Читать книгу Julia Roseingrave - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 3

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Mrs Barlow was extremely surprised to hear an iron tongue striking impatiently into the night, for she guessed this sound to be the clang of the great bell which hung over the main entrance to Holcot Grange; it was not the small bell which tinkled feebly over the side entrance that she and the other servants used.

The house had been uninhabited for two generations. It was well off the road nor was any traveller likely to pass...The imperious summons was repeated; Mrs Barlow huddled on her clothes.

'I wonder when that sounded last?' she thought nervously, and, for company, she tried to rouse Grace, the maid who shared her room. But Grace was a country girl and slept as soundly as an exhausted animal. So Mrs Barlow took up the lantern she had lit with trembling fingers. The moonlight was bright without, but she had to go through the shuttered portion of the house, along the left wing of Holcot Grange; she reached the front door and came out into the quadrangle as the bell rang a third time. The moonlight was very bright. The seven gables of the Grange were picked out sharply against a sky that dazzled with silver radiance. The moon itself hung above the old elms beyond, where the doves had made a deep cooing all day, but which now held only silence in their boughs.

Mrs Barlow was not much comforted by this dazzle of moonlight which she always considered an unwholesome and unnatural illumination.

She hastened across the courtyard, keeping on her slippers with difficulty, and firmly holding the lit lantern, which gave a coarse yellow flame amid all the heavenly silver.

The entrance to Holcot Grange, which had not been opened for near half a century, was very magnificent. Two pillars held trophies of arms and garlands. The moonlight glistened on the white stone of these and made them appear as if they were covered with snow crystals, the gates between were of exquisitely hammered iron.

Through the sharp black design Mrs Barlow could see a man holding a horse. The beast appeared weary, the man full of energy; with a useless gesture of impatience he struck with a glove on the iron grille and then, although he must have seen Mrs Barlow approaching, pulled again at the iron chain connected with the great bell that hung to one side of the gates.

'I wonder how he's found it,' grumbled Mrs Barlow. She felt nervous and apprehensive of danger and called out (her own voice sounded thin and strange to her in the silence):

'Who are you, sir, and what do you want here? You must have sadly mistook your way!'

A man's voice that had the rough hoarseness which comes from one who has been silent for hours, replied:

'This is Holcot Grange, is it not?'

'Yes.'

'Then it is the place I want.' And, in an agony of impatience (with wrath, too, Mrs Barlow feared), he added: 'Whoever you are, open to me, and at once!'

'I must know your business,' she trembled. She tried to make out his person and his features, but this was impossible, the moonlight was behind him, he was but a black shape. The animal, she could see, was weary, its head hung down and its motionless limbs and heaving body were steaming.

'I will tell you my business when I'm the other side of the gates.'

Mrs Barlow had been trained from a child to obey her superiors, and this man was plainly her superior. She had caught up her keys with her; she prided herself on never allowing these out of her sight, and among them, well polished and oiled but never used, was the key of the main gate.

She turned this stiffly in the ward with a trembling hand, while the man without continually urged haste and as soon as the gate was forced on its rusty hinges, pushed through without ceremony. If Mrs Barlow had been surprised by being roused in the middle of the night at a summons on the main gate of the deserted Grange, she was still more terribly surprised at the personage whom she had admitted, who was no less, her bulging eyes assured her, than the Devil himself.

The lantern fell from her hand, then crashed on the cobbles, and she would have shrieked had not the terrible guest at once put his hand over her mouth, bidding her, in the lewd and abominable terms she might have expected from such a character, to be silent.

'Who are you?' she stammered through his fingers, which was very foolish as she knew well enough that only one person could own such infernal insignia. Under his light, summer travelling cloak she could discern a tail which trailed on the ground as he walked. The hoofs she could not see, but then he wore hoggers, or riding boots, which might well have concealed such a deformity. The two points on his head which she had noticed with faint terror through the gate, she had thought and hoped to be feathers, or some outlandish ornamentation, but they were certainly horns.

For the rest, all she could see of his clothes was a tatter of red.

His face was smooth, hideous, expressionless, and a glittering yellow.

