Читать книгу The Dust Flower - Basil King - Страница 3

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It is not often that you see a man tear his hair, but this is exactly what Rashleigh Allerton did. He tore it, first, because of being under the stress of great agitation, and second, because he had it to tear—a thick, black shock with a tendency to part in the middle, but brushed carefully to one side. Seated on the extreme edge of one of Miss Walbrook’s strong, slender armchairs, his elbows on his knees, he dug his fingers into the dark mass with every fresh taunt from his fiancée.

She was standing over him, high-tempered, imperious. “So it’s come to this,” she said, with decision; “you’ve got to choose between a stupid, vulgar lot of men, and me.”

He gritted his teeth. “Do you expect me to give up all my friends?”

“All your friends! That’s another matter. I’m speaking of half a dozen profligates, of whom you seem determined—I must say it, Rash; you force me to it—of whom you seem determined to be one.”

He jumped to his feet, a slim, good-looking, well-dressed figure in spite of the tumbled effect imparted by excitement. “But, good heavens, Barbara, what have I been doing?”

4

“I don’t pretend to follow you there. I only know the condition in which you came here from the club last night.”

He was honestly bewildered. “Came here from the club last night? Why—why, I wasn’t so bad.”

Standing away from him, she twirled the engagement solitaire as if resisting the impulse to snatch it off. “That would be a question of point of view, wouldn’t it? If Aunt Marion hadn’t been here––”

“I’d only had––”

“Please, Rash! I don’t want to know the details.”

“But I want you to know them. I’ve told you a dozen times that if I take so much as a cocktail or a glass of sherry I’m all in, when another fellow can take ten times as much and not––”

“Rash, dear, I haven’t known you all my life without being quite aware that you’re excitable. ‘Crazy Rash’ we used to call you when we were children, and Crazy Rash you are still. But that’s not my point.”

“Your point is that that infernal old Aunt Marion of yours doesn’t like me.”

“She’s not infernal, and she’s not old, but it’s true that she doesn’t like you. All the more reason, then, that when she gave her consent to our engagement on condition that you’d give up your disgusting habits––”

He raced away from her to the other side of the room, turning to face her like an exasperated animal at bay.

The room was noteworthy, and of curiously feminine refinement. Expressing Miss Marion Walbrook as it did, it made no provision for the coarse and 5 lounging habits of men, Miss Walbrook’s world being a woman’s world. All was straight, slender, erect, and hard in the way that women like for occasions of formality. It was evident, too, that Miss Walbrook’s women friends were serious, if civilized. There was no place here for the slapdash, smoking girl of the present day.

The tone which caught your eye was that of dusky gold, thrown out first from the Chinese rug in imperial yellow, but reflected from a score of surfaces in rich old satinwood, discreetly mounted in ormolu. On the French-paneled walls there was but one picture, Sargent’s portrait of Miss Walbrook herself, an exquisite creature, with the straight, thin lines of her own table legs and the grace which makes no appeal to men. Not that she was of the type colloquially known as a “back number,” or a person to be ignored. On the contrary, she was a pioneer of the day after to-morrow, the herald of an epoch when the blundering of men would be replaced by superior intelligence.

You must know these facts with regard to Miss Walbrook, the aunt, in order to understand Miss Walbrook, the niece. The latter was not the pupil of the former, since she was too intense and high-handed to be the pupil of anyone. Nevertheless she had caught from her wealthy and public-spirited relative certain prepossessions which guided her points of view.

Without having beauty, Miss Barbara Walbrook impressed you as Someone, and as Someone dressed by the most expensive houses in New York. For beauty her lips were too full, her eyes too slanting, 6 and her delicate profile too much like that of an ancient Egyptian princess. The princess was perhaps what was most underscored in her character, the being who by some indefinable divine right is entitled to her own way. She didn’t specially claim her way; she only couldn’t bear not getting it.

Rashleigh Allerton, being of the easy-going type, had no objection to her getting her own way, but he sometimes rebelled against her manner of taking it. So rebelling now, he tried to give her to understand that he was master.

“If you marry me, Barbe, you’ll have to take me as I am—disgusting habits and all.”

It was the wrong tone, the whip to the filly that should have been steered gently.

