Читать книгу Mignonette - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 4

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"Leave well alone, my dear Miss Lawne."

"But perhaps we are leaving evil alone," replied the lady, smiling.

"In that case also, have nothing to do with it."

"I mean that we may be allowing evil to happen when we could prevent it," she urged softly.

"In either case it is meddling," the lawyer persisted. "All is arranged, provided for."

"Too much an arrangement and a provision, nothing left to love, affection, family ties."

"You think that I advise according to my profession. Why, so I do, but also as your friend and the friend of your late father."

"I know you do so." A warm sentiment showed in her fair features. "But I have been thinking for days over this case, ever since I knew of it." She paused, then added emphatically, "A marriage contrived through a matrimonial agency is revolting—not to be endured."

"French custom allows it, as you know. In this case, all parties are agreed—the girl, her mother, the man."

"Oh, I understand it is their way, but to us—how disgusting!"

"Why should not this marriage be as satisfactory as the thousands of others made in like fashion? It is particularly suitable for a young lady whose birth is irregular and who cannot hope for entry into any social circle."

"She is to be married for her money—that is what is so distasteful."

"It happens everywhere. Your father has been generous, the lady has been well educated and has the dowry without which marriage in France would be impossible for her."

"But she is only eighteen years of age and has had no chance. Why this haste to dispose of her entire future?"

Mr. Bompast smiled indulgently. He found this tender feminine caprice endearing, but still, what Barbara Lawne was proposing was, as he had said, meddling, and he repeated his advice against such imprudence, adding, "Your father would not have wished it."

Barbara Lawne had no immediate answer to this objection. The wishes of the dead had, she knew, a leaden weight, but her father had not expressed any with regard to this secret daughter who had been so carefully hidden. He had merely acknowledged her in his will, left her five thousand pounds and an allowance of three hundred pounds a year to her mother.

"A sufficiently heavy charge on your fortune," remarked Mr. Born-past, "is made by these ladies. You have no obligation toward them."

"I know, of course. As for the money, of course again, I do not grudge it. As sole heiress I can afford it, besides, there my father lays commands. He does not restrict me as to how much further I might go. Indeed, perhaps he trusted me to go much further—in affection and kindness."

"He never spoke to you of these ladies," the lawyer reminded her carefully. "Had he wished you to become intimate he could have, at least, told you of their existence."

"My mother died but five years ago, and since then my father was ailing, sick, closed away—perhaps he would have liked to have told me."

"Mr. Lawne, even when ill, never lacked decision of character," replied the lawyer. "Had he wished you to know, he would have told you."

"Yet he makes no concealment in his will, he was aware that one day I should know."

"The dead are readily forgiven."

"That might apply to my mother, not to me."

"You do not feel that you have anything to forgive?"

"You stress the point, Mr. Bompast. No, I do not. I feel bewildered, even after thinking of this for three months. Shall we go out? We seem to have talked so long."

The lawyer readily followed her out of the French windows onto the verandah of the small hotel that ran the entire length of the one-story building. This gave onto a slope of well-kept turf surrounded by bushes of myrtle, poets' laurel, and groups of ash and beech trees that were broken by rocks that led to the shore, on which a springtime sea slowly rippled.

The city man found the scene soft and that it had an exotic air of luxury, extremely agreeable. The celebrated Undercliff was all, he considered, that it was claimed to be, a retreat from the cares and dullness of urban life. The ocean breeze blew sweetly on his face, with a delicate hint of perfume from the flowers that grew with such uncommon richness in these sheltered coves, helping to gain for the Isle of Wight the name of the Madeira of England. The cloudless heavens and the unflecked sea were overspread by a pale silver haze that seemed to diffuse a balmy essence over the prospect. There was an air of holiday abroad, of children playing, of invalids languorously returning to health, of all the dreary commonplace of everyday being stayed and put aside.

