Читать книгу Supernatural Mysteries - Ultimate Collection - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 53

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The moon had waned and the night was clear and dark save for the clustering brilliance of the stars which made a radiance more likely to confuse than to illuminate.

Sir William Notley felt himself utterly plucked away from his old life, he knew the even freedom of a man whose days have always been stainless. He had no burden of remembered sins. He felt at ease with his own soul, and in harmony with all about him.

When his city acquaintances sent him letters, which they did cautiously and severally, he burnt them without reading them. He wrote to no one. The care of the estate remained in the hands of Mr Morley of Griffinshaws, and the master of Holcot Grange and of so many other houses and estates lived on his own property as if he were a stranger and a guest there. His state became a very ecstasy of dreams and languid inaction. He made no effort to pursue Julia Roseingrave, it was enough for him to know that she was there in the Dower House with the woodbine ripening on the porch, behind the chestnut trees in the park.

He rejoiced in the fair weather, in the ineffable stillness of the long summer afternoons which held, surely, in their remote golden hours an echo of eternity. He listened with drowsy content to the song of the reapers and came to take it as part of the harvest (there was but a field or so of it on the estate); he watched the reaping-hooks laying low the bearded grain and the corn lilies and the corn roses that grew between the brittle yellow stalks.

Behind the song of the reapers which he felt to be melancholy and uncouth he seemed often to hear that other high voice, which he believed he had first caught the accent of in Julia Roseingrave’s neat parlour—an unearthly voice which said: ‘You are in more peril than you have ever been before.’

This warning, even though he believed it true, mattered little to him. If he were foreshadowed by his own fate, he cared nothing. He felt himself to be in possession of some persuasive and all-pervading truth which made all the incidents of human life unimportant, reconciled good and evil, and took the horror from crime, and the abnegation from duty, and blended both in one perpetual delight.

He was in that mood when the conflicting forces that divide Creation seemed united in his heart. There had been a time, and that not so long ago, though it seemed so far away, when he had been in the thick of that conflict. Now he was apart from it, and, as it seemed, for ever. A voluptuous sensation of acquiescence in things as they were, lulled his senses and his spirits. He ate very sparingly and he slept long, and his health became finer than it had been since he was a youth, and he had up some of the rose-coloured wine from the cellars, laid down and sealed by a dead hand so many years ago.

And in the evening he would sit with the windows open and watch the stars glittering like falling jewels among the high elm trees, and raise his glass and drink to Julia Roseingrave.

It was his decision that she should come to him; he would make no further step in the wooing of her. His waiting did not gall him, he felt no trepidation as to the result. One sunny mom, or one starlit eve, or one dense midnight she would come up to the Grange and be his entirely.

But Julia Roseingrave made no sign. The new moon waxed large again in the sky and became strong enough to fade the starlight, and still she did not come. He saw nothing of Mother Cloke the herb woman nor of Dr Rowland. The gardens became full of seed pods and fruit and withering leaves and drying blossoms.

The stubble field from which the harvest had been carted away looked bleached white in the sunlight. The last swallows were flying very low.

For a long while it had not rained and the vegetation was dried and brittle.

Sir William went several times to the lily pond in Ballote Wood and the water there was drying up and the lilies fading. His unrestrained and libertine fancy kept him inactive. He never turned his steps towards the Dower House beyond the chestnut trees in the park.

One night, after a day of heavy dreams, he saw the thunderclouds coming up behind the elm trees, packs of vapour, advancing and mingling with the natural dark. He felt at once enervated and excited by the menace of the approaching storm; several birds flew home in the murky twilight, their crying sounded like shrieks of terror. Mrs Barlow wanted to set lights in every room; she was afraid of thunderstorms, she could remember some terrible tempests coming up from the sea and striking the marsh and the woods, blasting many trees and killing sheep and even human beings.

But Sir William dismissed her. He found a sensuous charm in this majestic disturbance of the elements. He sat at his open window and cast a clear and penetrating glance into the dark turmoil of the heavens. He thought that perhaps she would come tonight; he believed that his withdrawal was wearing down her lofty and contemptuous spirit, and soon she must surrender, and he waited, drowsy and eager, for her to come fearlessly through the dark and the storm. With his own hand he even set a supper on the heavy waxed and shining oak table: fruit, and wine, and sweet cakes.

Something, his conscience, his heart, or that high voice he had heard singing above the reaper’s song, warned him that her coming might be little conducive to his future peace or welfare, but he recklessly continued in a delicious moment of expectation.

There was an intense stillness as if every living thing down to the smallest of weeds in the crevice of the walls were motionless, and as if every breathing thing down to the most timid mouse in the wainscot held its breath.

Then the storm broke directly above the Grange.

Sir William felt peace, satisfaction, and repose as he stood beneath this opulent display of celestial fury. He saw the heavenly fires flash beyond the window, showing in a second’s greenish brilliancy the outline of the elm trees, the garden, the vases of withered flowers on the terrace. Or, if he turned to another window, showing the bare quadrangle and the great iron gates through which he had ridden in the tawdry, red rags with which so gaily he adorned himself as a mock devil.

She could not, of course, bold and fearless as she was, come through the full fury of the tempest, but he looked for her immediately afterwards.

The storm was short, the thunder rolled and muttered away towards the West and seemed to draw the oppressive heat with it. The lightning diminished to mere sparkles on the dim horizon far beyond the marsh. The stars showed behind the light, hurrying vapour; the moon had already set, and silence and a gentle breeze came like a benison on the land.

Sir William set the silver lamp in the window. It was to guide her, for he was still sure that she would come. He glanced at the table to see that all was set fairly; he held up a crystal flagon of wine so that the light of the lamp was reflected in the heart of it—rosy gold it was, old and perfumed. He turned about the peaches that had ripened on the southern red brick walk of the fruit garden. He had collected some small early pale-yellow apples, wall pears and plums with the bloom unimpaired, taken from the muslin bags which protected them from wasp and fly.

He took off his dark coat and fetched from the press one of a ruby-coloured velvet, with long skirt and wide cuffs that he had made the fashion in the city through the mere wearing of it at Court. He looked round for a mirror, but there was none in the room—and still she did not come.

He went down to the door and set it wide and looked across the quadrangle. Surely she would arrive through the iron gates. That would please her, he had eased and left them ajar on purpose, she had but to touch the cold metal and it would yield. The night was no longer very dark, the glimmer of the stars was sufficient and the way was very familiar to her, but still she did not come.

And when the dawn, with unusual magnificence, suddenly coloured the East with saffron he knew that she would not come, and for the first time since his arrival at Holcot Grange he felt a definite disappointment, a definite uneasiness.