Читать книгу The Way Home - Basil King - Страница 9

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This question raised itself at intervals throughout the next three or four years, coming up chiefly during Emma's visits to the rectory. Osborne's efforts on behalf of the Trans-Canadian keeping him on the move over the United States and Canada, with frequent dashes to London, Paris, or Berlin, his wife rarely had a settled home. It was a matter of convenience to her, therefore, to spend a large portion of her time in New York.

Notwithstanding Emma's methods of attack Charlie Grace kept to his resolution. Not that he didn't sometimes reconsider it; but reconsideration never failed to bring him to the conclusion that to change his intentions would be treason to the memory of his mamma; and he clung to that memory the more desperately because it tended to grow dim. He found, too, another fortifying influence—one with which Emma herself had put him in touch, when she thought she was doing something else.

"So you're going to be a clergyman? If I were a boy it's what I should want to be, too."

This was Fanny Hornblower. Since the days when they were little children together Charlie Grace had met the banker's daughter face to face but rarely. The reason for this was mainly geographical, since the Hornblower residence was in the Murray Hill district of Fifth Avenue, the family continuing to attend St David's from old association.

It was Emma who intervened, to keep this separation from being more prolonged. He heard her on one occasion gently chide her father for letting it begin. Considering the future, she said, and the combinations wrought by mere proximity, it was criminal to have neglected such an opportunity. In due time, therefore, when Emma had renewed the old family ties with Mrs Hornblower, he found himself "taking tea" at the residence in Fifth Avenue, and leading out Miss Fanny Hornblower at dancing-school and juvenile parties. She was then fifteen, a year younger than himself. She was not pretty, being thin and bony, with a mere wisp of very blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and very blonde lashes. Her charm lay in an appealing gentleness, charged with an eagerness to do everything for everyone, making no demands for herself. Charlie Grace would probably not have thought of her as other than a sweet little girl, unusually plain, whom he liked in a condescending way because she was generally a wallflower at dances, if Remnant hadn't said, jocosely:

"Glad to see you makin' up to little Miss Hornblower, sonny. Go it; go it. Lots o' tin."

From this moment the boy grew cold in his attentions, though he could not have given a reason for the sudden reserve. None the less, such scraps of intercourse as he allowed himself with her he enjoyed, and the more so when she ventured to sympathize with his plans.

"If I were a boy it's what I should want to be," she declared, in her gentle way. "There's nothing I can think of so really noble for a man. It's what I should want to be above all things."

Confidences of this sort might have brought them nearer together if Emma hadn't said too significantly:

"I want you to be nice to Fanny."

He bridled at once. "I am nice to her."

"I don't think you are—always."

"Why should I be nicer to her than to anybody else?"

"Not nicer perhaps; but as nice. You'll find her a useful acquaintance when you're older."

He bounded. The formula was one he had grown to detest. "I don't choose my friends," he said grandly, "for the sake of making use of them."

Emma became conciliating. "You're quite right. There's nothing I dislike more than calculation. It's such a common thing too, nowadays. But still, one has to look ahead, don't you think?"

Since he couldn't deny this necessity, Emma was able to go on.

"You especially will have to look ahead, Charlie dear, because you have your own way to make."

"I suppose I can make it as well as other people."

"Oh, better—that is, better than the majority, I'm quite sure of that—if you only play your cards well. You hold a good hand," she smiled, "with some of the best trumps."

He looked at her with curiosity. She returned his gaze calmly. They happened to be standing in the front hall of the rectory, Emma at the door, the boy lolling over the banister, as he stood on the lowest step of the stairs. Emma had brought up the topic just as she was going out. It was part of her touch-and-go system. The high-crowned hat which was the fashion of the day—something like an overturned, elongated saucepan—gave height to her short figure; and in her long sealskin coat, her hands composedly in her sealskin muff, she was the very picture of a self-possessed little lady.

"In fact," she continued, using the method of instilling self-confidence she had practised effectively with Noddy Tomlinson, "in fact you may be said to hold the ace. You're very good-looking. I suppose you know that."

He did know it, in a manner of speaking. That is, he thought so himself; only he was not sure that others would agree with him. It was an immense pleasure to be corroborated by so good a judge as Emma, though all he could find to say was a sheepish "Oh, go on."

"You are," she insisted, "and that's an enormous advantage as a start. It has to be backed up, however. You'll always be welcome wherever you go: but you'll be more welcome if you cultivate your opportunities. That's all I mean. That's all I'm thinking of in asking you to be nice to Fanny."

