Читать книгу The Spectral Bride - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 5

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On the first landing of the small house Lucy Fenton paused with a sigh that expressed more than exhaustion of her stout person that she had so painfully heaved upstairs. There were two doors facing her—one led to the room that she shared with her husband, that with the small adjoining closet was all that she had of privacy from her daughters and Susan Keen, the maidservant. The sick man hardly counted for human intrusion on this retreat; when she drew his bed-curtains together she could forget him and by the hour together. The other room was that shared by the girls. Above were the two small attics, in one of which Susan slept and the other which was used for storage.

Downstairs were the front parlour, the back kitchen and scullery; there were no more rooms in the entire house. Not many means here for pretensions at gentility, not much with which to impress a doubtful superiority on a sneering neighbourhood.

Mrs. Fenton frowned, struggling with her own ignorance, her own lack of knowledge of the world. Naturally she was quick and shrewd, active-minded, ambitious, but thwarted and frustrated at every turn by her lack of money, her restricted ambience, besides the facts that she was uneducated and had to fight a sluggishness in her disposition that prevented her from making those strenuous and desperate efforts that others in her situation might have undertaken. Some women in the position of Mrs. Fenton, with the advantage of her steady income, her small capital and her two pretty daughters, even if handicapped by a sick husband and a provincial upbringing and a poor background, would have contrived something better than Mrs. Fenton had contrived. She knew this and it increased her antagonism against what she vaguely termed her destiny.

Without knocking she entered her daughter's room. Adelaide was seated at the window, the chill light—it had been a winter of bleak winds and was a late-flowering black spring—was beginning to thicken into darkness and a pearly glow, half-silver, half-dusk was over the figure of the girl in her flowered dimity frock; she had a curious, solid, almost heavy effect as if she was a well-formed statue. The bonnet looking fantastic in this chamber and by this light, half-covered her lustrous ringlets.

Dressed too thinly for the season, like all young girls now, thought Mrs. Fenton mechanically, thin shoes and cotton frock, no mantle even when she goes out. She looks healthy, though. I wonder if she does go out, after I'm in bed, out to the Folly Woods?

She smoothed her apron with her hands, that were like her daughter's, white and comely but now curdling into the soft ripples of late middle-age.

"Where are the letters you spoke of, Adelaide? You ought to show them to me."

"They're in my drawer—I wish I had a desk." The girl simpered; the full face turned on her mother was moonlike beneath the pink bonnet; she seemed now too heavy for beauty.

"Take that rubbish off your head," commanded her mother, sharply, "you look like a clown at the fair. I'm going round to Miss Herle's to-morrow to find out the truth about the matter."

"You said so before, didn't you, Mother?" replied the girl, lazily. She slipped the bonnet from her head and hung it on the polished arm of her rush chair. "And I tell you she can't tell you the truth but only that little bit of it she knows."

"You're trying to confuse me," protested Mrs. Fenton doggedly. "You could tell me the whole truth, and I'll have it, Adelaide, now."

"Oh, will you?" The girl lifted her plump shoulders. "You'd better let me alone, Mother, or you'll be losing the best bit of fortune that's likely to come our way."

The mother sighed, baffled, resentful, yet impressed; her daughter was better educated than she was herself. Lucy Fenton knew the value of that. She was, moreover, just as shrewd as she was herself and, had Mrs. Fenton believed, that curious quality that in her idiom she termed—'knowing how to manage the men.' She had observed Adelaide with the few male visitors who came to their house, with the shopmen, with the tradesmen, with the youth, who had grown up from childhood in the same lane.

Yes, Adelaide knew how to lead them on and hold them off. Perhaps she was to be trusted, yet this secret affair seemed difficult, dangerous to this woman, more unfortunately placed, as she bitterly reminded herself, than if she had been a widow.

She tried a wheedling tone that she used with ill effect and that was against her nature. Seating herself on the other rush-bottom chair placed between the two long beds with the white crochet covers she coaxed.