But Barbara Lawne in her cumbersome suit of black mourning seemed out of place. Her youth was eclipsed, the luster of her gentle beauty tarnished, by this parade of grief. The lawyer, whose profession so often brought him in touch with death, wished that its visits could be disposed of more quickly as they were so frequent. It seemed time for one so good, patient, and pretty as Barbara Lawne to taste something of the livelier side of life. She had lost a brother and a sister through the sudden maladies of childhood. Her drooping mother had, during years of undefined illness, claimed her services, then died slowly, and Barbara had barely been out of mourning for her before she had had to nurse her father. Now she was free, rich, and had escaped from the large somber house in Portsmouth to the Sandy-rock Hotel, but Mr. Bompast thought she did not know what to do with her freedom, and was weighed down by her bombazine and crape. He remembered also that she was twenty-seven years of age, and that devotion to her parents had caused her to refuse to entertain any offers of marriage.

"Pray," he insisted on a warm impulse, "do not concern yourself with these French ladies. Leave that to me."

Barbara sighed, as if regretting the necessity of being obstinate. "It is not in my power to forget them, Mr. Bompast. The daughter, at least, is my concern whether I like it or not."

The lawyer found no answer. The fact that he had always known she would take this revelation generously did not decrease his admiration for her behavior. She was showing, he considered, a rare Christian charity in her attitude toward this startling secret.

She had said that she was, after several months of reflection on the matter, still bewildered.

Mr. Bompast could understand that; he had been Edward Lawne's friend as well as his lawyer, but even so had no clear comprehension of what tale of whim or passion lay behind the birth of this girl, now by his will acknowledged by the dead man, whose mother was to receive a pension, who was herself to be handsomely dowered. Mr. Bompast had written to the Frenchwoman at the address he had found in the will and had received a reply in crabbed English. Madame Falconet knew of the sum to be paid by Mr. Lawne upon his daughter's marriage, and in expectation of it, a suitable match had been arranged through a respectable agency. Death, it seemed, had made no difference to this transaction. Edward Lawne could hardly have transferred so large a sum to his daughter without the knowledge of Mr. Bompast, but he had died without speaking of it and the lawyer had had to make the best he could of the bequest, Madame Falconet's colorless letter, and its implication that Edward Lawne had approved of the marriage the Frenchwoman had already settled.

Barbara had from the first said that the whole affair seemed heartless, a washing of the hands of an affair of honor. Something more than money was due.

And the lawyer had reminded her that her father had never seen this daughter, nor met her mother for many years, for it was long since he had left England, and not possible that the Frenchwoman had visited the well-ordered household in Portsmouth.

It was at this point they were now, as they stood on the verandah of the little hotel and looked with a touch of laziness at the scene that to both of them, the elderly man used to his busy cabinet and precise bachelor rooms, and the young woman used to sickness and a domestic routine, had the allure and sparkle of the outlandish, the fantastical, a fairy tale.

The few strollers in their summer clothes were idling, the children with balloons or kites, erratic in the capricious breeze, the boats on the silver blue of the sea seemed idle too, the sails hardly stirred, they seemed to be drifting.

"Leave well alone," repeated Mr. Bompast. After all the debate, everything he had to argue was summed up in these trite words. "Madame Falconet has not asked for anything beyond what your father's will leaves her."

"You always speak of Madame Falconet, I always think of the daughter."

"You are willful, my dear," smiled Mr. Bompast. "I speak of the mother because I know how French girls are brought up—she will not even desire a will of her own, everything is in the mother's hands."

"She is a human being, whatever the customs of her country! Could you not discover something about her—and the mother?"

Barbara Lawne had asked him this before and he had no different answer to give her now. Such an action would be meddling in another person's affairs. It would mean the employment of agents or spies.

"Even if I went myself to Paris, should I learn anything of them from a formal interview?" the lawyer asked again. "This Madame Falconet is circumspect, as appears from her letter and the fact that she has administered the funds for herself and her daughter all these years."

"Perhaps my father advised her, they may have corresponded," suggested Barbara, and thought, He could have received letters at his office, but shrank from the idea.

"Certainly he handled much of his business himself; he was a resolute, a secretive man, though in all honorable."

Barbara looked at him quickly, almost reproachfully. His comment, spoken in obvious good faith, condoned the intolerable offense against her mother, even against herself. While they had all seemed bound together by uprightness, faith, and understanding, there had been this secret woman, this secret child, secretly pensioned. And Edward Lawne had been a church warden of St. Peter's, and Sunday after Sunday had faced the board on which were written the Ten Commandments, at first with his wife by his side, then with her name on the mural tablet above that which commemorated his children.

