Читать книгу The Guests Of Hercules - C. N. Williamson - Страница 6

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Lady MacMillan of Linlochtry Castle, who was a devout Catholic, came often from her place in the neighbourhood to see her half-sister, Mother Superior at the Convent of St. Ursula-of-the-Lake. Mary Grant's only knowledge of the world outside the convent had been given her by Lady MacMillan, with whom when a schoolgirl she had sometimes spent a few days, and might have stopped longer if she had not invariably been seized by pangs of homesickness. Lady MacMillan's household, to be sure, did not afford many facilities for forming an opinion of the world at large, though a number of carefully selected young people had been entertained for Mary's benefit. Its mistress was an elderly widow, and had been elderly when the child saw her first: but occasionally, before she became a postulant, Mary had been taken to Perth to help Lady MacMillan do a little shopping; and once she had actually stayed from Saturday to Tuesday at Aberdeen, where she had been to the theatre. This was a memorable event; and the sisters at the convent had never tired of hearing the fortunate girl describe her exciting experiences, for theirs was an enclosed order, and it was years since most of them had been outside the convent gates.

Lady MacMillan was a large, very absent-minded and extremely near-sighted lady, like her half-sister, Mary's adored Reverend Mother; but neither so warm-hearted nor so intelligent. Still, Mary was used to this old friend, and fond of her as well. It was not like going away irrevocably from all she knew and loved, to be going under Lady MacMillan's wing. Still, she went weeping, wondering how she had ever made up her mind to the step, half passionately grateful to Reverend Mother for not being angry with her weakness and lack of faith, half regretful that some one in authority had not thought it right to hold her forcibly back.

There was no railway station within ten miles of the old convent by the lake. Lady MacMillan came from her little square box of a castle still farther away, in the old-fashioned carriage which she called a "barouche," drawn by two satin-smooth, fat animals, more like tightly covered yet comfortable brown sofas than horses.

It was a great excitement for Lady MacMillan to be going to London, and a great exertion, but she did not grudge trouble for Mary Grant. Not that she approved of the girl's leaving the convent. It was Reverend Mother who had to persuade her half-sister that, if Mary had not the vocation, it was far better that she should read her own heart in time, and that the girl was taking with her the blessings and prayers of all those who had once hoped to keep their dear one with them forever. Still it was the greatest sensation the convent had known, that Mary should be going; and Reverend Mother would not let her half-sister even mention, in that connection, the name of the other Mary—or Marie—Grant, who also had gone away sensationally. The eldest of the "three Maries," the three prettiest, most remarkable girls in the convent school, had left mysteriously, in a black cloud of disgrace. She had run off to join a lover who had turned out to be a married man, unable to make her his wife, even if he wished; and sad, vague tidings of the girl had drifted back to the convent since, as spray from the sea is blown a long way on the wind.

Reverend Mother would not hear Lady MacMillan say, "Strange that the two Mary Grants should be the only young women to leave you, except in the ordinary way," the ordinary way being the end of school days for a girl, or the end of life for a nun.

"I want dear Mary to be happy in the manner that's best for her," answered the good woman, whose outlook was very wide, though her orbit was limited, "If it had been best for Mary to stay with us, she would have stayed; or else some day, when she has learned enough to know that the world can be disappointing, she will return. If that day ever comes, she'll have a warm welcome, and it will be a great joy to us all; but the next best thing will be hearing that she is happy in her new life; and she promises to write often." Then the clever lady proceeded to ask advice about Mary's wardrobe. Should the girl do such shopping as she must do in Aberdeen, or should she wait and trust to the taste of Mrs. Home-Davis, the widowed aunt in London, who had agreed to take charge of her?

The question had fired Lady MacMillan to excitement, as Reverend Mother knew it would. Lady MacMillan believed that she had taste in dress. She was entirely mistaken in this idea; but that was not the point. Nothing so entranced her as to give advice, and the picture of an unknown aunt choosing clothes for Mary was unbearable. She made up her mind at once that she would escort her young friend to London, and stay long enough at some quiet hotel in Cromwell Road to see Mary "settled." Mrs. Home-Davis lived in Cromwell Road; and it was an extra incentive to Lady MacMillan that she would not be too far from the Oratory.

