make him laugh, as Alice and Emily had. He had been with those two all afternoon—and tomorrow he would be gone forever. But she wasn’t good at beginning conversations, and she never knew where to look when his dark eyes were on her; so she kept at a little distance, turning her head away, pretending to be busy.

“Here’s another ball!” he called, picking it up out of the wet pink and silver border of cinnamon pinks. And he said it as if he were telling her a tremendous and beautiful and funny secret that only they two would ever know, so that she forgot to be shy, and came smiling to his side.

In her spreading white muslin and rose-colored ribbons, she seemed to him like a slender apple-tree in blossom. He was a modern young man, but he did not like the modern girl. It was the time of the bloomer agitation, and every paper you picked up was full of caricatures of ladies, with bonnets and ringlets, to be sure, but also with trousers, bull dogs, and cigars. And there were jokes about ladies “popping the question,” or if they did not ask for the gentleman’s hand in marriage, at least asking for the next polka or deux temps. There were even jokes about colleges for women, and caricatures of professors with bloomers under their gowns and mortar-boards on top of their lace caps. But there was nothing of the new woman about Margaret. She no more wanted equal rights than did the rose, sweet and cool in its broad fresh leaves at her belt. At the very mention of bloomers her white lids curtained her blue eyes, her cheeks grew pinker; and, when she went to church to confess her sins in her innocent voice, she wore a bonnet all rosebuds and lace instead of one of those fast round hats that were becoming so fashionable.

“See, here’s a firefly,” he said, and showed it to her on his finger, its little green glow shining and darkening, shining and darkening. She bent over it, showers of ringlets falling like curtains on either side of her pretty face. The dusky rose in the sky was deepening, and little pale moths were fluttering over the flowers. In the valley below them where a white mist was rising, the frogs began to call. They still stood close together, their heads bent to the firefly’s small green lamp; but they had forgotten it, forgotten everything except that her whole being was crying silently, “Tomorrow we will be apart!” and his was answering, “Tonight we are together.”

The night before her wedding Margaret spent in weeping. In the first place, the Southmayds were dreadfully poor, and, instead of lace, her wedding-veil beneath its orange buds would be plain illusion. And then Mrs. Southmayd had had “a little talk” with her daughter that was as terrifying as it was unilluminating; and, after vague wide circlings about some secret so sinister that it could not be mentioned, it had ended in floods of tears on both sides.

Her trembling voice and ice-cold fingers, when they were being married, filled Victor with an anguish of love. But presently, tying on her white silk going-away bonnet, an artless advertisement with its lace veil and orange-blossoms, while her bridesmaids fluttered about her, envious and excited, and her tall, dark lover waited for her below, she grew more calm, became, in fact, complacent. And although his passionate love never seemed to her “quite nice,” she returned it with placid affection.

He had fallen in love with her greatly because she was not “strong-minded”; and indeed Margaret was never what Miss Florence Nightingale called “a female ink-bottle.” But, after they were married, he tried for a little while to improve her mind.

“Would you like me to read to you, darling?”

“Oh, that would be very nice!”

But first she would have to get her foot-stool, and her work from upstairs, and her little quilted jacket of rose-colored silk bordered with swansdown, in case she grew chilly. And then:

“Oh, Victor! My thimble! It’s up on my toilet table!”

And she would look so helpless and appealing that he would tear upstairs, three steps at a time, and bring it down to her.

“Now then, I really am ready!”

He would begin to read words that stirred the depths of his heart with their beauty:

“‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art——

Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,

And watching,——’”

“Oh, Victor love! Before you get really into it! Tell me, if you were me, would you have field flowers on your new leghorn straw, or just a white lace veil and mauve ribbons? Field flowers and a lace veil would be too much, wouldn’t they? Or wouldn’t they?”

“‘No——yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,

Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,

To feel forever its soft fall and swell,

Awake forever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.’”

Surely she must cry “It’s about us. It’s just exactly like us!”

She hadn’t listened to a word. The fire was so bright, her chair was so soft, and the sound of the rain on the windows made her sleepy. But when his voice stopped she rose out of her warm abstraction to make a little humming sound that meant, “How very pretty.”