'Who am I?' he answered angrily, in reply to her quavering question, 'I am your master. I have come home. Go in and prepare a bed and a meal for me. And who is there to look after my horse?'

Mrs Barlow, though ready to swoon with fright, contrived a defiance to the powers of darkness.

'You're no master of mine,' she stammered. 'I've been a God-fearing Christian ever since I could talk.'

He had taken his hand from her mouth and stared at her with those glassy, unnatural eyes in such a threatening fashion that she began to moan, and added in a tone of complete surrender:

'I'll rouse Jack and tell him to look after your horse.'

'I perceive you are a fool,' he answered, 'and that nothing is to be got from you,' he then turned away and walked towards the house.

Mrs Barlow stared after him, black and red in the moonlight as he crossed the quadrangle. She had left the great front doors open behind her and he passed into the house and closed them.

'Oh dear, oh Lord, I have let the Devil into the house! The Devil has shut himself into the house!' whimpered Mrs Barlow.

Great as was this misfortune, she felt a certain relief at being rid of his actual presence, and the sight of the poor tired horse standing dejectedly beyond the gates, restored a little of her common sense and her courage. If the rider had come from the infernal regions, the horse at least seemed ordinary flesh and blood.

Mrs Barlow went out of the gates that she had never passed through before, closed them behind her, and taking the bridle of the weary animal led it round the Grange to the side gate, passed through this postern into the parts familiar to herself where she lived with her fellow servants, Grace and Jenny, in an irregular pile of outbuildings which had been built on the back of the Grange. There were stables here and the stable boy slept above those occupied by the two horses used by the men-servants.

With tears and cries and lamentations Mrs Barlow roused this youth, who presently came down the ladder, dragging on his smock and pulling at the straps of his leggings, with straw in his hair and horror in his eyes, for Mrs Barlow kept on repeating that the Devil had gone into the Grange, she had let him in with her own hand—the Devil and no one else, tail and horns and all...

But the boy looked at the horse.

'That's an ordinary animal,' he said, 'and has been ridden fast and bad and a good many miles too.'

'Well, I hope,' cried Mrs Barlow, 'that Hell is a long way off! I wouldn't like to think it were just round the corner.'

'But it's not much of a bit of horseflesh for the Devil to be riding,' remarked Jack with slow shrewdness. 'Why, it's just an ordinary post hack, hired at some stage inn.'

'I don't care what it is, the Devil was riding it and he's gone into the house!'

'Gone into the Grange!'

The youth was plainly awed. Neither he nor Mrs Barlow could remember when anyone had been in the Grange before, save the servants when they went to clean and repair.

'Yes, he went into the Grange, through the great gate and through the front door, and he's there now. You had better take up a lantern and come with me, Jack, and look for him, from room to room. It's our plain duty to do so.'

But the boy never gave this proposal even a second's consideration. He shook his head resolutely.

'I'll look after the horse, but I won't come into the Grange with you, Mrs Barlow, not if it meant losing my place.'

The housekeeper wrung her hands, torn between a very reasonable and bitter fear and a keen, honest sense of duty.

'What shall I do?' she kept saying in a foolish fashion, her goggling eyes staring at the boy, as he put the horse in the stable and unharnessed it.

'If I were you I'd go and ask the advice of Miss Julia Roseingrave,' suggested the lad. 'She's clever. She'll be able to tell you if you're dreaming, or if it's all just moonshine, and I shouldn't be surprised if she didn't mind going with you and searching over the Grange.'

With that, Jack, grinning, closed the stable door.

Mrs Barlow followed his advice. She had a great respect both for the courage and the judgment of Miss Julia Roseingrave.

So she set off, very panting and exhausted, along the path under the chestnut trees to the Dower House where Miss Roseingrave lived with her mother and her sister Phoebe. The housekeeper had begun to hope by now that she might have been dreaming or suffering from some horrible hallucination. The grinning incredulity of Jack had somewhat restored her equanimity. At the same time Jack had refused to go into the Grange with her, and as a proof that something tangible had arrived that night there was the exhausted, sweating horse.