The lawyer did not notice the glance. He liked and respected Barbara Lawne, he did not want her to be entangled with foreigners, with dubious women, with anything painful and furtive.

He could not form any opinion of Madame Falconet, neither of her birth, her character, her appearance. All was a blank to him. He did not know if she was married, the title might be honorary. He did not know how she explained herself, or her daughter, nor how she had, nineteen years ago, met Edward Lawne, whose business as a shipbroker took him, as a younger man, to foreign ports with sojourns in foreign cities. Nor did he feel it his duty to inquire into these matters. The affaire, he used a decorous word even in his mind, was long over, the child provided for, and how better than by a marriage—"suitable" the mother had termed it—where her assumed or doubtful name would be replaced by that of her husband, some careful Frenchman, well paid to overlook his wife's lack of pedigree?

So Constant Bompast, after the first shock of astonishment, would have left the subject of Madame Falconet and her daughter, without even much interest or curiosity, for in the course of his profession he had come upon many bizarre stories and learned not to concern himself in any of them beyond the legal details that were his work.

He regarded Barbara Lawne's interest in these two unknown women as fanciful, feminine, romantic.

"Now, the formalities of the marriage are completed, it only remains to transfer the money to the notary appointed by Madame Falconet."

"Write first," said Barbara impulsively. "And ask some details—of the man, the settlement."

The lawyer sighed.

"I was hoping to avoid that question. Madame Falconet has given me all these particulars."

"And you never told me!"

"I did not want to speak of it at all—it is really dull. Madame Falconet sent me a large dossier, references, legalities, all exact. The man is young, of a good family. The dowry is to be settled on Mademoiselle, but she will lend some of her capital to her husband at a low rate of interest. There is nothing to be argued about."

"How distasteful!" exclaimed Barbara.

Mr. Bompast supposed she was confused by the candor of the set terms, her own mother had brought her father a fortune that had purchased wharves and shipyards. But in England there was always a sentimental gloss over matrimony.

"So you see," he said, with what he hoped was a final air, "there is nothing that you can do."

She perceived that he would not talk any more of this and was silent. She even thought that he was wise—men were obviously wiser than women in all worldly concerns—and that it would be advisable "to leave well alone," as he argued, and not to interfere in lives that seemed so carefully, so neatly settled.

Yet this stranger with a name like a posy of flowers, Aimée-Violette-Marguerite Falconet, was her half sister, and Barbara was lonely, a little desolate, lately robbed of that fondness that she had taken for love and reduced to a paid companion to ease her solitude.

They had now crossed the turf and passed between the bushes of myrtles, the sea was close before them; behind the cliff rose steeply, sheltering the little hotel.

A new road ran between the rocks and trees and there Mr. Born-past's carriage, square, open, and furnished with linen curtains, waited to take him back to the White Lion in the village of Niton, where he was glad to linger for a night before returning to Portsmouth.

"I hope there are no more papers for me to sign," said Barbara. The banality of the remark and her reserved smile closed the subject of the Falconets.

Relieved, Mr. Bompast in his turn commented on the improvements in the island since his last visit some years ago, the new plantations, the splendid gentlemen's seats to be glimpsed between the trees, the excellent roads, all of which, amid a scenery sometimes soft and sometimes rugged, had the effect of some magical transformation, as if groves, villas, and gardens had been conjured into place overnight.

"It is very pleasant," agreed Barbara. "I dread the prospect of returning to Stone Hall—perhaps I shall ask you to sell it for me."

"I could get a good price for it," he smiled, and he thought, How much sickness, how many deaths she has seen in that gloomy old mansion. She ought never to go back to it. She ought to get married.

To cover this reflection that he felt might show in his pause, in his expression, for she was looking at him fixedly, as if challenging his opinion of her, he said, "Whose house is that? The park overhangs the cliff."

He did not expect her to know, he had intended only a distraction, but she replied at once.

"Sir Timothy Boys—it is named Mirabile and is in the Italian taste. Miss Atwood desires to see it, so I have sent in a note to Sir Timothy—my father knew him slightly."