"Who is it you walk in the woods with, dear? Caroline has seen you and maybe others have, too. Won't you tell me all about it and let me help you?"

"You couldn't help me, Mother." The girl spoke sullenly and with an edge of defiance. "You stand in the way, and you know it. I have to be careful what I say about you, and Father. I don't want to be undutiful or to say things that will wound. My Basil is a fine match"—her voice trembled and she put her hands over her eyes. "I've his letters here. You can see them, one day. There's his seal on them and his name underneath. Let me alone."

"You don't speak so genteel as you used to," said Mrs. Fenton sharply. "If you say I stand in the way, it seems to me you soon forget your manners yourself."

"He's not thinking of manners," retorted the girl, passionately, "he's thinking of me. He loves me, he's going to give me a white horse, an Arabian horse, he's going to build me a summerhouse, a pavilion that will be painted with convolvulus and wild roses on a blue lattice-work. He's going to have a new wing put on to the house, which is like a palace. There's going to be a conservatory, what you call a stove-house, built, and there'll be all manner of exotic plants in it."

"What do you mean by exotic?" asked Mrs. Fenton suspiciously.

"As if that matters!" Adelaide was contemptuous. "It means foreign."

"You got it out of one of those books you read. I don't see that opening a circulating library in Mullenbridge is any good for anyone."

"You don't understand."

"That's what the young ones always say to the older ones," replied Mrs. Fenton, without malice. "Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not. I'd understand all right if you'd give me something to understand. You're trying to get married to a young man who's above you in station and you're managing the affair secretly. Well, I admit I've no home to receive a gentleman in, and your father—when he is in his senses—is no use to anyone."

"Basil," commented Adelaide, "is sorry about that. He doesn't like to think of me nursing a bedridden man for so many years."

"Oh, you managed to say that, did you, to this Basil—is that his name?" Mrs. Fenton searched her mind, briskly, keenly; she knew no Basil in the neighbourhood.

"I call him Basil," said Adelaide, evasively. "And he calls me Carina."

"I never heard of that. Is it a Christian name? Light a candle, Adelaide; it's getting dark."

The girl rose and lit the two candles of plain mutton-fat in the simple pewter sticks that stood on the little table that was used for both toilet and writing.

"It's a foreign name. You wouldn't know what it meant, any more than you did about exotic."

Adelaide did not give any further regard to her mother; she was staring at the reflection of her face that was shown like a flower blooming above a dark lane in the depths of the sombre mirror that was filled by all the shadows of the darkening room and the flames of the candles that illuminated her glowing, soft countenance.

Her mother also studied this reflection with the detached, keen, almost greedy air of one who views a treasure, possibly her only treasure.

The girl, well, perhaps the two girls, were her sole capital; through them lay her only chance of attaining some passionately held but most vaguely defined ambitions.

Her life had really been no life at all, a mere existence—childhood, girlhood on a small farm, the marriage to a man a little ^'above her,' confused hopes and wishes (crossing and re-crossing one another) of seeing something, or doing something more than she had seen or done before, of contriving, by some means she knew not what, to emulate those she saw enjoying all that seemed to her desirable—women who were easy, luxurious, flattered, admired.

The birth of two children, the increasing anxieties of supporting them on a small income, her husband's miserable health, then his long illness, all this had combined to stifle Mrs. Fenton's ambitions that had never, even to herself, been clearly formulated. Her ignorance and her sluggishness had hindered her from defining even her aspirations.

She had gradually transferred this medley of blurred desires, of vulgar ambitions, to the girls, and there again she was thwarted by her own lack of knowledge, her own slowness and apathy, by the pressure upon her of distressing circumstances. Mr. Bisset, her attorney, had been the only person to whom she could go for advice and perhaps he was not so clever.

Yet Adelaide might be lucky, she certainly was educated in a genteel manner and Mrs. Fenton had a blind faith in education.

