Читать книгу Boundless Water - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The rain fell heavily and steadily. The rooms in the house behind the yew were dark, sombre, and filled with the trickling sound of the water dripping from the roof and the wet branches without.

At an upper window Serena Fowkes sat, with her hair unbound, looking through the diamond panes into the depths of the yew that completely shut out the High Street.

The room was small and bare, all one colour of dark worn wood; the floor sloped towards the deep window-seat and the plaster ceiling bulged between the great beams.

On a rush-bottomed chair by the low bed with its patched coverlet sat Patience Coventry, straining her eyes over the embroidery of a sheet.

Serena sat with her chin propped on her hand and her elbow on the window-ledge; she wore a gown of rough blue linen, thick white stockings, and heavy leathern shoes; round her waist was a girdle from which hung a bunch of keys; a grey shawl was folded over her shoulders, for the room felt damp and chilly. The most noticeable thing about her appearance was her beautiful and undressed hair, a rare hue of pale auburn brown, that fell over her poor attire like lavish silk embroidery on a frieze cloth.

Now and again Patience Coventry lifted her head and looked at her sharply; she was herself pale and small, not uncomely, but expressing in her glance and movement a quick secretive curiosity, as if ever furtively on the watch, that sat unpleasantly on her youth.

She appeared to be waiting for Serena to speak, but at length broke the silence herself.

"Serena, why do not you sell your hair?"

"Sell my hair?"

The other girl moved slowly, in a half-terrified manner, to face her cousin.

"You know," said Patience calmly, "that hair is worth a vast deal of money now it is the fashion for ladies to wear so many curls."

Serena rose and shook back the locks that flowed in waves of changing hue to her knees.

"Sell my hair!" she repeated again. "What made you think of that, Patience?"

"There was a gipsy in Haslemere yesterday; she came to the door while you were out and wanted to tell my fortune."

"Oh, what did she say, what did she say?" cried Serena.

"As if I had any money to give her!" retorted Patience.

"She said nothing at all, of course, because she got no silver; but she said that she had seen you in Boundless Copse, and that she knew a man in London would give fifty pounds for your hair."

Serena laughed in a pleased fashion.

"I remember her now—she was gathering berries nearer the gallows than I have ever seen any go. How did she know me, Patience?"

"She described you—I suppose really she had seen you leave the house—she did not speak to you?"

"No; why, I only gave her a glance. I was lying in the furze waiting for Francis Ribblestone to ride by; I could see him for miles along the white road as I watched from Gibbet Hill. Sell my hair, the old witch suggested! It is worth more than fifty pounds on my head, Patience."

The other girl laid her sewing on the bed.

"Oh, I do not know. What is the use of fine hair if you have no combs to put in it and not even a genteel bonnet for the church-going?"

Serena smiled with the indulgence of a beautiful woman towards a commonplace one; she did not expect Patience to understand the feeling that would prevent her from selling one lock of hair for twice fifty pounds: her beauty was as precious to her as the honour of Francis Ribblestone to him, a thing to be held as inviolate.

She looked up at the only picture in the room, a time-stained engraving after an Italian picture, showing Saint Catherine leaning on a wheel and holding a palm-branch. Serena kept the picture because she had been told that the fair upturned face of the Saint was like her own, and even to impartial eyes the resemblance was obvious.

There were the same low brow, the same wide eyes, the same pure delicacy of nostril and lip and chin, the same coils and braids of soft hair; but in Serena Fowkes rich colouring was added to lovely outline, her eyes were blue, inclining to purple, her cheeks flushed with a tender rose, her mouth was a pale scarlet above her white chin.

She was not tall and her figure was one of rounded curves; her hands were spoilt with work, her feet disfigured with heavy shoes, and her movements were either too impatient or too languid for entire grace; she had not the art of exquisite posture and delicate gesture; her pretty voice was untaught in cadence and marred by the common London accent.

Yet she was undeniably a beauty, nor did she lack that glow and fire of the inner spirit without which beauty is a mere mask.

Sometimes, as now, when she stood with her head lifted, her bosom palpitating, and her hair scattered over her shoulders, a smile on her lips and in her eyes, she triumphed over her poor clothes and faults of breed, and seemed pure abashing loveliness, spiritual and free from strain.

Patience Coventry looked at her without sympathy or envy; she neither liked nor admired her, but she found a strange emotion by proxy in being the confidante of what was, to her, a strange romantic creature.