“Did you like it, my darling?”

“Yes, thank you, Victor. It was sweetly pretty. Oh, and just while I remember it—would you like a tipsy parson for dessert tomorrow? You hardly touched your syllabub today, and I do so want to please you!”

It seemed to him so touching that she should want to please him that he could have fallen at her feet to worship her. But he gave up trying to improve her mind.

He gave up trying to make her exercise her body even sooner, although on their honeymoon he had bullied and coaxed her into a bath in the ocean. She rather fancied herself in her gipsy hat and her bathing-dress, with her feet looking so white and small under the blue flannel ruffles; but going into the cold, rough water was dreadful! Walking, except for gentle ramblings about the garden, tired her, she said; and the very thought of a horse filled her with panic. As for skating, thank goodness, by the time the river froze, she knew she was going to have a baby, and could lie on her dear, soft sofa for hours and hours at a time without being urged to do anything.

So Victor went “down state” with his brother Willie and Sam Blow to shoot reedbirds, and railbirds, and ducks in the marshes, rowed across the river to fish in the New Jersey creeks, skated on the river in winter nearly up to Philadelphia, and galloped over the fields fox-hunting.

“You ought to join in Victor’s pleasures more, my dear, unless you’re anxious to lose him,” Lizzie Blow advised Margaret. “It’s a poor plan to let a man find out how well he can amuse himself without you.”

Margaret’s eyes filled with tears. She did join in Victor’s pleasures! With her own hands, she made him sandwiches of ham, home-cured in the old grey smoke-house that huddled under its mantle of heaven-blue wistaria; she ate, with cries of delight, the fat little reedbirds he shot; she patted his horses, timidly offering them apples while she tried to hide her terror at their bared teeth and jerking heads; and she saw that drinks were always ready when he and Willie and Sam came trooping in, steaming punch when they were cold and muddy, frosty mint juleps when they were hot and dusty. And it was to “The Maples” they always returned, not to “Meadowbrook,” the Blows’ house, nor to “Riverview,” where Willie and poor Priscilla lived in expensive muddle. Remembering this helped Margaret to bear Lizzie’s trying remarks with fortitude. And she would rather have died than tear around the country as Lizzie did on Sam’s wildest horses, with her cheeks like fire, making such a figure of herself.

Victor had brought Margaret home to his father’s house in Delaware; and two years later the elder Mr. Campion died, leaving the place to his son. She loved it, inside and out; the trees so tall they seemed to hold the sky, the gold-green lawn, the carriage sweep, and the fountain in front of the house, with its great sheaf of white and green iron calla lilies and leaves, each lily sending up a jet of water. She loved the big grey house with its cupola and porches; the round beds of asters that were blooming when Victor brought her home, the pears that were dropping, heavy and golden from the golden sun. She loved the view of the river, blue, or slate-colored, or café au lait, with its sailing ships. She loved the negro servants, their soft voices and ready laughter and melancholy songs. She loved her deep carpets, the snow-drift of her bed, the delicious food that old Chloe cooked. And oh, she did love her pretty clothes, after piecing and contriving and making over her old dresses for so long! Her gowns of apple-green glacé, black velvet, mauve and primrose silk, her black lace shawl with its swirling ferns and deeply petalled edge, her white lace shawl as delicate as frost-work; her little parasols the shape and color of hyacinth bells; and the pearl and primrose tinted gloves; and small white mists of cobweb pocket-handkerchiefs, fragrant from lavender fagots.

And she loved Victor, too. She loved him very much, indeed.

As she had told him, she did so want to please him! But there was only one thing he didn’t have that he wanted, and that was a son.

So kneeling in church in her best shawl and bonnet, and by the broad bed in her long-sleeved high-necked nightgown and lace-frilled nightcap, she sent up prayers detailed as marketing lists:

“Dear God, please bless Victor and Baby” (or “Maggie and Baby,” or “Maggie and May and Baby,” as time went on) “and let her not have so much trouble with her teething; and bless Mamma and Papa, and bless Henry, too, but don’t let him ask Victor for any more money; and make old Chloe not so cross; and make me good and make my sore throat well; and keep us in safety and happiness and give us a little boy. Amen.”