Читать книгу Supernatural Mysteries - Ultimate Collection - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 50

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Sir William Notley was enchanted, as the two women had intended that he should be. Nothing now would please him but the possession of Julia Roseingrave. Though she might appear to the casual eye but an ordinary woman in her clothes, he knew that in herself she was as beautiful as a lily spike, as a branch of silver bells. He knew, too, that she was strange and cold and had lived all her life apart from the world.

He liked to think that she were a witch or a fairy or possibly a goddess, and that Mother Cloke, who had beguiled him into the woods, was her handmaiden or attendant. Perhaps they were evil, both of them, but for that he cared nothing. The herb woman had said that he was evil, too. He was even pleased by the thought that she lived alone in the park in the Dower House with those two stricken creatures. He felt that strange exaltation which was always his, when he fell in or out of love.

He did not immediately endeavour to see her, but for two days after he had beheld her bathing in the pool in Ballote Wood, he stayed in the house or went abroad but in the garden at sunset, when the doves were homing and all the flowers giving out their evening scent.

He took out the old instruments from the press in the room where he had first met the herb woman, and repaired them, for he had great skill in music. He wrested the keys aright, and tuned them and restrung the stringed instruments, he tenderly oiled and polished the delicate woods. Some were cracked and beyond repair, but others only needed careful handling which he gave them, to emit again their sweet, mournful melodies.

The harpsichord was easily put aright, for Mrs Barlow had kept it oiled and cleaned. He had flowers in large glass cups brought into this room and the windows set open so that the sun came in, and he asked Mrs Barlow when she was doing this work for him, who was the original of the portrait—the pale lady with the withered apple?

She replied that it was the Lady Dorcas, who had set the curse on the Grange and her descendants—that was one reason, said Mrs Barlow, why it had been so long uninhabited. As long as a man had another house he did not care to live in Holcot Grange.

Sir William laughed.

‘I have seldom seen a pleasanter place nor one where a man might be more readily at peace.’

Mrs Barlow looked at him with a certain apprehension. She thought him very handsome yet she was not altogether attracted by him, the expression was too wilful and imperious, and the splendour of his youth was something tarnished—good Mrs Barlow did not know by what. She dreaded him and did not like his residence at the Grange, she could not get over the impression she had received the night of his arrival, when she thought she had admitted the Devil into the old house, yet his manners to her were always civil and even courteous and he was lavish with his money to all the servants. Mrs Barlow did not like Martin either. The man was taciturn and would say nothing of what had happened to his master or to himself in London.

While Sir William Notley dallied with the after-taste of his nocturnal adventure in Ballote Wood, the weather changed. The brilliant sunshine disappeared, but not behind any cloud; it was rather obscured by a subtle mist, light, yet not to be penetrated, as if mysteries were to be performed in Heaven, which must be veiled from the earth. This withdrawal of the light was not without a certain menace, but the young man found it much to his taste. While Mrs Barlow talked with an odd apprehension of a coming storm, he noted curiously the changes that this mist gave to the house, the gardens, and the landscape, still to him so unfamiliar.

The gardens greatly interested him; the sombre man who worked there had done his duty skilfully, and it was that season in the year, the height of summer turning into autumn, that the strangest and most gorgeous flowers were in bloom. The young man admired the Rosa Ultramarina or Outlandish Rose, with the bright purple, double blossoms rising high above all the more lowly plants and the Indian Sun, heavy with seeds, hanging languidly and not knowing to which part of the heavens to turn since the sun was hid.

He noted the helmet-shaped, blue flowers of the Monkshood, the delicate tints of the Dovesfeet, and when he saw the small red grapes of the woodbine or honeysuckle, he thought of Julia Roseingrave standing under the porch of the Dower House.

At night the mist was denser than it had been in the day; moist exhalations rose from the low, fenny ground beyond the woods and the park, and these divided into the likeness of large, strange shapes that floated up and away into the dim upper radiance. Mrs Barlow entertained an intense conviction that it was dangerous to go out at night and to breathe in deeply the marsh mist.

He took no heed of her warning, but walked abroad in the quadrangle right up to the iron gates that had been opened for the first time in so many years, to admit him in his devil’s disguise. And then in the garden to the quidnuncs where the narrow box hedges were kept carefully clipped, and in the centre was a great globe of metal tarnished by damp.

The young man had left lights in an upper room of the Grange and the windows open, for he liked to look back and see the place thus illuminated as if somebody were waiting to receive and welcome him on his return. The Grange was silent in the daytime, but even more profound was the silence of the night, for there were not the homely noises of the servants going to and fro in their quarters, nor the bark of a dog, nor the low of a sheep or cow to be heard, nor the cooing of the doves. All living creatures were mute.

Sir William recognised something unhealthy and evil in the marsh mist; the air was heavy and close. When he looked back at the Grange he saw that not one of his lights had stirred, because no breath of wind floated through the open windows. There was a little pavilion at the far end of the garden close to a small pond or, rather, a great stone basin of water, in the centre of which had once been a fountain, but the machinery had been neglected and the waters no longer played from the pipes concealed in the moss-greened dolphins in the centre of the pond. There were dark weeds and white lilies on the water and through the mist Sir William could see them and they reminded him, though he needed no such aid to his remembrance for her face was constantly before him, of the creature whom he had seen bathing in the depths of Ballote Wood, her dark hair like the pond weeds, and face and shoulders and bosom white as the lilies.

He tried to recall the expression of her eyes when she had looked up at him, neither trustful nor beckoning, nor suspicious, but a look of blank acceptance as if she drew all his soul into hers as a matter of course, as a casual gift. He wondered if she had been sleep walking on that night, or if it were her ghost that he had seen.

He knew the old tale—that the ghosts of those about to die in the ensuing year wandered round the churchyard near the spot where they were likely to lie.

Had he then disturbed Julia Roseingrave while she had been returning from a visit to her future tomb?

The miasmas from the marsh had invaded the painted pavilion, which was damp from being long shut away and had no furniture beyond a couch of gilded wood very tarnished.

The young man stood at the door of this pavilion and looked out across the lily pond at the stone figure of the great fish, at the poisonous mists which rose and slowly dispersed in the upper moonlit air. Above, was a curious silver gloom, unreal and fascinating; his own swarthy brow, lowering glance, and dark clothes were not ill-fitted to the scene, nor was his mood.

He thought of his past life and all the deeds he had done as shut away in a book…he endeavoured by this symbol to express his complete severance from his former life, shut away in a book and clasped, locked, and sealed.

He strained his ears against the silence, half expecting a voice of warning or of menace or of invitation, and it seemed to him that he was lifted up and away from the earth, but not towards any heaven.

He had hitherto ridden towards his destiny with a loose rein, careless as to the consequences of his pleasures, his wanton sins, of temptations unresisted, indifferent as to the morrow, and contemptuous of Hell.

Now, with his past shut so resolutely behind him, he felt as if he had his fate in grip, and could and would deliberately choose his own path, and in that moment he felt disdainful both of good and evil, as if he held fiends and archangels helpless in the palm of his hand. He remained near the pavilion until dawn.

With the first pallor of eastern light a little breeze arose and set the lilies rocking in the pond, and fluttered those few candles in the upper rooms of the Grange that had not yet burnt out.

The marsh mist divided and hung for a second or so in the likeness of ghostly, hooded, shrouded figures, then dispersed, and the air was pure.

Sir William walked back to the house.

The flowers looked strange in that first light, many of them were yet folded, their petals closed over their hearts, all were pearled by the moisture of the night. They were entangled in a great luxuriancy, and the leaves of many had begun to decay and turn yellow.