Mr. Bompast thought that this was agreeable and said so. Barbara Lawne had returned to her usual manner of a charming lady whose placid temperament lent a luster to her polished manner. He hoped, as he drove off in his little carriage, that she would not again ruffle herself or him with uneasy and perhaps dangerous concerns over these foreigners, who could be forgotten by ignoring them. That had been Edward Lawne's way, by cutting out of his life the consequence of some rash flightiness, he had effaced them. Save for that sudden declaration in the will, it was as if they had never existed. Money had squared that account. The lawyer hoped that Barbara would continue to allow it to be a matter of money and that the Falconets need never be mentioned again. But Barbara had turned away along the path that led up the slope between the walls of Mirabile and the grounds of the hotel, thinking of nothing but her half sister.

How expect a man and a lawyer to understand? She regretted that she had disclosed her heart to him; she had done so in the hope that he would be of use, and he had done nothing, indeed, she felt, was resolved to do nothing.

For herself, she had no guile, and no knowledge of anything beyond what had happened in her own confined existence, passed with people much older than herself, for she was the last child of a late marriage, and in a narrow society where she had made few friends.

As she sensed the holiday world about her she was stirred by some indefinable nostalgia for what had never been, the light joyousness of youth, adventures of the spirit and of the heart. The laughing child flying the fluttering kite of rose-colored paper seemed herself as she had never been, and so did the young girl in her pale new gown, leaning on her husband's arm.

These trembling dreams that were almost formless were overlaid by sharp memories of deaths and illness, of medical men and nurses, of brief visits from acquaintances who left fruit and flowers and were relieved to escape from hushed rooms and the odor of medicine. Memories of other flowers also, formal wreaths and crosses of white blooms that appeared never to have been grown anywhere, so unnatural seeming were they with black-edged cards attached and streamers of crepe.

All these memories were shut in by the gray bulk of Stone Hall in the gray-walled garden, the large ill-lit rooms, the high ceilings, the heavy furniture, the shut-up nursery, the disused schoolroom, the cupboards of toys and lesson-books belonging to dead children.

She had half-wondered, sometimes, why her grandfather had ever built such a place and why her parents lived in it, and what force it was that held them in this colorless routine when they had the means to alter it. But custom, tradition, and a natural timidity had always overcome these faint stirrings of rebellion in Barbara's unawakened heart. She had little with which to compare her life in Stone Hall, only the existences borne by her father's clerks and workmen that she winced to contemplate, and half-stories told by sea captains who dined at her father's table and which gave her stray sparkles of worlds so far away—India, Cuba, Madagascar, the Barbary Coast.

She must have been ten years of age when her father had brought her a silver-embossed casket from Paris, and the coromandel wood desk for her mother.

She recalled clearly his few gifts and his frequent remark, not without a bitter reflection on the sharp loss of his son, "When I am gone you will have everything."

Yes, that must have been the date nineteen years ago, when her father had met Madame Falconet—or, perhaps, he had known her for a long while before the birth of the child.

Barbara could not conceive this situation realistically. She could not imagine how such relationships began, how any woman could be approached with any offer below that of marriage, how the birth of a child out of wedlock could be contrived, how money could pass on such a matter, how a clandestine correspondence could be undertaken. Her father had taught her that lying was sinful and punished her for childish untruths, and now he was revealed as one who had engaged for a lifetime, yes, for the lifetime of Aimée-Violette-Marguerite, in an elaborate deception.

She flinched from judgment of the dead and reflected again, vaguely, on the prettiness of these names.

Mr. Bompast had not been favorably impressed by them, he said they were theatrical and showed the girl's origin; no family names, the saint's name last.

Probably the girl had been educated in a convent, Mr. Bompast had remarked on that, adding: "That will help to make her different in all from you."

Barbara paused in the hotel verandah, and leaned against one of the supports, now clad with a close-clipped, rosy-leaved creeping plant.

The prospect was very pleasant—the smooth sea, the placid sky, the fresh green of trees and shrubs, flushed with rich hues of amber and gold in the breaking buds, the beds of purple iris, lavender-hued primula, and pale blue hyacinth, bordered with the stiff pink of thrift, had the carefree air of an ordered peace soothing to Barbara's spirit, fatigued by monotony and sadness.