The estate was small. The Dower House was not much more than a large cottage, nor was it far from the Grange. The familiar sight of the plain, brick front, with honeysuckles growing over the porch, and the pretty rose-pink curtains showing in the moonlight gave Mrs Barlow fresh heart.

She knocked at the door, and an upper window was instantly opened. Julia Roseingrave was always on the alert, and her neat, graceful head and shoulders looked out, as her dark eyes were turned on Mrs Barlow.

'Why, Mrs Barlow! At this time of night? It is very late, is it not?'

'Oh, Miss Julia, if you would come down and allow me to speak to you!'

'Certainly, I shall come down. But is it so important? Cannot you tell me now?'

'It's only this,' said poor Mrs Barlow, 'I believe I've let the Devil into the Grange.'

Julia Roseingrave laughed.

'Indeed Mrs Barlow, that would be very interesting, after you have had no company for so long to be thus honoured! Pray, tell me all about it.'

'Oh, Miss Julia, I knew you would mock me, but someone came up tonight, there's his horse in the stable now and young Jack attending to it. And I opened the great gates that have never been opened before. At least, not that I can remember, nor anyone else that I know, and the front door, too, and he passed straight in.'

'Some traveller,' said Miss Julia coolly. 'Don't talk too much and too loud, Mrs Barlow, you will wake my mother. I shall be down directly.'

The housekeeper was instantly silent, she was rather afraid of Miss Julia, but she admired and respected her very much.

In a very short while Miss Julia was down and had opened the door. She held a candle in her hand which showed her very neatly arrayed in a dimity gown, her hair very smoothly combed, her buckled shoes on her feet; she seemed never to be taken by surprise. Mrs Barlow followed her into the small parlour where everything was fair and orderly.

'Now, Mrs Barlow, pray tell me this strange tale.'

Mrs Barlow obeyed, and when she had finished her breathless recital, Miss Julia did not laugh or mock, but said pleasantly:

'It is clear that someone has gone into the Grange, and someone who has no business to be there. Of course, it is nonsense about it being the Devil, and, of course, we must go and see who it is. You say that Jack would not go, and of course, neither of the maids would. And there's nobody else, is there?'

Mrs Barlow shook her head. There would be nobody else at Holcot Grange till the morning, when the gardener and two other men who worked there would come up from the village for their day's work.

'Well, I shall go,' said Julia Roseingrave, 'if you will stay here, Mrs Barlow, in case my mother or my sister wake. You know that they must never be left alone.'

Mrs Barlow knew. Miss Julia's mother was a paralytic, and her sister Phoebe was an imbecile. But she made a protest against the young woman undertaking such a dangerous expedition as that she proposed, to the deserted Grange where the Devil had certainly taken up his night's lodging. But her protests were not very vehement, for she really thought this a good solution of the problem. She did not want to go to the Grange herself, she did not know anybody else who would go, and yet she was very willing to have the mystery solved as soon as possible. She also knew that Julia Roseingrave was completely without fear; never had she seen her in the least discomposed nor put out by any person, so she agreed to stay with the two invalids in the Dower House while Julia Roseingrave, putting a light shawl over her shoulders and taking Mrs Barlow's keys in her hand, set off through the moonlight under the chestnut trees towards the Grange.

She could have found her way there in the dark, for she had been a very young child when she had first come to live at the Dower House, and she was now a woman of twenty-seven.

As she proceeded directly, but without haste, on this strange errand, she turned over in her mind the nonsensical story of the housekeeper, which she thought the more striking, because she had always found the woman sensible and quiet, not given to either hysterics or romancing. Some traveller, she decided, whose fantastic appearance had deceived the good woman...'But why should there be a traveller going past Holcot Grange?—for the road leads nowhere, and who could have had the impertinence to force his way in thus without an explanation?...leaving poor Mrs Barlow in such a fright.'

The housekeeper's last injunction to her, whispered from under the honeysuckle-leaved porch of the Dower House had been that she must surely rouse Jack or get Grace or the other maid to go with her for company, but Miss Julia Roseingrave never gave this advice a thought. She did not wish to be embarrassed by the company of fools or rustics. The adventure was in her own hands, where she wished to keep it. She was indeed afraid of nothing.