"Well, I have done all I could for you," she protested, as if she put forward her merits as a plea for favours. "I've spent every halfpenny on you that I could, all the little bit that Father left. I never had more than two gowns a year, one for winter and one for summer, and I've not changed them more than once in every ten years or so. I even cut down on your father's medicines and the dainties Dr. Barton said he ought to have, in order to keep you up in your music and your painting. They were extras, Miss Fullam said."

"And what's the good of either one or the other when there's no pianoforte in the house, and no money to buy water-colours with?"

"Never mind, dear," replied the mother, and her tone was half servile, half threatening. "If you're to marry this gentleman who's to give you a boudoir, or a pavilion, or a stove-house, or whatever it is, and a white Arabian horse—"

"All that and everything!" cried Adelaide, with a triumphant interruption. She was re-arranging the candles so that they cast a double glow upon her in the dusky depths of the mirror, totally absorbed in her own reflection, answering her mother with her lips only, with the first words that came as she watched the changing colours of pearl, rose, gold and bronze in her face, hair, neck and throat.

"Well, then," persisted Mrs. Fenton, slowly, "it won't matter if you don't have a pianoforte here, but you'll be glad I taught you how to play one, won't you? But what's the use of a horse to you?" she added. "You never had one all your life and couldn't ride it. I had a mare, old Dolly, on the farm."

Adelaide did not trouble to answer. She sat down at the little table that she had made as attractive as possible with a few trinkets of glass and china and, pulling open a drawer that had long brass fuchin-shaped handles, she held up before her mother's eyes a packet of letters tied with a lavender-coloured sarcenet ribbon.

"There they are, Mother, you can look at them from here. They're from Basil, but to-day you're not to read them. Did you tell Caroline to believe all I told you?"

"Yes, I did. She said she would. But you can't trust the girl. She's quick-witted, too. Shell be watching you to see if you, or I, or both of us, are lying. She said she'd seen you both in the Folly Woods, too."

"Well, what does it matter? A lady can walk with a gentleman in broad daylight."

"Not without people talking. And who is this gentleman? I don't know many in the neighbourhood."

"You're thinking them over. There's the doctor's young son and the lawyer's son—one helping his father in the dispensary and the other articled to his—"

"Oh, yes," interrupted Mrs. Fenton, rising impatiently, "and there's a good many likely young men in the town. But they're not gentlemen, they'll not be able to buy you white horses and stove-houses, with foreign flowers in them, or whatever the nonsense is. Give me those letters, miss, let me see who's written them."

"They wouldn't tell you anything, they're signed Basil." Adelaide thrust the packet back in the drawer and looked at her mother over her shoulder. "Can't you trust me? It won't help you if you don't. I'll run away!"

"You wicked girl," said Mrs. Fenton slowly.

This was exactly what she'd done herself—run away with the pale clerk who had come 'for change of air' to the village where her father had his little farm; 'a lot of good it has done me, I'd better have married Thornhill's son, who had a little property better than my father's. The two farms might have been joined and I might have been comfortable now, if not genteel or lady-like. Yes, the two little properties together would have been worth having. But I ran away with someone who was above me and young Thornhill married someone else. Why do I ramble on about my own past? It doesn't matter any more to anyone.'

"Run away if you like," she added with an indifference that caused the girl to turn and face her. "But you've no money, and if this fine gentleman's under age he won't have any either. Remember, too, that your father, imbecile though you may think him, has got to give his consent to anything that you do before you're of age yourself."

"I don't want you to be angry with me, Mother," said Adelaide. "I don't mean to run away, of course I don't, and I want you to share in all my good fortune. Just let me alone a little for a few days."

"A few days," said Mrs. Fenton, eagerly. "You'll tell me everything then?"

"Yes. Only keep Caroline off, and Father, too. Sometimes, you know, when he's sensible, he asks questions. Don't go to Miss Herle about the bonnet, it'll only begin a lot of talk and there's no need."

"You won't be able to wear it in Mullenbridge," remarked Mrs. Fenton, lifting the latch of the door and peering through the shadows.