There was more of Emma's philosophy, of which it was not difficult to catch the inner significance. If he got on his high horse about it, it was chiefly because he could hear a sympathetic response to it within himself. He recognized the fact that the things that Emma wanted he, too, wanted dearly, and yet could hardly bear to make the admission to his secret soul. As a matter of fact, to his secret soul, he declared that he despised them. He could pardon them to Emma because she was a woman after all. It was natural to a woman to care for the gewgaws of life, and to study the arts of getting them; whereas the imputation of this weakness to a man—to a man of sixteen especially—was little short of an indignity.

During the next few weeks he was colder than before to Fanny Hornblower, while he sought the society, notably unremunerative, of Hattie Bright.

This young lady, at the age of nearly seventeen, was even more seductive than she had been at twelve. Out of the little fluffy ball of 1880 she had shot up fair and lissom, like a daffodil from a bulb. Rather, perhaps, it was like a hyacinth, since she had plenty of rich April tints in her complexion, while her eyes laughed unutterable things as archly as those of a Romney's Lady Hamilton. From the dingy boarding-house, dominated by the querulous nagging of Mrs Bright, she contrived to emerge as fresh as springtide, and not less stylish than a coloured plate in Godey's Lady's Book. To the matrons of St David's it was no Spirit of Good that achieved this miracle. To the young men, on the other hand, the wonder was sufficient to itself.

For Charlie Grace she was the embodiment of a principle which all his life was to be a snare to him. Naturally enough, no analysis he could make of his own proclivities could tell him that just yet. If he realized it at all, it was by fits and starts, that came suddenly and as suddenly went—or else it was in troubled dreams that had little or no counterpart in workaday life as he knew it.

And yet it was during these early months of 1885, when the whole mystery of womanhood seemed summed up for him in Hattie Bright, that he first saw the girl who personified his ideals almost before he had formed them. Vaguely, mistily, in unoccupied moments—in long jolting journeys on the horse-cars, or during the enforced stillness of service in church—he got glimpses of a woman, who to the patient gentleness of Fanny Hornblower and the bodily magnetism of Hattie Bright would add whatever in the way of feminine virtue was necessary to unify these warring characteristics. The vision had been a vision and no more. It was with a shock, therefore, that he saw it brought before him in the flesh in the person of Hilda Penrhyn.

This occurrence, too, was due to Emma's solicitude for his welfare. It would be good for him, she reasoned, to know a girl like Hilda, who now, at the age of eighteen, had left Tubb's Ferry and entered society. Knowing his oppositions and irritabilities, Emma told him nothing of her plans beforehand. She was content to invite him to see the opera of Carmen at a Saturday matinée. Excited by the movement and brilliancy of the incoming audience, as well as by the very shape and size and smell of the opera-house itself, he was twisting and turning in his seat, paying no attention to anyone, when Emma leaned forward from her place in the row, and said:

"Hilda, I don't think you know my brother, Charlie."

"How d'you do?"

"How d'you do?"

He was not aware that the instant was, with those of his own birth and his mother's death, one of the three great moments of his life up to the present time; but he was fully conscious of a desire to be at the feet of this exquisite being as a worshipper or a slave. The thought of love was as far from his mind as it was with Fanny Hornblower or Hattie Bright, but the impulse to kneel and serve was instinctive. It was all he could think of doing. He knew, of course, that there was such a thing as love, and that one day he should come to it; but he knew, too, that he was not ready for it yet. For Hilda Penrhyn there was nothing in his mind but service. If she had wanted a programme he would have as gladly risked his life to get it as David's soldiers to fetch him water from the well at Bethlehem.

But she had a programme; she had opera-glasses; she had everything a young lady at a public performance could require. Moreover, during the brief ceremony of introduction, she had glanced at him but languidly, turning away at once to converse with Sophy, who sat on her other side. The boy bore her no ill-will for that. It was natural that a beautiful creature of eighteen, who was already going to dinner parties, should have "no use" for a callow lad, two years her junior, and very much out of her "set." It was no more possible to resent her hauteur than for a Hindoo of the water-bearing caste to complain of insolence from a Brahmin.