"Doth Mr. Septvan ever write to you?" she asked.

"Mr. Septvan?" Serena withdrew her eyes from the engraving. "No; he doth not even know where I am."

"Why did you not tell him?"

"What was the use! He in London, and I here!"

"He would have married you, I thought," remarked Patience calmly.

"Do you think so? But I had no money, and he very little. I should not have bettered myself."

"But you would have married a gentleman," answered Patience, who had herself no thought above her neighbor's journeyman printer.

Serena returned to the window and clasped her hands tightly on her knee.

"I think I shall marry Francis Ribblestone," she said thickly, gazing out at the dripping yew.

The name on Serena's lips was not new to Patience, but this statement shook her.

"Marry him!" she said, reaching mechanically for her sewing.

Serena kept her face averted.

"Something happened to me this morning, Patience. I must tell you. I met Sir Francis by the Town Hall, he was talking to two ladies in a little chariot; he presented me, Mrs. Cowley and her daughter. I was all fear at first; the younger lady—I hardly dare look at her! But a glance was enough; she is not at all pretty, not at all, Patience!"

Serena paused, moistening her lips, unlocked her hands, and began to twist the curling ends of her hair round her fingers.

"They were mighty pleasant, and they asked us, me and you, Patience, to the ball they are giving next week."

"Why?" asked the other girl grimly.

Serena glowed resplendently, her heart-beats lifted her bosom under the rough shawl.

"Because he told them to, of course. They will expect me to remember it when I am Lady Ribblestone, and, Gracious God, I shall not be ungrateful!"

"What are you going to wear?" asked Patience calmly. "I have my blue silk; I am glad I brought it," she added complacently. She had a way of speaking of her best clothes as if they were an infallible sign of gentility.

"What doth it matter what I wear?" cried Serena. "He hath never noticed my clothes...I shall go fine enough for the rest of my days..."

She rose and, crossing to the bed, crushed Patience to her bosom with an impulsive, almost rough gesture.

"Are you not going to say you are glad that I am so happy?" she muttered, pressing her face on the other's shoulder.

"Hath he asked you?" demanded Patience.

Serena freed her with the same violence.

"Not yet...he will, at the ball; you do not think I cannot tell...all the town hath remarked it...I get curtsies now...for what reason were these ladies so kind to me? 'Madam,' I said, 'I have no carriage.' 'Never heed that, child,' she answered; 'I will send one, and I trust you will have some pleasure, for a gentleman who admireth you is like to be there.' With that she smiled at Sir Francis, and half the town staring!"

Serena spoke so rapidly and brokenly as to be almost incoherent.

"It is a rare spot for gossip," said Patience, folding up her sewing.

Her cousin paid no attention.

"When we took our flowers to the church yesterday, I was thinking what a great name it was...there on all the tombs, and how he could give it to me with a few words...and how one day I could lie there too among gentlefolk, with the record of a good life above me—for I will be good, Patience." She closed her eyes for a moment and added hoarsely: "I should be happy if he was not even a gentleman, for I love him unto agony."

She leant her face against the leaded panes and the breeze from the crevices lifted the lighter tendrils of her hair: her shawl had fallen apart and showed the firm lines of her throat above the common gown.

Patience narrowed her eyes to look at her, for dusk was filling the low, narrow chamber.

"Is Mr. Holt going to the ball?" she asked.

Serena laughed excitedly.

"A fellow like that! Why should they ask him?"

"I was thinking," said Patience, rising, "that he is the only other person we know in Haslemere"—she pursed her lips—"and if he goeth not, who is to look after me?"

"Mrs. Cowley will arrange our entertainment," replied Serena. "How can you be so cold, Patience, when it is all so wonderful as to be—almost terrible?"

Patience was peering at her own small features and close brown ringlets in the blur of a white mirror facing the window on the low-fronted bureau.

"It is all very romantic and wonderful," she said, "and of course I am very glad that you are to be a great lady—only—"

"Only—what?" cried Serena from the window, like a challenge.

"Well, I hope Sir Francis is as serious as you think. I have heard that he was going into Parliament and had to make a big match—"

"Oh, tush!" cried Serena. "You don't understand any of it—" and she gave a rapturous sigh.

"When is the ball?" asked Patience.

"Next Tuesday."

"I ought to go home on Monday; Mother needeth me."

"You can write to-night."

"Very well." Patience had the air of making a concession, but in truth she was very well content to remain and watch the development of a romance in which she only half believed.

