Читать книгу Rubies - Elizabeth Louisa Moresby - Страница 5

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IREMEMBER how one or two of the women servants stared at me, as if with pity, when we reached the great house, pretending to take no notice, but glancing at me out of the tails of their eyes as they passed quickly. A tall footman, bowing, flung open the library door and closed it upon us, Kyriel advancing to the big writing-table and sitting down in a heavy carved chair.

He had the whip hand of me in that room, because it was so imposing, like a weight upon a man’s spirits—as solemn as a church, with a high roof full of shadows, walled with rows of books that gave out a musty smell from leather bindings, which for ever after brought to mind that alarming day. Here and there on pedestals gleamed white busts of angry-faced gentlemen, whom I guessed as Roman generals, with whose abominable tongue I had been daily badgered at school—heaven knows they could never have found time to conquer the world if they had had to master it themselves!

All these things gave me a feeling of desperate discomfort, and, but for my father’s message, I thought myself a fool for not having made off in the garden. I had a kind of feeling I had got into an enchanted den, all was so big, silent, and gloomy, and when Kyriel opened a door, covered with books and therefore invisible, it looked as if it might lead to some secret laboratory for turning copper into gold and old men into young.

There was nothing worse, however, than a basin and washing materials, and he ordered me to walk in and clean up—which I did, dowsing my head also, and was much refreshed and clearer in consequence. Then I took the chair he pointed to; but still the gloom of the great room and his dark glance oppressed me.

“Young man,” said he, propping his chin on his hand and piercing me with his look, “what is your name and age?”

“Roger Pendarvis. I’m twenty-eight.”

He seemed to meditate on this a minute, and then said, “Give it to me,” stretching out his hand, in which I put my father’s message.

He read it twice with care and without a change of face; then, striking a match, burnt it, and taking the ash in his hand carried it to the window, where a light breeze took it. Returning he made no allusion to his action, but asked coolly: “And do you bear malice for the pain I put you to, Pendarvis? Or the shame, with women looking on?”

“No,” I said slowly, trying to clear my wits, “I suppose it was all part of the game.”

“Don’t trouble your head about the game. Simply act as your father bids. What did he say about me?”

“He said that I might have the rough side of your tongue and was to stand it. What my father says I stand by in more than this.”

“You are very right—yet you flew at me like a wild cat. That may be for the best, however. Holmes is not likely to think we use you. Your father is not an ordinary man—possibly you take after him.”

I flushed up for pleasure at this. I could not take to the man in my heart, yet, he being what he was, it pleased me after all that had come and gone.

“I shall send a message to your father by word of mouth,” he continued. “Writing is a foolish risk if we can trust our messenger, and of course neither Holmes nor anyone else will suspect you now of running any errand of mine. Your father had written on that paper, ‘Trust bearer.’ Well, I will! That is, so far and no further. I tested you and you did not fail.”

I don’t know that I had any special cause to be thankful, but I was honestly glad I had not failed my father, acting, as I did, more from impulse than reflection. In some ways it is better when a man can trust his impulses rather than his reason, for they will carry him through in a flash when he has no time to think. I believe Kyriel saw what was in my mind. Anyway, he spoke more kindly, though still with the same dropped glance, as if what he meant was far behind all he said. He spoke very low.

“There must be no coming up near the house again, but I’ll show you a way where you can come any evening about half-past six, if your father sends you—nobody about then.”

I nodded, beginning to be a little carried away by the mystery of the thing and amazement at my father and Kyriel being mixed up in any transaction; but suddenly the damping thought struck me—what if the girl with the grey shoes should see me lurking about—the thief at his thieveries again? A whipped hound she must think me already, and rightly served. The picture she must have of me chilled me. And besides, with all her father’s graces (and I must own he looked and talked like the highest of the high), there was something about him that said in a whisper, “Beware!” every time he looked at me.

“Tell this to your father,” he continued in the same low voice. “And now attend carefully: ‘I understand I was seen with Quesnel and it shall not happen again. What you know has been put in safety in the hands you know of, and the rest will be here before long, though I don’t yet know how.’ Repeat this in a whisper, that I may know you have it.”

I listened carefully, connecting it entirely with Quesnel and the smugglers, then whispered it twice, and he was satisfied.

“Now go, and I shall dismiss you angrily, but I say on parting, you behaved well. Tell your father I said so.”

He was about to ring the bell, but I hung back, and he saw it.

“What is it? Anything I can do for you in reason I will.”

“Sir,” I said, with a tingle all through me and yet driven to speak; “there is one thing. I shall be obliged if you will let Miss Ruthven know I am no thief. She can scarcely think I was anything better, and I don’t like it.”

I forget if I have said their family name was Ruthven. The Honourable Marcia Ruthven. I knew that much. I might have spoken of a stranger, he looked so perplexed. Ever after that I knew how little account he made of her.

