Читать книгу Mignonette - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 13

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With perceptions made keen by the emotional crisis in her life, Barbara stood in the verandah the last day of her stay in the Sandyrock Hotel. The simple scene appeared to her as one of overwhelming beauty.

The air was full of sounds, the distant fall of the sea on the shingle, a distant quarter clock striking, a child in the lit room behind Barbara turning a musical box that played an Italian air, the warble of a thrush on an elm bough. Barbara had never noted before the intense beauty of such commonplace music, nor the entrancing loveliness of such ordinary visual delights.

It was, she was aware, because her own life had fallen into harmony. She was no longer set aside, unheeded. Francis Shermandine would surely ask her to marry him. She was too inexperienced to detach love from marriage. If he wanted her for his wife, he must love her, she argued, astonishing as this seemed, and if she felt such happiness at the thought of this, then she must love him.

She saw the whole of an ordered life spread before her, years filled with opportunities and blessings, and she felt humble before her great good fortune.

The world appeared to dance. The same graceful movements united the waves casting shells on the shore, the leaves bowing before the breeze, the rooks flying home, Barbara's own body as she sighed beneath her dull mourning.