Читать книгу Windlestraws - Bottome Phyllis - Страница 4

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It had all to be done in a rush--a few hours to buy clothes, barely an hour to pack them. A letter of explanation written to her father, which didn't explain anything at all, except the decent front he would expect any daughter of his to put upon a wound. The nervous farewell kindness of an aunt, who was inclined to think all ways of earning your living for a girl were dangerous and even faintly immoral; and then the innocuous jolting swiftness of a railway journey--into an unknown world.

Jean had always wanted to see Dartmoor, but although she drove through it now she could hardly be said to see it. A large and powerful car possessed itself of her and her luggage with a celestial sleight-of-hand, and whipped her across the moor over a white road like a flying ribbon. She had a vague impression of bleached heather and ghostly ling. She saw grey stones against a pale sky, and here and there a patch of gorse ran like flame over the rusty earth.

The rest of the drive was a jumble of speed and her own fears.

Suddenly the white road, which seemed engraved into the landscape, slipped out of the moor, the car raced through a small grey town, turned down a mossy road deep in flowered hedges, and stood still for a minute before the big stone gates of a park.

An avenue of solemn beeches closed over the car; deer, slender and archaic, flickered between the stems as noiselessly as light. The air, half moor and half sea, was as sweet as honey.

The beeches led up to and then fell abruptly away from a grass-grown terrace on which stood an old Tudor house, with long silvery lines and a gabled roof. The thin windows, ribbed with stone, looked as if they had been touched by frost.

Dropped close by on the smooth velvet lawn, like a kindly afterthought, was a demure fourteenth-century church.

The front door opened as if by magic before the car stopped, and revealed a grave elderly butler as austere and protective as the avenue of beeches.

'Her Ladyship is in the rose-garden,' he announced, 'and hopes that you will come out to her.'

Jean crossed a hall which seemed silently alive with the peering eyes of dark portraits. She was taken through a doorway which opened out upon a lawn fringed with copper beeches. The butler paused for a moment to indicate a path which led to a dark yew hedge. 'The rose garden is on the other side of the hedge, Madam,' he said with a dignity which seemed to limit him to the house and leave Jean to find her own way about the lesser decencies of the garden. Jean obediently followed the path to where stiff clipped peacocks crowned a flight of steps. She looked down from the top of the steps onto a sunk garden which held an acre of roses--coppery, orange, rose, carmine, shell-pink, palest ivory, and deepest gold--spreading before her like a horde of goblin jewels.

Through the riot of colour Jean caught a glimpse of a flagged open space in the centre, where a tall girl stood by a tea-table, a girl in cream and orange, whose own bloom and texture challenged the background of the roses.

Beatrice Falconer looked across the sea of petals with a welcoming smile. Her beauty outstripped comparison; she was a new sensation.

The eyes which looked into Jean's were as blue as rain-washed scyllas, the eyebrows above them were dark, but very delicate and arched, her low Greek forehead was crowned by waving chestnut hair. Beatrice's colouring was as fine as the pink and white of old Sèvres, but her skin did not remind Jean of china; it had the soft freshness of windblown flowers.

The lines of her face were upward, slanting lines like the subtle curves of a Leonardo Madonna. When Beatrice smiled dimples came on each side of her pointed chin and lit her stately beauty into the light secretive laughter of a Faun.

Beatrice hoped that Jean didn't mind having tea out of doors? She drew a chair forward, and hoped that Jean didn't mind roses? But she gave Jean tea among the roses whether she minded them or not.

'I know I ought to have seen you in town,' she said, 'but I hated it so. I wanted to come back to my roses. They're nearly over of course, but I like to be with them as long as they last. They're so much less disappointing than people, I think, don't you, and ever so much sooner over. I do hope the tea is hot?'

Jean murmured that it was. She wanted to go on talking about the satisfactions of roses and the falling short of human beings. But Beatrice disposed of the abstract, quicker than she disposed of tea. There was decision in her every movement, but when she wasn't doing something decided she kept remarkably still.

Her tall figure gave the impression of slenderness, but there was nothing frail about her. She held her head erect and buoyant; her back was straight as a wand, the long firm lines of her thighs were supple and full of vigour. She had the small pointed breasts of an amazon on a Greek frieze.

'Mother has written pages about you!' Beatrice observed with laughing eyes. 'Poor you! She must have put you through a mangle! But there's the less need for me to bother you now! She tells me she's told you about Reggie too! He'll need a good deal of coaching! He's never made speeches before. He knows a lot about horses, but I'm afraid that won't be much of a help, will it? Still you'll see what you can do with him. It must be nice to be so awfully clever!'

'I think it would be much nicer,' said Jean, laughing back, 'if you didn't think I was! I'm so afraid I shall let you down. All I can do really is to collect facts and to make the best of them; but Sir Reginald will have to deal with the speeches when they are made, and how am I to know that anything I can do will suit him?'