It was evening when the two arrived at King's Cross Station, after the longest journey Mary had ever made. There was a black fog, cold and heavy as a dripping fur coat. Out of its folds loomed motor-omnibuses, monstrous mechanical demons such as Mary had never seen nor pictured. The noise and rush of traffic stunned her into silence, as she drove with her old friend in a four-wheeled cab toward Cromwell Road. There, she imagined, would be peace and quiet; but not so. They stopped before a house, past which a wild storm of motor-omnibuses and vans and taxicabs and private cars swept ceaselessly in two directions. It seemed impossible to Mary that people could live in such a place. She was supposed to stay for a month or two in London, and then, if she still wished to see Italy, her aunt and cousin would make it convenient to go with her. But, before the dark green door behind Corinthian pillars had opened, the girl was resolving to hurry out of London somehow, anyhow, with or without her relatives. She decided this with the singular, silent intensity of purpose that she did not even know to be characteristic of herself, though it had carried her through a severe ordeal at the convent; for Mary had never yet studied her own emotions or her own nature. The instant that the Home-Davises, mother and daughter, greeted her in their chilly drawing-room, she lost all doubt as to whether she should leave London with or without them. It would be without them that she must go. How she was to contrive this, the girl did not know in the least, but she knew that the thing would have to be done. She could not see Italy in the company of these women.

Suddenly Mary remembered them both quite well, though they had not met since a visit the mother and daughter had made to Scotland when she was seven years old, before convent days. She recalled her aunt's way of holding out a hand, like an offering of cold fish. And she remembered how the daughter was patterned after the mother: large, light eyes, long features of the horse type, prominent teeth, thin, consciously virtuous-looking figure, and all the rest.

They had the sort of drawing-room that such women might be expected to have, of the coldest grays and greens, with no individuality of decoration. The whole house was the same, cheerless and depressing even to those familiar with London in a November fog, but blighting to one who knew not London in any weather. Even the servants seemed cold, mechanical creatures, made of well-oiled steel or iron; and when Lady MacMillan had driven off to a hotel, Mary cried heartily in her own bleak room, with motor-omnibuses roaring and snorting under her windows.

At dinner, which was more or less cold, like everything else, there was talk of the cousin who had left Mary a legacy of fifty thousand pounds; and it was easy to divine in tone, if not in words, that the Home-Davises felt deeply aggrieved because the money had not come to them. This cousin had lived in the Cromwell Road house during the last invalid years of her life, and had given them to understand that Elinor was to have almost, if not quite, everything. The poor lady had died, it seemed, in the room which Mary now occupied, probably in the same bed. Mary deeply pitied her if she had been long in dying. The wall-paper was atrocious, with a thousand hideous faces to be worried out of it by tired eyes. The girl had wondered why the money had been left entirely to her, but now she guessed in a flash why the Home-Davises had had none of it. The years in this Cromwell house had been too long.

"We've always imagined that Cousin Katherine must have been in love with your father, Uncle Basil, before he married," said Elinor, when they had reached the heavy stage of sweet pudding; "and when the will was read, we were sure of it. For, of course, mother was just as nearly related to her as uncle Basil was."

It was difficult for Mary to realize that this Aunt Sara could be a sister of the handsome, dark-faced man with burning eyes whose features had remained cameo-clear in her memory since childhood. But Mrs. Home-Davis was the ugly duckling of a handsome and brilliant family, an accident of fate which had embittered her youth, and indirectly her daughter's.

"How shall I get away from them?" Mary asked herself, desperately, that night. But fate was fighting for her in the form of a man she had never seen, a man not even in London at the moment.

In a room below Mary's Elinor was asking Mrs. Home-Davis how they could get rid of the convent cousin.

"She won't do," the young woman said.

"She reminds me of her mother," remarked Mrs. Home-Davis. "I thought she would grow up like that."

