Читать книгу The Man Who Changed His Plea - E. Phillips Oppenheim - Страница 8

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There is a certain evening light much beloved by artists who go in for indoor work and who do not disdain the aid of uncovered windows and the faint deference to conventionality which has a strangely searching effect upon the figures in modern canvasses and in the lines and expressions of human faces. No one knew this better than the girl who had turned away from her unfinished canvas to sit and gaze for long minutes out of the plain, uncurtained window towards the skyline, northwards. The departed sun seemed to have left behind some remnant of his lurid farewell in the distant skies. There was for a few minutes a fine light upon her delicate face, the slightly uplifted, pointed chin, the dark brown eyes from which the fervour of work had departed but upon which the faint joy of recent creation was still lingering. Perhaps, too, it displayed more keenly than any other light those lines of sorrow which gave her head that melancholy droop, which had drawn the girlish softness from her lips and then made sudden atonement in that Madonna-like sweetness which only sorrow can give. There was a figure in the background whom as yet she had not noticed, and he stood there almost without breathing, fascinated by the wonderful picture. Already that light was fading, so soon it would be lost, and with it the most poignant emotion he had ever felt since the blast of tragedy had prematurely turned a high-spirited lad into the tragical figure of a sorrowing man....

A few more seconds and it was passing. The girl, utterly unconscious both of that rapt, almost reverential scrutiny and the fading of the light which had shone down upon her face, rose slowly to her feet. She pulled down the ivory knob of the blind, she touched the electric-light switch, but her fingers, which would have strayed to the bell, seemed to have become suddenly paralyzed. She drew a step back and looked at her uninvited guest.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"It seems strange that you should ever need to ask me that," he replied. "Here I am, Pamela, an unbidden visitor. I feel that I have broken in upon a sacred dream. If I did not know that you scorn the arts of the poseurs, I should have decided that you were sitting there in the light he loved, the grey sad light that broods over Firenze, and trying to charm Andrea del Sarto back to life again to finish your picture for you."

"It is you, then, Martin, really?" she exclaimed, moving a step forward. "At first you frightened me. You were so much like a dream picture, yourself. What am I to say to you?"

"Welcome," he replied as he moved towards her.

"Welcome it shall be then," she assented gently. "I shall stoop down from the sublime into which you have exalted me to the ridiculous. I shall ring for tea."

"Wait a moment," he begged. "This moment is too tense to break. You are not angry with me?"

"I could not be," she answered, shaking her head gravely. "You have kept your word nobly and in my heart I am glad that you have ventured now to break it. There—can I say more?"

His movement forward had something unreal about it, it was so swift, so unhurried, yet so perfectly natural. She rested in his arms for minutes while his lips touched hers lightly, almost reverently, passed to her eyes, her cheeks, once more to her lips. She drew away with a little smile which dispersed, if only he could have known it, lines which had lingered round her lips for many weary days and nights.

"Now," she declared, motioning him to a chair, "I shall really ring for tea."

She avoided the bell and had disappeared through the door which he held open without glancing upwards. She had been too late, however, wholly to protect herself. He had noticed the rush of tears into her eyes. She closed the door softly behind her and he stood for a moment like a man who had risked his life and soul in a great battle and had won. His little laugh had almost a note of classical music in it, as he walked with the air of a conqueror towards the chair in which he had been told to seat himself.

The great commonplace world moved on. Things happened that might have happened anywhere. A neatly dressed maid brought in tea, there were hot muffins upon a heated plate, and she herself sat behind the Georgian silver teapot. She did not ask him whether he took sugar or milk in his tea; they both devoured muffins and she wiped her fingers upon his cambric handkerchief. They talked very little, there were a few casual references to what had become of the geniuses of a few years ago in painting and sculpture, and they agreed on the greatness of Epstein. Afterwards they sat upon a sofa, not very far apart, whilst the maid cleared away the tea and lit one of the wall-lamps. After her departure, there was a silence which almost cost him a heartache to break.

"You were difficult to find," he complained.

"I had to be," she answered. "Being found out would have been so painful. I hoped that you would keep your half-promise and I hoped even more energetically that you would break it."

He smiled.

"I had to break it," he confessed. "I have been in many countries, Pamela, but I have never forgotten."

Her fingers, which had been moving through the complicated meshes of some old-fashioned tatting, came to rest. She looked at him enquiringly.

"Since I settled down here," he said, "I have become a man of two purposes, one leaning upon the other. One is already fulfilled, you know what it is—I am here. Half the pain has passed out of my life."

She asked him a question, but her voice sounded like the far-off trembling of a voice from the skies.

"And the other?"

"It is," he confided, "to set you free if by any human means it can be accomplished."

She sat very still for several moments. Then her fingers resumed their restless motions. She was at work upon her tatting. She had not looked towards him once—but he felt the barrier. The man who had faced many ugly perils without flinching was silent now in fear, he was afraid of saying the wrong thing. He was afraid of seeing his tower of hopes collapse, afraid of the melancholy turn of her head, afraid of those few unchanging words. When she spoke it was like sunlight suddenly streaming into a dark place.

"You may try, Martin," she sighed. "I feel that it is quite hopeless; I have given up the idea of living any more like other women, of being set free from this haunting load of misery. Once I forbade you to move. I ordered you to go away and forget. You obeyed as I meant you to obey, you went away. You have come back and up to a certain great point I am glad. I do not know whether this will be any reward to you, Martin—if I were a vain person I might say to myself, 'It is perhaps a further persecution,' yet I will tell you this. I am just an ordinary woman and I would be happy to live an ordinary woman's life—with you."

She lifted her eyes and looked at him. She was very nearly sorry. It was a man's face, splendid in many ways. The set lines of purpose were there, the deep lines of self-control, but for the moment he was happy with a happiness which shone out of him, a deep glow of something more than content, the delirious joy of a man listening to music which he had been denied all his life or hearing suddenly the beautiful words of a reprieve from a sentence of death. For a moment she was afraid. She leaned across, laid her hands upon his shoulders, and kissed him gently upon the lips.

"For the moment, Martin," she whispered, "this must help you as it will help me—to meet life. If you think it is worth it, I shall not do what I tried to do before, stop your hand. I believe in the fate which should be his coming to every man. I trust your judgment as I would trust nobody else's in life. If ever the means should come, I will ask no questions. Martin," she added with a little break in her voice, which had seemed all the time such sweet and easy music, "you look so much happier. I am afraid—you look much happier and nothing may come to us after all. I cannot bear to think of you then."

"I am like the rest of the world," he answered confidently, taking her hand. "One chance of Paradise is enough for me."