'Oh, Reggie's awfully easy to please!' Beatrice said, looking carefully into the tea-pot, 'and all you'll have to do really is to prevent his coming croppers. Archie says--he's our chief Whip, you know--that all Reggie needs is a little intelligent handling. This is quite an easy constituency and his family have always run it. He won't go wrong about agriculture, he farms a lot of his own land, and none of the farmers about here are red, thank God. About animals of course, he's always perfectly safe. Do you play bridge?'

Jean said she did; and something in Beatrice's speculative eyes, now raised from the tea-pot, made her feel that it was a mercy. It was important that she should be able to handle her work, but it occurred to Jean that perhaps work at Windlestraws wasn't as important as bridge. There was a plea in Beatrice's slow provocative smile, as if what she really hoped was to arouse in Jean a certain form of friendliness. She wouldn't ask for any direct response, nor would she perhaps go very far out of her way to win it. Under the cloak of her humility lurked a glacier region of cold pride. But friendship of some sort or other was what she really wanted.

She was, her beautiful vague eyes seemed to say to Jean, after all, only another girl.

Beatrice was silent for a long comfortable moment, while Jean took in her employer's unexpressed desire. If Beatrice was really going to like her it would make the bleak expanse of Sir Reginald's political innocence nothing worse than a game. Jean was not shy in a tied-up uncomfortable manner; she had courage and beneath her silence her judgment went on acting. She was more capable of knowing what Beatrice thought of her than Beatrice was of knowing what Jean thought of Beatrice. Jean drank her tea; and enjoyed, without attempting to match, the sophisticated repose of Lady Falconer's manner, a repose that had never been shaken by a doubt, nor breathed on by an adverse air. She saw that Beatrice felt at no disadvantage because of what she didn't know; she knew that what she didn't know couldn't really matter. Her beauty made her silences as important as speech and much less troublesome; but it was not an unconscious beauty, it paved the way for her speeches. When she did talk, Beatrice cut her conversation as an inspired dressmaker cuts expensive materials without the need of a pattern. The shape was in her mind; and it was sometimes a little alarming to watch the ruthless decision with which Beatrice wielded her conversational shears.

'I hope you'll like Devon,' Beatrice announced when her friendly comfortable pause had lasted long enough. 'It's my county as well as Reggie's, but we come from the sea. My brother's place is twenty miles off, but he and Reggie don't get on. The children are on the sands now. I hope you don't mind children?' Beatrice smiled sympathetically across the table at Jean as if she were willing to give up her family at a moment's notice should they seriously inconvenience her new secretary.

Jean assured her that this drastic sacrifice was not required of her. She did, as a rule, like children--but not in the lump. She liked them individually in the way she liked--if she did like--grown-up people.

'Oh, much better than that, I hope!' said Beatrice quickly. 'We're all so much nicer when we're young. One ought to like children and make them happy, don't you think? Later on one can't; and then they'd be so sold if they'd never had any happiness. I was a frightfully happy child, and it's helped me to put up with a lot since.'

Beatrice's eyes wandered over the goblin jewels to the stately silvery house. Windlestraws hardly seemed a possession which required much putting up with. There was in the long slim lines of the building, the definite roof, the thin straight windows, a mingling of force and grace, singularly like the force and grace of Beatrice herself. Surely she had the right setting for the supreme gift of her loveliness?

'I've got three children,' Beatrice dropped after an odd little sigh. 'Oliver--that's my boy--is the youngest; and then there's Bridget and Anne. They're really rather nice little girls, but Oliver's the betterlooking. Such a pity, don't you think? For looks are so wasted on a man. You'll see for yourself what they're like. I'm awfully fond of having them with me. That's why I really need some one to help me in the house. I want everything to be rather tidy and clean; and servants, if you don't look after them, do nothing but sit in the kitchen and eat lumps of meat. Just now we haven't anybody here but ourselves; but on Saturday there'll be about fourteen for the shooting. Do you mind my asking if you're engaged to be married or anything?'

'Not even anything!' Jean murmured with decision, 'and certainly not engaged.'

'That's rather odd,' said Beatrice with amused eyes, 'though very sensible! But you're awfully good-looking to have been left so much to yourself! I think it's a mistake getting married too soon. Of course in the end you'll have to; people who don't are in such a hole when they get old and ill; but marriage is a dog's life. Still a love-affair is quite different--it keeps you from hankering!'

'But I don't hanker!' Jean protested. Beatrice's amusement deepened, first one and then the other of the dimples made their enchanting appearance.

'Perhaps not now,' she said, 'but you can't tell when you'll begin, can you? There isn't any known antidote to falling in love--not even being in love with somebody else already, though I admit that's the stoutest protection! Well! I suppose you'll have to manage the best way you can--like the rest of us! The house is always full of men. Lock your door at night--and don't come to me with stories! It's so awkward to have to know things about one's guests--and besides, I may have my hands full with my own little troubles!'

Jean longed to say that she knew how to keep men at a distance and to prevent stories. But defence on the subject of love is often only an opening for a more dangerous attack; and after all, could she be sure, in a world where doors had to be locked at night, of the security she'd always known in the placid non-inflammable atmosphere of her father's house? Even then her father, poor dear, had been caught by the wandering flame of Carrie; perhaps Beatrice was right after all, and there was no immunity from love. She returned to Beatrice's less personal remark with an instinct that it might be more enlightening, and would involve her less.

