Читать книгу "Good-Morning, Rosamond!" - Constance Lindsay Skinner - Страница 5

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In the living room she paused for a conference with herself.

“Let me see,” she said, aloud. “Amanda said I must send for Mrs. Greenup at once, to manage the house till they come back. So I shan’t do it! I’ll be my own Cinderella—sometimes in the kitchen and sometimes my ladyship. This may be the only day I’ll ever have that is all mine. So it must be—it’s just got to be—wonderful! and nobody shall spy on it. What shall I do first?”

She dropped into an enormous padded chair and stared thoughtfully at the farthest wall. When one is to have perhaps only one Wonderful Day, decision regarding how to spend every moment of it is important.

Even immersed—as she was—in delicious hopes, she could not remain long unaware that her eyes were fixed upon the countenance of the man who had brought her to Villa Rose. The childish glow, the eager make-believe, which had transformed her into a girl of eighteen again, faded from her eyes. In their place came a wistful gravity, the look of one who has probed and queried and accepted certain harsh facts, yet refused to let them wholly dispel the fancy and optimism which alone can make a life of facts livable. She accosted the portrait.

“You were very good to me, in your way, Hibbert Mearely; but you never allowed me to forget how greatly you had honoured me. It pleased you when I called you ‘sir.’ You didn’t marry me for love of me—you took me as if I were a—a—bunch of wild flowers, to give just the right contrasting touch of rustic simplicity to your fine house. No, not home. It never was a home—only a museum.”

She looked about the large room. It was ornamented with scores of pieces of bric-à-brac, with jars, images, plates, trays, boxes, gathered from all parts of the globe. They were artistically arranged, making pleasant spots of colour, and might have looked as if they belonged there and together—but for the tags. Every article, no matter what its size—even the thimble which, it is safe to say, Mary Stuart never did wear—had a ticket attached to it. Mr. Mearely had spent most of his time, when at Villa Rose, in writing on these tickets, in his small, pointed calligraphy, the fictions of dealers most pleasing to his egotistical and highly artificial mind.

“I have been only another curio with a ticket on—” Rosamond said, accusingly—“the rustic trifle to offset the art of all ages. You even told me that was why you married me and thought I should feel complimented. What higher compliment could a woman desire than to be regarded by her husband purely as an art object? And I agreed—at first. I thought that was finer than just love—the love of farm lads and lasses. But, oh sir, the farm lads and lasses know something more precious than any treasure that has ever come into Villa Rose. Everybody in Roseborough said that the butter-maker’s daughter married you from ambition, but it wasn’t only ambition. It was glamour!”

The wistful, far-away look came into her eyes again, despite the little smile at the corners of her mouth—a smile as if she mocked herself for a past foible, the while her eyes denied that it was past.

“Yes, it was glamour. I had known nothing but humdrum farm poverty—but I believed fairy tales. I thought it would be good to be the wife of the distinguished Hibbert Mearely—to live in Villa Rose among the antiques—among Cleopatra’s knitting needles and Madame Pompadour’s stuffed lizards, with a knob of Charles I’s unwise, not to say wooden, head for the handle of my shoe-horn!”

A short sharp laugh came from her, unmellowed by the spirit which had bubbled in her since His Friggets’ departure. It suggested that, unless she laughed, she might cry.

“There wasn’t a single woman in the district who wouldn’t have jumped at the chance of marrying Hibbert Mearely. So I—yes, sir—I jumped! And you never knew that I wasn’t happy. You never knew because you were not interested to inquire. You of the portrait, there—do you accuse me of ingratitude? Are you saying that you richly dowered a beggar maid who gave you nothing but the beggar maid in return? Let us discuss that. You made me believe it, and I did believe it, until lately. But it isn’t true. I spoiled nothing that you gave me; but you!—I gave you my dreams, all the fairy tales I’d imagined, all my ideals and faith and all that I knew of reverence. But these things weren’t art objects, so you despised them. Well, I suppose you’d say I gave you no gifts at all, because I gave you what you had no taste for! Enough said for my gifts. What do I owe you? Let us talk of your gifts—without glamour—heart to heart.”

Her hands smoothed down the crease in the hem of the satin pannier, and she smiled.

“You dressed me very beautifully and extravagantly; but it was only to delight your eyes—not to make me seem more lovable to you. Love was too common—almost too vulgar—a sentiment to find lodgment in the Mearely breast. I didn’t mind your being fifty-three, sir. That was like being wooed by a prince with powdered hair—say, the Fourth George, ‘the first gentleman in Europe.’ ”

She nodded emphatically over this.