“But I suppose there’s no law to compel me to marry you.”

“Only the law of honor.”

Her whole personality was aflame. “You talk of honor!”

“Yes I talk of it. Why shouldn’t I?”

“Do you know anything about it?”

“Would you marry a man who didn’t?”

“I haven’t married any one—as yet.”

“But you’re going to marry me, I presume.”

“Considering the facts, that’s a good deal in the way of presumption, isn’t it?”

They reached the place to which they came once in every few weeks, where each had the impulse to hurt the other cruelly.

“If it’s so much presumption as all that,” he demanded, “what’s the meaning of that ring?”

7

“Oh, I don’t have to go on wearing it.” Crossing the room she pulled it off and held it out toward him “Do you want it back?”

He shrank away from her. “Don’t be a fool Barbe. You may go too far.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of—that I’ve gone too far already.”

“In what way?”

“In the way that’s brought us face to face like this. If I’d never promised to marry you I shouldn’t now have to—to reconsider.”

“Oh, so that’s it. You’re reconsidering.”

“Don’t you see that I have to? If you make me as unhappy as you can before marriage, what’ll it be afterward?”

“And how happy are you making me?”

Holding the ring between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand, she played at putting it back, without doing it. “So there you are! Isn’t that another reason for reconsidering—for both of us?”

“Don’t you care anything about me?”

“You make it difficult—after such an exhibition as that of last night, right before Aunt Marion. Can’t you imagine that there are situations in which I feel ashamed?”

It was then that he spoke the words which changed the current of his life. “And can’t you imagine that there are situations in which I resent being badgered by a bitter-tongued old maid, to say nothing of a girl––” He knew how “crazy” he was, but the habit of getting beyond his own control was one of long standing—“to say nothing of a girl who’s 8 more like an old maid than a woman going to be married.”

With a renewed attempt at being master he pointed at the ring which she was still holding within an inch of its finger. “Put that back.”

“I think not.”

“Then if you don’t––”

“Well—what?”

Plunging his hands into the pockets of his coat, he began tearing up and down the room. “Look here, Barbe. This kind of thing can’t possibly go on.”

“Which is what I’m trying to tell you, isn’t it?”

“Very well, then; we can stop it.”

“Certainly—in one way.”

“The way of getting married, with no more shilly-shallying about it.”

“On the principle that if you’re hanging over a precipice the best thing you can do is to fall.”

He continued to race up and down the room, all nerves and frenzy. “Don’t we care about each other?”

She answered carefully. “I think you care about me to the extent that you believe I’d make a good mistress of the house your mother left you, and which, you say, is like an empty sepulcher. If you didn’t have it on your hands, I don’t imagine it would have occurred to you to ask me.”

“Well, that’s all right. Now what about you?”

“You’ve already answered that question for yourself.” She stiffened haughtily. “I’m an old maid. I haven’t been brought up by Aunt Marion for nothing. I’ve an old maid’s ways and outlooks and habits. I resented your saying it a minute ago, and yet it’s 9 true. I’ve known for years that it was true. It wouldn’t be fair for me to marry any man. So here it is, Rash.” Crossing the floor-space she held out the ring again. “You might as well take it first as last.”

He drew back from her, his features screwed up like those of a tragic mask. “Do you mean it?”

“Do I seem to be making a joke?”

Averting his face, he swept the mere sight of the ring away from him. “I won’t touch the thing.”

“And I can’t keep it. So there!”

It fell with a little shivery sound to a bare spot on the floor, rolling to the edge of a rug, where it stopped. Each looked down at it.

“So you mean to send me to the devil! All right! Just watch and you’ll see me go.”

She was walking away from him, but turned again. “If you mean by that that you put the responsibility for your abominable life on me––”

“Abominable life! Me! Just because I’m not one of the white-blooded Nancies which your aunt thinks the only ones fit to be called men––”

But he couldn’t go on. He was choking. The sole relief to his indignation was in once more tearing round the room, while Miss Walbrook moved to the fluted white mantelpiece, where, with her foot resting on the attenuated Hunt Diedrich andirons she bowed her head against an attenuated Hunt Diedrich antelope in bronze.