'The house is under a curse,' Mrs Barlow had quavered.

Julia Roseingrave was not afraid of that menace either. The fancy also took her to enter the Grange by the front entrance. She had been into the house but very seldom, and only on those occasions when the servants were cleaning. There had been always a sort of understanding that she was not to go into the house, and Mrs Barlow had tacitly given her to understand that she would not very readily give her the keys. So there were many rooms and many things in the house which Miss Julia Roseingrave had never seen and which she had a rather lively curiosity to see. It pleased her, too, to enter by the great gates which she had always seen chained and then through the big main doors always kept closed. The house was not very large nor very magnificent, but it was the largest and most magnificent that she had ever seen. For years she had envied the owner of Holcot Grange.

So, skirting the outbuildings where the servants lodged, the stables and, beyond, the disused chapel, she went leisurely round to the front of the house. The iron gates were closed. She unlocked them with a pleasurable sensation of power and passed into the moonlit quadrangle. The whole house was clear before her and she studied it intently. There was no light in any of the windows; the gables rose sharply against the moonlight-filled sky. A faint night breeze rustled in the tops of the elms; her own shadow and the design of the gate lay black before her on the cobbles, which were bleached to the look of marble by the moonlight.

No house could have seemed more blank and silent than did the Grange. 'The foolish woman imagined it all,' thought Julia Roseingrave with a feeling of disappointment.

She went up to the front door and after some difficulty found the right key and entered. Then in the hall she lit the candle, on the plain stick, that she had brought with her...the stairs were directly before her; leading up into darkness.

She listened. There was no sound, except, after she had stood still a considerable while, the scuttle of a mouse in the wainscoting.

'If there were indeed anyone here and he is as tired as his horse is said to be, he would have gone upstairs to rest, I suppose.'

And resolutely holding her candle aloft Miss Julia Roseingrave mounted the stairs.

'The Devil, I suppose, would choose the finest apartments.'

She remembered the largest bedroom that had always been used by the master of Holcot Grange, when it had had a master. She turned to that and opened the door.

The room was fully furnished, and like the rest of the house kept in tolerable repair; Mrs Barlow fulfilled her duties conscientiously; the two maids had nothing else to do but to keep repaired, darned and cleaned, the hangings and the furniture of the deserted house.

Shielding her light with a delicate hand Julia Roseingrave entered the room and softly closed the door behind her. There were long curtains of green rep to the bed and these were half pulled back. The shutters were closed and there was no sign of disarray in the room, but the young woman sensed that someone was lying in the bed.

With a steady hand she pulled back the sage-green curtains, and saw extended there in a deep slumber, the figure that had so affrighted Mrs Barlow—a man in a tattered carnival dress of scarlet was lying stretched on the hangings which Mrs Barlow kept rolled up in the bed. The tufted tail which the housekeeper had found so affrighting now looked ridiculous and even pitiful, trailing across the relaxed limbs.

The man had not even pulled off his boots. His dusty cloak still hung from his shoulders and he had loosened but not removed a mask of light gilded wood with holes for lips and eyes, and which still partially covered his face—a hood with crumpled cardboard horns lay beneath his head.

Julia Roseingrave stared at this stranger in a rapt curiosity. She wondered where he could have come from...For miles around the monotonous countryside afforded no more than a few sheep farms. She knew of no house where people were rich enough and idle enough to amuse themselves by dressing up as devils.

With a delicate and adroit hand she pulled aside the mask, and looked at the stranger's features. His face was peculiar and to some tastes handsome. In his slumber it twitched as if in the spasm of some half-spent passion or the feverish dreams of over-exhaustion. He was dark, and his curls, very rich and full, were pressed into the hood with the trumpery cardboard horns. He did not look the thoughtless fool that his disguise and his strange entrance to Holcot Grange might have shown him to be.

Miss Julia Roseingrave supposed that he was drunk. He was powerful and a small sword and a case of travelling pistols lay beside him on the bed. She knew it might very likely be dangerous to rouse him, but she did not hesitate.