“Yes, sir; indeed his nickname suited you, too, as well as his nature; for you both had wonderful manners but no hearts at all. What other gifts? Many. I remember, sir, and gratefully, that you taught me all I know of fine airs—how to walk, as if I’d never paddled on flat bare soles through the creeks and meadows; how to talk in drawing-room accents without the ill-bred emphasis of excitement. ‘Don’t rattle the milk pails, my love,’ is what you used to say, when my zest for life keyed my tones above the Mearely pitch and tempo. How you enjoyed seeing people writhe under your ridicule! It put you into a pleasant mood again, presently. You taught me what music to admire, and what to consider with pursed lips and lifted eyebrows; what books, modern and classic, should lie on a cultured woman’s table. But I remember, too, that you taught me these things by means of sarcasm that cut to the bone; and my tears you called ‘squeezing out the buttermilk.’ You had a sort of placid cruelty, sir, that always made the butter-maker’s daughter cringe. And only a few days before you died you told me you feared I was ‘irredeemably bourgeoise’—because I had ‘so much emotion.’ And the last gift?”

A tremor of rebellion went through her, and her eyes flashed.

“Villa Rose, and your small, safe fortune! Villa Rose and the Mearely money willed to me in terms that make me a prisoner all my life! So I think, on the whole, I’ve earned my right to this day. I have paid your memory the last jot of respect demanded by Roseborough. For four years I have worn hideous blackish clothes which would have caused you to swoon with horror had the angels allowed you to lean out of heaven to observe me. Now, I am going to be young and dress like a bird of paradise! And—and. …”

In a trice she threw off the mood that had held her there. The grave analyst disappeared. It was a young creature thrilling with the joy of life who leaped up and threw her arms high above her head and laughed.

“Do you know what this ‘irredeemably bourgeoise’ bird of paradise is going to do now? She is going out into the hedges and the river grass and along the highways; and she is going to twirl her finery about, and shake her hair out in the sun, and call—and call—till her true mate comes to her! And he’ll jump down off his horse—or the wind, or a heron’s back—and he’ll catch me up in his arms, because he, also, is irredeemably bourgeois! And he’ll say … he’ll say—‘Good-morning, Rosamond!’ ‘Good-morning, Rosamond!’ ”

The sound of her name this morning gave her exquisite delight, as if it introduced her to a new being; as if, indeed, she had discovered that this new being, herself, contained in profusion all the elements of the romance she coveted.

She sing-songed her matutinal salutation in the theme of the little minuet she had hummed, from time to time, since her pleasant interview with the Orleans mirror, and danced herself out with it to the garden.

The portrait of the late possessor of this rebellious bit of country bric-à-brac was an excellent essay in flesh painting of the realistic school. It had no psychic qualities. Therefore it did not change its tints or take on shadows when Mrs. Hibbert Mearely, renouncing the life of an art-object, wafted out on rustic love-adventure bent. The morning sun, so kind to the fresh countenance of the farmer’s daughter, dealt very sincerely with the gentleman in the picture. Its arrow rays, shot across the wall, lent neither warmth nor softness—only pointedness—to the long, thin head, and the nose, chin, and lips that were all long and thin and curved. Nor did the sunshine kindle the prominent, cold, pale eyes which looked out with condescension upon a world of humanity that mattered little, collectively or individually, to the self-contained self-sufficiency of Mr. Hibbert Mearely, aristocrat and amateur collector of antiques.

One long, thin hand held a small gold-painted box from which James II was supposed to have pecked his after-dinner comfits. With a fine impartiality, the other hand rested on the head of a cane of English oak and silver, said to have been given to William of Orange by Mary, his spouse. Indeed, she may have given it to him for, as all history knows, the intense but plain-faced lady put her Stuart pride in her pocket and wooed her dour Dutch Bill, assiduously and submissively from A to Z, before she finally convinced him—to his belated joy—that they were two souls with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.

It may not be amiss to mention here (in whispers) that the distinguished dilettante—whose taste and knowledge of arts past and present had been that of an amateur and a gentleman without vulgar taint of professionalism—had once (only once and never again) sought the opinion of an expert on his collection. This “brutal person,” as Mr. Mearely had characterized him on the only occasion thereafter, when he permitted his name to be mentioned in his presence, found the Orleans mirror and the Louis chair to be of the periods claimed, but doubted that princesses had ever looked in the one or kings sat in the other. He approved the jade Buddha and certain bronzes, potteries, and two pictures; but as to the rest, he had said, amid detestable chuckles:

“Well, sir, my advice to you is, don’t ever charge the public admission to your private bazaar—Villa Bizarre, eh?—for the law would be down on you for obtaining money under false pretences. And I can promise you that all your ‘royal’ pepper pots and powder puffs and poodles and petits pois—if they sold for what they’re worth—wouldn’t bring in enough to pay your fines.”

“I have not a poodle in my collection,” Mr. Hibbert Mearely retorted with icy dignity, and showed the “brutal person” the door.

Perhaps it was not strange, therefore, that little Rosamond Cort, equipped by Nature from the beginning to be a connoisseur in happiness, should have found out that the crown of wifehood bestowed on her by Hibbert Mearely was something less than royal, and that the joys which had glistered to her through the window panes of Villa Rose were golden only on the surface.