"Yet there's a look in her eyes of Uncle Basil," Elinor amended, brushing straight hair of a nondescript brown, which she admired because it was long.

"With such a combination of qualities as she'll probably develop, she'd much better have stayed in her convent," the elder woman went on.

"I wish to goodness she had," snapped Elinor.

"You are—er—thinking of Doctor Smythe, dear?"

"Ye-es—partly," the younger admitted, reluctantly; for there was humiliation to her vanity in the admission. "Not that Arthur'd care for that type of girl, particularly, or that he'd be disloyal to me—if he were let alone. But you can see for yourself, mother—is she the kind that will let men alone? At dinner she made eyes even at the footman. I was watching her."

"She can't have met any men, unless at that old Scotchwoman's house," replied Mrs. Home-Davis. "Perhaps even their Romish consciences would have forced them to show her a few, before she took her vows—Catholic young men, of course."

"Perhaps one of them decided her to break the vows."

"She hasn't really broken them, you know, Elinor. We must be just."

"Well, anyhow, she hasn't the air of an engaged person. And if she's here when Arthur gets back to London, I feel in my bones, mother, there'll be ructions."

"Arthur" was Doctor Smythe, a man not very young, whom Elinor Home-Davis had known for some time; but it was only lately that she had begun to hope he might ask her to marry him. She valued him, for he was the one man she had ever succeeded in attracting seriously, and though she knew he would not think of proposing if she had not some money which would be helpful in his career, she was eager to accept him. Had she realized sooner that there was a chance with Arthur Smythe, she would not have let her mother make that promise concerning Italy, for she could not be left alone in London all winter. Arthur Smythe would think that too strange; yet now she would not go out of England for anything. He was in Paris attending a medical congress, and planned afterward to visit the châteaux country with a friend; but he would be back in two or three weeks. Now that Elinor had seen Mary, she felt that changes must be made quickly. In other circumstances, it would have been pleasant to loiter about Italy, stopping at the best hotels at Mary's expense, on money that ought to have been the Home-Davises; but as it was, Elinor could think of nothing better to do than to send Mary off by herself, in a hurry. Or, as Mrs. Home-Davis said, "some one suitable" might be travelling at the right time, and they could perhaps find an excuse for stopping at home themselves.

"You can be ill, if necessary," suggested Elinor.

"Yes, I can be ill, if necessary—or you can," replied her mother.

Mary had not known that there could be such noise in the world as the noise of London. She did not sleep that night; and the fog was blacker than ever in the morning. Shopping had to be put off for three days; and then Lady MacMillan was too near-sighted and too absent-minded to be of much use. She was telegraphed for from her box of a castle, at the end of the week, because her housekeeper was ailing—an old woman who was almost as much friend as servant. Mary would have given anything to return with her, even if to go back must mean retiring into the convent forever; but the gate of the past had gently shut behind her. She could not knock upon it for admittance, at least not until she had walked farther along the path of the future.

When Lady MacMillan had gone, Mrs. Home-Davis and Elinor showed no interest in the convent cousin. They went about their own concerns as if she did not exist, leaving her to go about hers, if she chose. They were both interested, they explained, in the Suffragist movement; also they had charities to look after. There was no time to bother with Mary's shopping, but of course she could have their maid, Jennings, to go out with: in fact, she must not attempt to go alone. Consequently, Mary bought only necessaries, in the big, confusing shops that glared white in the foggy twilight, for Jennings as a companion was more depressing than the cold. She was middle-aged, very pinched and respectable in appearance, with a red nose, always damp at the end; and she disapproved of lace and ribbons on underclothing. Mrs. Home-Davis and Miss Elinor would never think of buying such things as Miss Grant admired. Jennings would have pioneered Miss Grant to the British and South Kensington museums if Miss Grant had wished to go, but Mary had no appetite for museums in the dark and forbidding November, which was the worst that London had known for years. Her aunt never suggested a theatre, or the opera, or anything which Mary was likely to find amusing, for a plan decided upon with Elinor was being faithfully carried out. The convent cousin was to be disgusted with Cromwell Road, and bored with London, so that she might be ready to snatch at the first excuse to get away. And once away, Mrs. Home-Davis promised Elinor to find some pretext for refusing to receive her back again.