She even forgot, standing there at ease, that faint sense of being set apart, of belonging to no one, that had at first troubled her. A pang for a lost childhood, for a youth fast being lost, for dull in meekly doing her duty, the envy, wholly without malice, of the romping child, the newly married girl, the young mother with her babies.

She ceased to think of time steadily flowing away, as the sands flowed away in the hourglass, that frightening symbol of mortality.

Instead, she paused, and her dreams steadied about her into a tremulous satisfaction with the quiet scene, the sunshine, the first flowers of the year, the warm breeze upon her face.

And with this relaxation of her anxieties came a resolve to have done with the niceties she had herself raised, as to Madame Falconet and her daughter. She would leave them, as Mr. Bompast advised, alone. It was her father's affair. He had succeeded in keeping it from her mother, at the cost of lies, but he had succeeded and doubtless paid for his success by much secret and acrid remorse and self-contempt.

His account was now in other hands, reflected Barbara with a chilled recognition of the awful God she had always accepted without believing in, and she must go her way and take up her own life.

She turned into the little parlor with the French windows that she had hired for her particular use.

Caroline Atwood was at the desk. Barbara was glad to see her comely and elegant person, who always had the air of reassuring everyone that all was well with the world, and life worth living.

Distantly connected with the late Priscilla Lawne, Caroline Atwood, left with straitened means and uncultivated talents, had never lacked a comfortable livelihood as companion in the homes of relatives or friends.

"Oh, Caroline!" exclaimed Barbara on an impulse born of the easy day, the pleasant woman, the resolution to have done with trouble, "Could we not go abroad somewhere? Switzerland, or even Italy? We could sketch," she added, as if excusing her boldness, "and keep a diary and learn languages."

Caroline Atwood looked at her kindly.

"Why, Barbara, what an excellent proposal. You should have been abroad before. I always thought that you were kept too close."

"You'll come then?" Barbara flushed with excitement. Why had she never thought of this before? She had been weighed down with futile grief, with senseless speculations.

"My dear, how vexing! I should have liked it above everything. I know the Continent pretty well, but I had a letter this morning from Marian Savile and she wants me at once."

"Need you go?"

"I must. It is extremely sad. Her eldest girl is threatened with a consumption and ordered to Teignmouth. Another baby is expected in the summer, and Marian is distracted."

Barbara, though naturally sympathetic, felt unreasonable.

"Oh, Caroline, I am so grieved, but could not Marian find someone else? You are promised to me."

"We said six weeks, dear, and it is now three months. I never supposed you would want me much longer. Of course, I shall not leave you immediately, but I don't see how I could go abroad in face of this appeal from Marian."

"Of course," Barbara agreed quickly. "How selfish of me to have tried to detain you. After all, it was only a sudden thought, a whim I suppose Mr. Bompast would call it. I had no idea of going abroad even ten minutes ago."

"But you should go," replied Caroline Atwood warmly. "It is the most natural suggestion in the world. You have been moped so long in that great house."

"But I have no one to go with," smiled Barbara.

"Oh, there are any number of ladies who would be so delighted."

"I don't know of one."

"An advertisement—an agency."

"No, I could not. That would mean a stranger."

"Then perhaps you would travel with Harding as a maid."

"Poor Harding! She would be frightened into spasms at leaving Portsmouth and so, perhaps, should I. No, if you cannot come, Caroline, I shall not think of it. You are so clever and managing and know how to deal with couriers and hotels."

Miss Atwood was distressed. She was accustomed to people disputing her capable services, but this time it was a sharp conflict of duties that the conscientious woman felt. She liked Barbara Lawne and realized her loneliness, a situation for which Miss Atwood blamed her parents, but she had not expected to remain with her for more than a short time, and her heart was with Marian Savile, daughter of her dearest friend.

She thought, too, shrewdly, Barbara ought not to be so dependent on me just because she knows me. She ought to meet other people and shake off her timidity and unworldliness.

Aloud, she said, "I wish I had told you of Marian's letter at breakfast. I did not want to distract you before you saw Mr. Bompast."

"Of course it does not matter. I was selfish. Poor little Jane! Indeed you must go."

"But you must not alter your plans either, Barbara. It will really do you good to get rid of me. You must see some company."