Fortunately for his immediate peace of mind the orchestra struck up the overture, and presently Minnie Hauck, a rose between her teeth, and devilry in her eyes and voice, came bounding on the scene. But so it happened that while he followed the drama on the stage he also thrilled to a drama of his own creation. It was a drama without incidents, without action, without words, and with no dramatis personæ but himself and the silent girl beside him. It played itself in the passions of the piece, and sang itself in the gipsy airs, and took the tones and faces of each of the performers. There was cruelty, lust and caprice in it, lassitude and jealousy, joy and death.

During the entr'actes he stopped playing it, because as soon as the first curtain went down she spoke to him, and there was always the chance that she might speak again.

"Do you like opera?" were her words.

She spoke in the dry, staccato tone which implies concession to polite conventions, but bridges no inch of the distance that separates two souls. He didn't mind that. It was condescension enough that she should speak at all.

"I like this opera," he said, trying to throw a world of meaning into the penultimate word.

"I don't think I do."

He was longing to ask her why, but feared to be presuming. Before he could think of some other means of keeping up the dialogue, she had already turned toward Sophy. Her face being partially averted he took the opportunity to get a clearer idea of her appearance. This he could do but surreptitiously, as he feared that, if she looked round suddenly, she might resent his staring at her. His impressions, therefore, were in general rather than in detail. Before everything else, as he thought her over afterwards, she struck him as complete. There was nothing about her that was not finished, perfected. He could see that she was not tall; but that she must have the poise that gives to some women who lack height a dignity of their own. Her hair, worn in a twist low on the neck, was nut-brown in colour, and he had already noticed the ivory tint of her skin, when, in stolen glances, while the opera was going on, he had caught the delicate incisiveness of her profile. He could only guess at the colour of her eyes, but he was sure they must be brown.

On the way home he braced himself to speak of her to Sophy, who was spending the night at the rectory, to go back to Tubb's Ferry on the following afternoon. He trusted to the jostling of the crowds, as they walked down Broadway in the lamplight, to cover any confusion into which he might be betrayed, as he said:

"So that's the wonderful Miss Penrhyn."

"That's her." Sophy's way of speaking was Emma's despair. She looked up at him sidewise from under a fluffy fringe of hair imperfectly held in place by the scarf she had bound round her head and neck on coming out of the opera-house. Over her flimsy dress she wore a long fur coat in which she trudged heavily. She was a little thing. Everything about her was small but her mouth and her eyes, which were made for laughter and droll grimaces. "I wouldn't be crazy about her, you know," Sophy continued. "She didn't take much notice of you, did she?"

"I'm not crazy about her," he declared hastily. "I hardly looked at her at all."

"Well, you needn't be so touchy. She isn't bad looking."

"It's nothing to me whether she is or not," he asserted loftily.

"She'd make it something to you, if she wanted to. But she wouldn't want to—a boy of your age. She'd hardly see you—not if you were right under her feet, she wouldn't. She had a proposal last year—"

"What do I care?"

"I didn't say you cared, goosey. What difference would it make whether you cared or not—a young boy like you. You shouldn't be thinking of such things. Grandpapa 'ud be mad if he knew it."

"Knew what—for the Lord's sake?"

"Oh, well; we won't discuss it. She's got an air, too—Hilda has. She doesn't really dress well—all the girls at school said that—only she looks as if she did. I suppose you thought she was awfully stylish this afternoon?"

"I tell you I didn't look at her."

"Well, she wasn't stylish; not a bit. She wore that thing all last winter. Couldn't you see how it was cut in front? They've been as poor as Job's turkey since Mr Penrhyn died. That's why they're going abroad."

At this information the ground seemed to sway beneath his footsteps. More than ever he wished he could put his fortune or his prowess at her disposal. He mastered himself sufficiently to say, with an air he tried to make jocular:

"Going abroad, are they? What good'll that do them?"

Sophy tittered. "It'll do them the good that perhaps she'll get married."

"Can't she get married over here?"

"That's what I say; but mother and Mrs Penrhyn think she'll do better in Europe. I suppose they'll get the same idea about me. They'll want me to have a baron or a count. Well, I'd just as soon. The girls at school say it's as easy as wink over there. So that's what Mrs Penrhyn is going to make a try at for Hilda. If it doesn't succeed, she can bring her back, you know."

"And what does Hilda say about it?"

"She doesn't say anything at all. That's not her style—to say things. She's awfully provoking that way. You never know what she thinks and yet she's always thinking. You can see she is. But you may talk and talk and talk to her, and in the end you're no wiser than you were before. I hate that in anyone, don't you? Not that it matters whether you do or not, because I could see she didn't like you."