Carefully placing her candle on a tall table by the bedside she bent over the sleeper, and, using more force than her fine hands seemed capable of, took him by the shoulders, commanding him, at the same time, in a low, tense voice, to wake up and tell her his business in Holcot Grange.

After a while he did stir, with a sigh and a groan as one who surrenders with reluctance a hard-won repose. She continued to shake him and adjure him. He sat up in the bed and opened his eyes which were swollen and bloodshot, but of a deep blue that she instantly admired.

'Who are you? Perhaps you do not even know who you are?' she asked, 'and what are you doing here? You frightened poor Mrs Barlow, the housekeeper, very much with your foolish costume, and your forcing of your way here in the middle of the night.'

He set his teeth at her with a mechanical ferocity, not meant, she thought, for her at all, but for some personage out of the episode which had sent him flying through the dark to shelter.

'Do not be foolish,' she said coldly, 'explain yourself. This is not an inn nor the house of any friend of yours.'

He seemed, by then, to have some little sense of his situation. He looked at the young woman and then beyond her at as much of the room as the candle light allowed him to see.

'To whom does this house belong?' he asked, and his voice, though still hoarse, was steady. She believed that she had made a mistake when she assumed him to be drunk for the man seemed sober enough.

'The house belongs to Sir William Notley,' she said. 'He has never been here in all his life. No, nor his father, neither. Sir William has many finer and larger estates.'

The stranger smiled. He seemed now to be alert. Miss Julia Roseingrave liked the way in which he was studying her and her neat charms. To allow him to prolong his scrutiny, she lengthened her conversation, telling him unnecessarily:

'Sir William never comes here. He is a very wealthy man. This place is lonely, desolate, old-fashioned, but he pays to have it kept up. It is supposed to be under a curse, nobody lives in it at all. I don't think till Mrs Barlow, in her fright, opened to you tonight, that the front door and gates have been unlocked for half a century.'

Then, her curiosity proving stronger than the pleasure she found in the stare of the handsome young man, she asked quickly:

'Who are you and where did you come from? I don't know anyone for miles round here who would be holding carnival!'

'Pray,' said he, rising stiffly to his feet as if he suddenly remembered some courtesy, 'who are you thus to question me?'

'Well, if you want to know that, I'm Julia Roseingrave.'

'And what right have you in this house which you say the owner has not inhabited for all his life?'

'I live in the Dower House,' said Miss Roseingrave, 'with my mother and my sister. My mother is a distant cousin of Sir William's father. It was he, of his charity, when we were quite ruined, who allowed us the Dower House. Sir William has not withdrawn that favour, so there we have been for twenty years. Tonight, Mrs Barlow, that is the housekeeper who admitted you, came running to me to tell me she had let the Devil into Holcot Grange.'

'And you came by yourself to investigate if that were true or no?'

'Why, certainly. Do you think we get so many excitements here that I could let that one pass?'

The young man leant against the bed pillar. His interest in her, which seemed to have flared up so suddenly, had suddenly sunk down; he was again overpowered by fatigue. He seemed indeed near swooning.

'I will see you in the morning,' he said. 'Pray do me the kindness to give orders from me to that foolish woman who admitted me, that the house is to be opened and aired. The house is mine though I have never been here before.'

'You are Sir William Notley?' she asked very quick and peering.

'I am he, Miss Roseingrave, and I shall stay here for a while. I have a good reason for that and a good reason for coming here suddenly. Good night, cousin.'

Then he threw himself down again on the rolled up coverlet, smiling in his tattered devil's finery. The young woman thought instantly:

'Mr Morley, the steward, who lives over at Griffinshaws, will know if this is he or no. Meanwhile it were best that I accepted his tale.'

So she said, still composed, but pale:

'It is a very strange home-coming, Sir William, and you must forgive us if we mistook you. Will you not have another bed prepared, it can be done in a little while?'

'I have ridden from London, only stopping to change horses, and I could sleep on a board.'

'Good night, then, cousin, I will see you, perhaps, in the morning.'

She took up her candle daintily and left him.

In this strange fashion Miss Julia Roseingrave and Sir William Notley first met.