"Are you not coming down?" she asked, crossing to the door.

"Not yet—you get the supper to-night, dear; I want to think."

Patience opened the door, and then put another question.

"What are you going to wear, Serena?"

There was silence for the space of half a minute, then Serena answered very quietly:

"My mother's wedding dress."

"Lord!—but the fashion!"

"I can alter it, and it is the only fine gown I have."

Patience went out and closed the door.

The yew boughs rendered the chamber dark even while the street was still full of a mournful autumn light, and Serena rose slowly to strike the tinder and put the frail flame to the two yellow candles of coarse tallow standing either side the mirror.

Her shawl had slipped from her as she moved, the blue gown fitted tightly, and the reflection her victorious eyes leapt to in the glass showed the clear lines of her shoulders, throat and bust like ripe painting on the pulsing background of shadow.

With trembling fingers she lifted the long auburn braids from her forehead and, holding them either side like a parted veil, stared into her own half-frightened face.

No lovelier countenance had ever gleamed from behind the casements of Ribblestone Manor House; no brighter eyes had ever glanced down the long table where now Sir Francis sat alone; no sweeter lips had ever kissed an heir of Ribblestone; no softer hair had ever brushed the silk pillows of the state bed a queen had slept in...she dropped her face into her palms and tremor on tremor shook her young limbs.

Long ago, when she was still a child, her grandfather had told her that great beauty was a power to change the life of its possessor, like great intellect, great enthusiasm, or great faith.

In discontent, in impatience, in complaining she had waited, and the miracle had been wrought; love was to transmute her fortunes, her life, her soul, into pure gold.

Yesterday her grandfather had looked up from his books and said:

"All the town is talking of you and Francis Ribblestone—it will be your fault if he doth not marry you." And he added dryly that he had always bid her be patient and trust to her looks.

She had shrunk from the words then, but now she thought of them with triumph and with an intense loathing for the past her grandfather represented.

There was no mystery to her life, though to the people of Haslemere a certain obscurity seemed to rest on her antecedents. Her father was a bookseller in St. Paul's Churchyard, who had been ruined by printing Jacobite pamphlets, and died of his bitterness and poverty; her mother, the daughter of a Catholic linen-draper, had died the year after her husband, worn out with care and grief. Serena, left penniless, had passed her childhood with her Aunt Coventry, the widow of a Nonconformist minister, who eked out a small income by keeping a little dame school in Bunhill Row.

When she was fifteen she went to keep house for her grandfather, an old apothecary chirurgeon who called himself "doctor" and kept a small druggist's shop in Covent Garden.

Serena did the work, made her own clothes, weighed out the medicines, served in the shop, rent her heart with dreams and longings until she was one-and-twenty, when a young gentleman had staggered into the dark little shop with a head broken at the neighbouring tavern, and she had bound it up, and he had kissed her fingers and come again and praised her, and sighed for riches that he might do more than praise.

His flattery was like fruit and wine to her soul, but he left her cold. He was a younger son, studying law in the Temple, one of the Septvans of Kent, and her grandfather had warned her that she must look higher; he ever preached to her to put that fatal value on her beauty, and at his advice, although reluctantly, she had let her half-declared lover go, when her grandfather sold the shop and moved into the country with his savings to finish his great Latin book.

Mr. Septvan had given her the little picture of St. Catherine, and now it was only when she looked at it that she ever remembered him, so utterly was his image lost in that of Francis Ribblestone.

Recalling these years with swift dislike, she raised her head quickly and gave a little laugh.

"It was actually all over!—all over!" cried her thick heart-beats.

She rose and stretched out her arms, and shook back her hair, and walked round and round the four confining walls, seeing, not the poor bed, the darned curtains, the clumsy bureau and rush chairs, the blackness of the yew blocking the window and the common candles in the pewter stands, but visions of half-formed ecstasy dominated by the dark hawk face of Francis Ribblestone; hearing, not the sound of the rain and her own creaking footsteps, but the bewitching accent of a thousand silver-tongued fancies.

Suddenly a rush of passion came over her mood; she felt the blood in her face and bounding in a hot tide at her heart.

She stopped before the window, unlatched it and pushed it open; the cool, damp air rushed in, and she closed her eyes, clutching and unloosening her hand over her throat while she swayed against the window-frame.

"Oh Gracious God!" she muttered painfully. "It terrifies me that I love him so!"