"No, I know I shan't. And I haven't the pelisse or a reticule or slippers or anything that I could wear with it. But I'll keep it."

"What did he want to give you a bonnet for that you can't wear, and a string of stones that you have to keep inside your frock? It seems to me he is a fool."

"He is young, and very much in love," cried Adelaide. "Good night, Mother, I'm going to bed now."

"Don't you slip out at night, miss, to the Folly Woods, or wherever it is you do go! Yes, they may well call it Folly, anywhere you take your walks, I'll swear."

"How could I go out? You lock the door."

"So you know that, do you, miss? You've tried it!"

"Well, I hear you go down every night. And if it's not you, it's Susan. And how could I go out, with Miss Caroline watching me, and you and Father just across the landing, and Susan overhead, and all the neighbours."

"It sounds as if you've counted over the chances, and the risks, miss."

"Maybe I have. Any girl would. There's the moonlight over there, you can see the woods from the window."

"Well, go to bed," said Mrs. Fenton, in non-committal tones. "I'll see what I'll do. I'll talk to your father when he's well enough. And you be careful how you manage young Carrie. She's a bit more clever than you think, perhaps more clever than you are yourself."

"Don't open the door yet, Mother, I want to ask you something—isn't there some good blood somewhere in your family? You used to talk of it when we were children, now you never do."

"What's the use?"

"Is it true? Miss Fullam always spoke as if you'd married above you."

"Did she? Well, I thought so, too. The Fentons have always been city workers, but never more than clerks—humble, too, but your father seemed to me..." She checked herself. "You ask your aunt, she'll know better, it's all stories. My mother was a Heslop, they held themselves better than the Mortons—they had come down, there was coat armour gentry somewhere."

Adelaide pressed for facts.

"Nothing in the Church—no Bible with names, no crested silver?"

"Nothing," replied Mrs. Fenton. "Don't you concern yourself about these old tales, plain lies, I dare say—I put them about to shut people's mouths. You're from humble folk—both sides. It's yourself you've got to look to..."

"I know, and Basil don't care."

"I gave you both a genteel education, I keep you in idleness. I can't do more," sighed Mrs. Fenton.

With this Mrs. Fenton left the room and Adelaide stood for a while listening to her mother's heavy footfalls on the ladderlike stairway. This was the tiresome part of a tiresome day—what to do between now and bedtime... Of course, there was work, she could sew or patch, she could call on a neighbour, sit with her father and read to him again another chapter of the Bible, those verses that he seemed to like even when he was in his most lethargic moods and his mind most clouded, and she would believe him senseless until by a twitch of his pale lips or a flutter of his bony fingers on the clean coverlet he would make a sign that he approved and desired that she continue.

"I've done enough of that to-day," decided Adelaide, with a toss of her head. She put the two candles on the little table by the bed, threw herself on it, and taking from under the pillow a novel, Daughter of the Night, began to read, moving discontentedly and restlessly as her position became uncomfortable and awkward, holding the book with difficulty so that the fluttering flame cast a light over the closely printed pages.

When Caroline entered the room that the sisters shared, Adelaide was completely lost in the story. It was not with a feigned absorption that she remained inert on the pillows, never turning her head as the younger girl entered, impatiently complaining of the smell and the smoke from the flaring wicks of the unsnuffed candles.

"How wasteful you are, Adelaide, and how careless! The candles guttering like that. I declare one is making a winding-sheet, and that's an ill-omen you would say. The window's not properly closed and there's a draught. And how can you read in such a light?"

Turning with a sigh from her delicious reverie, Adelaide clapped the book together, dropped it and sank back on the pillows, clasping her hands behind her head.

"Are you ill? Does your head ache?" asked her sister, approaching her and gazing at her keenly. "You're very flushed. Why don't you go to bed? I think it's untidy to lie down in one's clothes. Have you washed yourself?"

"I'm not going to wash to-night, the water's too cold."

"Susan will heat some if you wish."

