Читать книгу The Coldstone - Dora Amy Elles - Страница 11

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“All right,” said Susan. Then she said, “Good-night, Garry,” and ran past him down the hill.

She heard him swear under his breath, and she heard him follow. She wondered if she could run faster than he could, and a little breath of excitement just touched her and went past. She took hold of herself and stood quite still, and he came up with a rush and caught her round the waist.

“You’re not going like that!”

“I was.”

“You can’t now.” His arm tightened.

“I shall have more luck than I deserve if I can get back without being seen. By the bye, where are you getting back to?”

“Wrane. I’ve got a motor bike. There’s no hurry. Kiss me, Susan.”

Susan heaved a weary sigh.

“My good Garry, I don’t want to be made love to—I want to go to sleep.”

Garry held her closer.

“Susan!”

“I’m dead sleepy.”

“Bored with me, I suppose.”

“Frightfully bored with you.”

“If I thought you meant that——”

“I do mean it.”

“I’d——”

“Well, my dear?”

The movement with which he let go of her was so violent that she nearly lost her balance. She said,

“Really, Garry!”

“Sometimes I think I could kill you,” said Garry.

“Think again!” said Susan. Then she laughed. “You’re being most frightfully silly. Good-night.”

This time she did not make the mistake of running. She walked away briskly and lightly, and after a moment’s pause she heard him go running back up the hill. She came into the warm hush of the village street and looked up at the blank windows again. Not a glimmer, not a sound. Old houses, dreaming old, confused dreams of all the things that had ever happened in them. Old drowsy houses, slipping back into the past out of which they had come.

She lifted the latch of the garden gate, skirted the lavender bush, slipped into the dark living-room, and slid the bolt. She couldn’t see anything at all, it was so dark. “Black as the inside of an oven,” Gran would say.

She felt her way to the stairs and went slowly, slowly up, each step solid under her foot without a creak, and the heavy rail smooth as glass under her hand. Hundreds of years of polish had made it as smooth as that—just the slipping of hands going up and down for three hundred years.

She reached the top, felt for the wall—and heard her name: “Susan——” It made her pringle all over. She hadn’t made a sound.

“Susan——”

Susan pushed open the door of old Mrs. Bowyer’s room and went in.

“What is it, Gran?”

“Where ha’ you been?” The voice came out of the dark very composedly.

Susan didn’t know what to say. Gran was the limit. She laughed, because that was easiest, and Mrs. Bowyer said,

“It’s no laughing matter.”

“Gran dear, I went out for a breath of air. It’s so hot.”

“You needn’t trouble to tell me lies, my dear.”

“Gran!”

There was the splutter of a match. Mrs. Bowyer sprang into view in a white frilled nightcap, leaning over on her elbow to light a candle in an old candlestick that was rather like a shovel with a piece of metal to grip the candle. When the wick had caught, she pulled herself bolt upright against the head of the bed and looked at Susan. Her eiderdown covered with red turkey twill was drawn up to her waist. She wore a flannelette nightdress trimmed with crochet of her own making. Her eyes rested with sarcasm upon Susan’s uncovered neck and the diaphanous black of her dress with its long floating sleeves.

Susan burst out laughing.

“It’s a fair cop!” she said. “But you’re not going to ask me a lot of questions, are you?”

“You’ve been meeting a lad.”

“I didn’t want to, Gran—honest injun. He came and whistled under my window, and I thought of Mrs. Smithers putting out her head to listen, or Miss Agatha, or Miss Arabel, or their awfully proper cook. So I just went out to tell him he must go away. You see, Gran darling, it really was most frightfully compromising for you. I don’t know what Mrs. Smithers would say if she thought young men came serenading you.”

“Come here, Susan!” said Mrs. Bowyer.

Susan came reluctantly. She sat down on the red eiderdown, and Gran’s black eyes bored through and through her.

“Was it Anthony Colstone?”

“Good gracious, no! What a frightfully amusing idea, Gran! I wish it had been!”

“Wishes come home to roost,” said old Susan Bowyer. She picked up a fold of the thin black dress. “What d’you call this stuff, eh?”

“Georgette, Gran.” Her cheeks grew hot. “I dragged it out of my box because it was black, and I should have hated to frighten Mrs. Smithers or the cook by being all white and ghostly.”

“You’ve a good tongue, my girl. Who ha’ you been meeting?”

“I can’t tell you.” Susan put her hand down on the old fingers and stroked them. “You needn’t worry—I can look after myself.”

“I never knew a maid that couldn’t—until ’twas too late. Are you in love with him?”

“Of course I’m not.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“He’s a nuisance,” said Susan, frowning. Then she jumped up. “I do want to go to sleep so badly.”

She bent forward and blew out the candle.

“Good-night, Gran.”

Mrs. Bowyer’s voice followed her on to the landing:

“If I don’t ask no questions, I won’t be told no lies. Is that your meaning?”

Susan’s laughter came back to her, and the sound of the closing door.

Mrs. Bowyer lay down flat on her one pillow and straightened the sheet. She liked to wake tidy in the morning. She thought about Susan, and the core of her heart was warm. She thought about an earlier, softer Susan, pretty, gentle, sweet—Susie, so pretty-spoken—William’s darling. He never spoilt the others, but he spoilt Susie. She could see William now, ever so big and strong with his little maid on his shoulder, ducking his head to come in at the door, and Mr. Philip behind him laughing—“I say, you might let me carry her for a bit!”

She fell into a dream of her own courting. William, too shy to speak, snatching a kiss in the dusk. And then it wasn’t her and William, but Susie with her floating curls crying bitterly at her mother’s knee: “Oh, Mother, I love him true—I love him true!” And again, Philip, on the threshold, looking at them.

Young Susan lay awake in the dark, three pillows heaped behind her and only a sheet for covering. It had been in her mind that she would fall asleep at once. But she lay awake. It was just as if she had come up against a smooth, blank wall. There was a door in it somewhere, but she couldn’t find it, though she kept feeling for it with groping hands.

In the end, the wall melted and let her through, and she saw Garry, with a face like a demon, hurling a great stone down upon her from the top of a high black mountain. The stone broke into three pieces and fell into the sea, and three rushing fountains sprang up from where the fragments had fallen. Only they were not fountains of water, but fountains of fire.