The plan succeeded perfectly, though, had the ladies but guessed, no complicated manœuvres would have been necessary, Mary having determined upon escape in the moment of arrival. She was shut up in her room for a few days with a cold, after she had been a week in Cromwell Road, and when she was let out, after all danger of infection for her relatives had passed, she dared to propose Italy as a cure for herself.

"I know you have important engagements," Mary said, hastily, "and of course you couldn't go with me at such short notice; but I don't feel as if I could wait. I may be ill on your hands. I feel as if I should be, unless I run away where it's warm and bright."

Mrs. Home-Davis, much as she wanted to take the girl at her word, could not resist retorting: "It's not very bright and warm in Scotland at this time of year, yet you don't seem to have been ill there."

Mary could have replied that in the convent she had had the warmth and brightness of love, but she merely mumbled that she had often taken cold in the autumn.

"It will be impossible for us to leave home at present," her aunt went on. "If you're determined to go, I must get you some one to travel with, or you must have an elderly maid-companion. Perhaps that would be best. One can't always find friends travelling at the time they're wanted."

"Mary isn't such a baby that she ought to need looking after," said Elinor. "She's nearly twenty-five—as old as I am—and you don't mind my going to Exeter alone."

Elinor was twenty-eight. When she was a child she had assumed airs of superiority on the strength of her age, Mary remembered, but now she and her cousin seemed suddenly to match their years. Mary was glad of this, however, and bolstered Elinor's argument by admitting her own maturity. "I don't want a companion-maid, please," she said, with the mingling of meekness and violent resolution which had ended her novitiate. "It will be better for my Italian, to get one in Italy. I shall be safe alone till I arrive. You see, Reverend Mother has given me a letter to the Superior in the mother-house, and other letters, too. I shall have friends in Florence and Rome, and lots of places."

"But it wouldn't look well for you to travel alone," Mrs. Home-Davis objected.

"Nobody will be looking at me. Nobody will know who I am," Mary argued. Then, desperately, "Rather than you should find me a companion, Aunt Sara, I won't go to Italy at all. I——"

She could have chosen no more efficacious threat; though if she had been allowed to finish her sentence, she would have added, "I'll go back to Scotland to Lady MacMillan's, or stay in the convent."

Thus the sting would have lost its venom for the Home-Davises, but Elinor, fearing disaster, cut the sentence short. "Oh, for mercy's sake, mother, let Mary have her own way," she broke in. "You can see she means to in the end, so why disturb yourself? Nothing can happen to her."

Elinor's eyes anxiously recalled to her mother a letter that had come from Doctor Smythe that morning announcing his return at the end of the week. It was providential that Mary should have proposed going, as it would have been awkward otherwise to get her out of the house in time; and Elinor was anxious that she should be taken at her word.

"It's more of appearances than danger that I'm thinking," Mrs. Home-Davis explained, retiring slowly, face to the enemy, yet with no real desire to win the battle. "Perhaps if I write Mrs. Larkin in Florence—a nice, responsible woman—to find a family for you to stay with, it may do. Only in that case, you mustn't stop before you get to Florence. I'll buy your ticket straight through, by the Mont Cenis."

"No, please," Mary protested, mildly. "Not that way. I've set my heart on going along the Riviera, not to stop anywhere, but to see the coast from the train. It must be so lovely: and after this blackness to see the blue Mediterranean, and the flowers, and oranges, and the red rocks that run out into the sea; it's a dream of joy to think of it. I've a friend who has been twice with her father. She told me so much about the Riviera. It can't be much farther than the other way."

So it was settled, after some perfunctory objections on the part of Mrs. Home-Davis, who wished it put on record that she had been overruled by Mary's obstinacy. If undesirable incidents should happen, she wanted to say, "Mary would go by herself, without waiting for me. She's of age, and I couldn't coerce her."