'Why do you say that marriage is a dog's life?' she demanded. Beatrice laughed.

'Perhaps I should have said a cat and dog life!' she amended. 'When it isn't a fight--it's a bore! It's bad enough to want anything from a person you don't happen to be living with, isn't it? But to have to live with a person who wants what you don't, or won't want what you do, does demand rather a lot from one's morals and one's manners! However I admit that marriage is a bore one gets used to, and there are bores one doesn't! So don't let me put you off a disagreeable necessity!'

Jean reflected that she could hardly be put off what she was so little on; but she had an uncomfortable feeling that either she was going to feel sorry for Beatrice (whom she already liked far too much to wish to have to pity) or she was going to dislike being forced to form such a poor opinion of Sir Reginald.

She felt that she was moving about in a world she didn't realize and that there was nothing to count on but Beatrice's aloof yet genuine kindness.

Jean wanted, even more than she had expected to want, to please Beatrice; and it was a relief to feel sure that Beatrice wouldn't easily take an adverse view of a subordinate. She might, Jean thought, be terrible if you failed her; but she wouldn't expect you to fail her. She'd give you plenty of rope, and make her wishes and the way to carry them out perfectly plain. 'I won't fail her!' Jean said to herself firmly. 'I won't fall in love--and even if I have to, she shan't be bothered by it! She'll find that she can fill the house from floor to ceiling with Apollo Belvederes--and yet I'll stick to my job!'

But Jean had already fallen in love without knowing it. She was in love with Beatrice's clear voice, her motionless sculptured hands, her chiselled eyelids, and her sidelong, haunting smile. Jean knew well enough that no soul could be as beautiful as the lips Beatrice's soul spoke through, and she doubted if Beatrice's heart was anything like so tender as the innocent azure of her eyes; but her own heart had slipped, without a flicker of hesitation, into Beatrice's empty, undesirous hands.

Beatrice rose slowly to her feet and fingered a basket half filled with dead roses, which lay on the table beside her.

She had given up an hour of her time to making this girl like her; and she saw that the girl did like her; so her time hadn't been wasted and she might now return to clipping the heads off the roses. On the whole Beatrice liked dead roses better than living girls.

A man strolled towards them across the lawn, accompanied by his own gigantic shadow. He stood for a moment silhouetted against the darkness of the hedge; the sunshine made him look a dazzling figure.

He came unsmilingly through the sea of petals towards them, and stood by Beatrice's side without a word.

He was not so gigantic as he had looked on the steps, but he was a head and shoulders taller than Beatrice, his black hair curled obstinately, though it was cut short and perpetually smoothed down by hard brushes and cold water. His deep-set grey eyes had an irritated, homeless look, his sensitive curved lips were strengthened by the heavy line of his jaw; he had a cleft square chin which jutted out a little; and the expression of a man who had never asked for peace in his time and would not have known what to do with it if it had been offered him.

Beatrice said 'Tea,' and he said 'Thanks, I've had it.' There was a perceptible pause before either of them spoke again. It was as if, at their meeting, time was always necessary before the shock of a pleasure so intense could be assimilated. The two tall figures stood three feet apart, they hardly looked at each other, but Jean felt as if the whole physical universe had altered to meet the intensity of their passion.

A chill wind blew through the garden, the sunlight vanished, and the colour lay dead on the roses. Beatrice spoke at last. 'This is my cousin, Major Ramsay,' she said. 'Miss Arbuthnot. I'm taking her to her room,' she added in a voice that had changed to music. 'I'll come back.'

Ian Ramsay said nothing at all. He bowed to Jean with a brief indifferent glance, and stood rooted to the steps where Beatrice had left him. But Beatrice herself seemed hardly to have left him; as she turned away from him, the sudden flowering softness of her beauty was eclipsed.

Jean felt as if she were being accompanied to the house by a gesture, not by the hand which made it.

Her room was full of the scent of flowers, a soft meticulous bloom was upon the furniture, the deep yielding carpet was a luxury to her feet. Nothing had been forgotten which could minister to her comfort.

Beatrice herself had given the finishing touches to everything and had made the bedroom look as much as possible like the garden they had left.

She glanced about it now with desultory but observant glances. 'I hope you'll be comfortable,' she said. 'Ring for anything you want. You'll meet my husband at dinner. He's Ian's greatest friend. They fought together in France for four years. I believe they saved each other's lives. They got wounded and decorated together, and I supposed they'd get killed together. But they both came back instead. Ian's frightfully clever--he reads Shakespeare and he found a way of making bricks on our estate which has helped us to meet the awful taxation. He's usually here, but he has a home in the village. The children adore him. Sims will unpack for you. Dinner's at eight.'

Beatrice lingered for a moment as if there was something more she wanted to say before she reached the door, but nothing came.

She was gone with no more than the deepening of her sudden sidelong smile.