"I think I am too old to change my ways."

"You soon will be if you talk like that," replied Miss Atwood briskly. "I am sure that you have worried too much over everything. There is much that you have not yet taken into account."

"Surely I have considered all," said Barbara rather wearily. "Mr. Bompast is most thorough."

"And so are you, I'm sure, in all business matters. But have you given any consideration to the fact that you are a very rich woman?"

"I know there is a large fortune. I am selling the business and all the assets. But this makes little difference to me. I have always had all I wanted."

"That is not true," said Miss Atwood cheerfully. "Money is more important than you suppose—remember that you are not only rich, you are free."

"I certainly had never thought of myself as free-only as lonely," said Barbara.

"No, how could you? So strictly kept and with such burdensome duties. You know, I ventured to tell your parents years ago that they should have given you a brighter sort of existence with more company."

Barbara was silent. "Years ago" had a dismal sound, as if the best of youth had flown.

"Of course I was reproved," smiled Miss Atwood. "They did not wish to alter their habits. I suppose that they never really recovered from the loss of the elder children."

"Mother was not well, and shrank from society."

"I know. It wasn't fair to keep you so enclosed. Your father once told me that he detested matchmakers, and after that I never felt welcome at Stone Hall."

"Were you trying to make a match for me?" smiled Barbara.

"I was not so far presumptuous. I merely made a suggestion that some genteel young men should be entertained at Stone Hall."

Again Barbara was silent. To have married and escaped—perhaps ten years ago. Aimée-Violette was marrying soon after her eighteenth birthday. And when her father had harshly put aside this kind advice, he must have been conducting his foreign and underhand intrigue.

"Is there not anyone with whom you could stay?" asked Miss Atwood, mentally running over some of her long list of acquaintances. "The Elliotts, Mrs. Bryant, the Mollisons, with a charming daughter your own age? The Bethertons?"

"Oh, pray!" laughed Barbara nervously. "I am out of touch with all those people. And do not concern yourself with me, Caroline. You must go to Marian Savile as soon as you can."

"In a week or so. There are a thousand things to attend to, in this removal to the seaside."

"And I must return to Portsmouth," said Barbara with an assumed air of energy. "There is so much to be settled. Here, with nothing to do, one feels lazy."

"It is excellent for you to feel lazy and to be lazy. This is a charming spot and you should remain here, everyone is very genteel and friendly, and with Harding it would be perfectly decorous."

"I'll see," replied Barbara, anxious not to be pushed to a decision. "Oh, I had a note, brought in while Mr. Bompast was here, from Sir Timothy Boys, giving a courteous permission to see over his villa. Do you still care to go?"

Miss Atwood, disturbed by her friend's sad letter, was no longer in the mood for sight-seeing, and Barbara had only written to Sir Timothy in order to pleasure Miss Atwood so neither of the ladies now wished to undertake this little expedition. But both thought that it would be discourteous not to visit Mirabile after asking permission to do so.

"There are supposed to be some marvelous Italian pictures there," said Barbara, making the best of tedium and thinking how little she cared for Italian pictures or, indeed, for anything she was likely to see in Mirabile. "Sir Timothy," she continued, "is an agreeable kind of man. He came to see father about the buying of some figureheads from old men o' war, Dido, I recall, Neptune, and a White Lion."

"Why, what should he need them for asked Miss Atwood, always interested in oddities.

"I think to set up in his grounds, in some place he has in Wiltshire or Hampshire. I suppose he is rich, quite old, and his wife just dead then, about four years ago."

"You are nothing of a gossip!" exclaimed Miss Atwood good-humoredly. "You hardly notice anything, and never remember anything."

"Why, what is the interest? So many elderly men came to dinner or luncheon, just once, on business."

"But I daresay they were sometimes droll or entertaining, and had wives and families."

"You know, we never entertained, so what was the use of concerning oneself with occasional visitors?"

And Barbara reflected, While we had that dull life, there was Madame Falconet and her child growing up in France.

She fancied that country as a fabulous region, golden, radiant, shimmering; the Frenchwoman and her daughter as beings of an unearthly brightness, though she had never ventured to voice this foolishness to Mr. Bompast.