She was not softened or repentant. She knew she would become so later; but she knew too that her tempers had to work themselves off by degrees. Their 10 quarrels having hitherto been rendered worth while by their reconciliations, she took it for granted that the same thing would happen once more though, as she expressed it to herself, she would have died before taking the first step. The obvious thing was for him to pick up the ring from off the floor, bring it to her humbly while her back was turned on him, and beseech her to allow him to slip it on where it belonged; whereupon she would consider as to whether she would do so or not. In her present frame of mind, so she told herself, she would not. Nothing would induce her to do anything of the kind. He had betrayed the fact that he knew something as to which she was desperately sensitive, which other people knew, but which she had always supposed to have escaped his observation—that she was like an old maid.

She was. She was only twenty-five, but she had been like an old maid at fifteen. It had been a joke till she was twenty, after which it had continued as a joke to her friends, but a grief to herself. She was distinguished, aristocratic, intellectual, accomplished, and Aunt Marion would probably see to it that she was left tolerably well off; nevertheless she had picked up from her aunt, or perhaps had inherited from the same source, the peculiar quality of the woman who would probably not marry. Because she knew it and bewailed it, it had come like a staggering blow to learn that Rash knew it, and perhaps bewailed it too. The least he could do to atone for that offense would be to beg her, to implore her on his bended knees, to wear his ring again; and she might not do it even then.

The dramatic experience was worth waiting for, 11 however, and so with spirit churning she leaned her hot brow against the thin, cool flank of Hunt Diedrich’s antelope. She knew by the fierce grinding of his steps on the far side of the room that he hadn’t yet picked up the ring; but there was no hurry as to that. Since she would never, never forgive him for knowing what she thought he didn’t know—forgive him in her heart, that was to say—not if she married him ten times over, or to the longest day he lived, there was plenty of time for reaching friendly terms again. Her anger had not yet blown off, nor had she stabbed him hard enough. As with most people subject to storms of hot temper, stabs, given and received, were all in her day’s work. They relieved for the moment the pressure of emotion, leaving no permanent ill-will behind them.

She heard him come to a halt, but did not turn to look at him.

“So it’s all over!”

As a peg on which to hang a retort the words would serve as well as any others. “It seems so, doesn’t it?”

“And you don’t care whether I go to the devil or not?”

“What’s the good of my caring when you seem determined to do it anyhow?”

He allowed a good minute to pass before saying, “Well, if you don’t marry me some other woman will.”

“Very likely; and if you make her a promise to reform I hope you’ll keep your word.”

“She won’t be likely to exact any such condition.”

“Then you’ll probably be happier with her than you could have been with me.”

12

Having opened up the way for him to make some protest to which she could have remained obdurate, she waited for it to come. But nothing did come. Had she turned, she would have seen that he had grown white, that his hands were clenched and his lips compressed after a way he had and that his wild, harum-scarum soul was worked up to an extraordinary intensity; but she didn’t turn. She was waiting for him to pick up the ring, creep along behind her, and seize the hand resting on the mantelpiece, according to the ritual she had mentally foreordained. But without stooping or taking a step he spoke again.

“I picked up a book at the club the other day.”

Not being interested, she made no response.

“It was the life of an English writing-guy.”

Though wondering what he was working up to, she still held her peace.

“Gissing, the fellow’s name was. Ever hear of him?”

The question being direct, she murmured: “Yes; of course. What of it?”

“Ever hear how he got married?”

“Not that I remember.”

“When something went wrong—I’ve forgotten what—he went out into the street with a vow. It was a vow to marry the first woman he met who’d marry him.”

A shiver went through her. It was just such a foolhardy thing as Rashleigh himself was likely to attempt. She was afraid. She was afraid, and yet reangered just when her wrath was beginning to die down.

13

“And he did it!” he cried, with a force in which it was impossible for her not to catch a note of personal implication.

It was unlikely that he could be trying to trap her by any such cheap melodramatic threat as this; and yet––

When several minutes had gone by in a silence which struck her soon as awesome, she turned slowly round, only to find herself alone.

She ran into the hall, but there was no one there. He must have gone downstairs. Leaning over the baluster, she called to him.

“Rash! Rash!”

But only Wildgoose, the manservant, answered from below. “Mr. Allerton had just left the ’ouse, miss.”

14