"Don't go down and ask her to—"

"I don't intend to, I'll wash in cold water myself. It's quite good enough for me, but your complexion is rather greasy and you'd do better with the warm water than all those lotions on which you waste the money that Mother gives you for other purposes."

"You know perfectly well," retorted Adelaide angrily, "that those lotions are not for my complexion. I buy them to cure me of sickness. I often feel sick when I stoop or do much housework. I have attacks of giddiness."

Caroline laughed coolly.

"Everybody knows what's in those pots and bottles you buy from Mr. Gilbert. I wonder he humours you and sells you the stuff. I suppose it's because we spend so much money there through father's illness."

Adelaide now dropped all pretence and sighed: "I've seen some advertisements in the Annuals of lotions one can get in Bond Street, London. They come direct from Paris and are the most elegant preparations. Yet really, at my age, one needs nothing. I am in the bloom of youth, that, in itself, is Venus's finest adornment."

"You talk in a strange, nonsensical way," remarked Carrie contemptuously. "I suppose that's the rubbish you get out of those romances you're always reading."

"It's the way ladies talk," replied Adelaide. She rose discontentedly and glanced at the trim, neat, untouched couch of her younger sister as if she longed to exchange it for her own, that was tumbled and tossed. "Mother believed all that I told her about my lover," she stated proudly. "She approved of my conduct. I have assured him that in a short time I shall be able to present him to my parents."

"I said I'd seen you both walking in the woods," remarked Carrie, "and now you must give me the paste clasp Aunt Martha sent you last Christmas. You promised you would."

"But you did see us walking in the Folly Woods, Carrie. And why should I give you my paste clasp for merely telling the truth?"

Caroline took off her clothes, quickly yet carefully, arranging her garments precisely on the rush bottom chair in which Mrs. Fenton had sat. The girls were silent; each engaged in an inner debate, then Carrie said, as she snuffed the candles out, then slipped into her cool, unruffled bed with a little shudder as the linen sheets and her cotton gown chilled her warm flesh: "You'd better give me the paste brooch, Adelaide, or I shall tell Mother that I was telling lies. And once she thinks that I never tell the truth, why she won't believe anything I say, will she?"

The core of this confused statement was very clear to Adelaide. She believed that she was defeated, but still tried to defend her treasure. How mean it was in Caroline to bargain for the red paste before she would undertake to do what she ought to have done, out of good nature, without any payment at all!

"I'll read you the letters instead."

"I've heard them before." The younger girl's voice came insolently out of the darkness; there was no moon and the night was cloudy. Only the faintest blur showed in the space of the window from which the thin curtains had been drawn aside by Caroline before she put out the lights.

"You haven't heard all of them. Some came yesterday."

"Did they?" questioned the younger sister. "I didn't see anyone bring them."

"Oh, it was the manservant, Humfries. It was when you was out."

"Yes, and Mother was out, too, I suppose?"

"No, Mother was there, looking out of the window, and she saw him, you ask her if she didn't see him. And then there was another billet-doux in the old beech tree nearest the Folly."

But Caroline was not tempted.

"They're all the same." Adelaide could hear that she was yawning. "They're like those in the books you get from the library, word for word very often."

"Gentlemen in love," retorted Adelaide, in a whisper, "always use the same terms of endearment."

"I suppose so." Caroline was not interested. "I don't like those romances. They're about things that never really happen."

"You are a prosaic little puss. Nothing romantic'll happen to you while you have those ideas, Caroline."

"Romantic! You've got to give me the red paste."

"What will Mother say," Adelaide put up her last defence, "if she sees you wearing it?"

"I don't know. What does it matter? You can tell her you gave it me for my birthday. Put it in my drawer to-morrow, Adelaide, or I shall say that I didn't see you both walking in the woods."

The other girl replied sullenly. "Very well, I promise. I give my word."

"Oh, I don't care about your promises, or your word," replied Caroline, "just see that the paste is in my drawer there. If is isn't, why then, I shall just tell Mother I was lying."

The girls turned on their pillows, Caroline to sleep, Adelaide to dream.