“Miss Ruthven? Oh, I see! Well, but what does it matter what women think?” Then suddenly, as he saw my look, “Certainly, if you think it matters a straw one way or another. Yes, you can rely on me—she shall know.”

I believed him and was satisfied, but he never kept his word, as I knew later.

He then rang, and in a flash the door was open and the footman at it.

“Show this young man out of the gardens. I have examined him, and he refuses the name of the gang that infests my woods. But I warn you, young man, that though I don’t now believe you are actually guilty, you have laid yourself open to suspicion and had better change your company in future. Tell your father I warned you as a magistrate.”

He looked so pale and angry, standing there like a hawk about to pounce, that under the black, darting fire of his look I could not believe he had ever softened. I am not sure now that he did. The man was a finished actor.

I pulled myself up, bowed stiffly, and walked out before the footman, looking as sullen as I could, chock-full of perplexed feelings, and perhaps the clearest a kind of assurance that the man was no gentleman at bottom. Yet, a peer of the realm—what could he be but a gentleman?

He called after us: “And, Symons, if he shows himself in the park again Holmes or the keepers are to telephone up to me at once, remember.”

The door slammed between us, and I walked, very straight, through the echoing, marble-paved hall. I was in a horrid tingle of shame, for he spoke loud and I heard a voice like little silver bells on the first landing where the stairs turned, and the thought got me that she was looking down and saying to the lady with her, “There goes the thief!” And suddenly there was a silence above, as if some one were watching.

When I got outside I could almost swear I never looked back at the house—why should I? Then how did I know that at one of the windows upstairs was a light figure, as if some one dressed all in white were watching some one below? But I did know it—with the back of my neck, I suppose. And I went my way, sore and most bitterly ashamed.

When I was out of sight I ran. The trees were magnificent: lovely beeches dipping their boughs in grass, as though bathing them in the shining green that flowed like water all about them. And many a pheasant rose with chattering scream as I ran, indignant to be disturbed among his ladies. I was burning to get to my father and unload all that had happened and hear his opinion, and pelted along through the meadows and up to the house, to find my mother sitting calmly in the window of her sitting room with the news that my father had been called off to Gwent half an hour after I saw him, and he would be away a couple of days.

“But, Roger—your face! What in the world has happened? You have a cut like the whip of a branch. And your hand!”

I caught at that notion of hers and left it at the whip of a branch, which, indeed, I had got smartly enough in the thickets before then. I sat down by her. She had been spinning, an old fashion become new, and did it most beautifully. All our new damask table linen, or ‘napery,’ as she called it, was of her weaving, and gleamed like satin. She was as placid as a picture, sitting there in her spinning chair with a big bowl of dead rose-leaves and spices beside her, as delicious as a lady’s perfumed presence, and the fresh roses looking in at the window, curled and dewy like pink sea-shells, and she began her spinning again and it continued like the humming of a giant bee. The homeliness and sweetness of it all crept into my heart after the gloomy magnificence of Hatton Park, and seemed as wholesome as a spring dawn, so that I leaned against the window revelling in it.

“But, Mother,” said I, “who called him? He goes so seldom. Did he take the car?”

“Yes. He was in a hurry. I think he said something about selling the wool clip. You know he thinks it’s a fine one.”

“Maybe,” I said absently, and twice I repeated Kyriel’s message to myself to be sure I had it. Then aloud, “I was in Hatton Park a bit of the way, and old Holmes roared at me for trespassing. An ill-conditioned old brute!”

“Don’t let Kyriel catch you, Roger!” she said, looking up in quick alarm. “Keep out of Hatton Park. He’s smooth-spoken and polite enough, but I wouldn’t have you or anyone I cared for in his clutch for diamonds! You didn’t see him?”

“I saw him, but what harm? What have you against him? He reads the lessons in church and goes regularly—bad men don’t do that.”

“Just what a bad man would do to hide his badness!” said she. “And I have always the fancy that if we could see into his high oak pew he would be grinning and mocking and showing his teeth without a sound.”

“More likely asleep!” I said, laughing, but still mighty uncomfortable, for I had a great opinion of my mother’s insight, and the very thought of the man grinning silently to himself while the others were praying gave me the creeps.

“I wish I hadn’t dreamt of him last night,” she said, with wistful eyes. “That clatter of the loose shoe—and now you’ve seen him to-day and your father’s off and away—I wish I could forget it.”

“But do you know anything against him, Mother? All this is as empty as the white sea fog that creeps in like a pack of fleeces and the sun behind it all the time. Is there anything real?”

“Why, yes and no!” she said, still spinning softly in a smooth whirl of sound. “He’s all on his best behaviour down here in England, but my people didn’t think quite the same of him in his big castle in Skye, up by Loch Ruinart.”

I pressed her to tell me. Everything about the man interested me now. It was as if he had burst his way into my life, and the least word about him filled me with curiosity. I had never cared the snap of a finger before.

“What is Loch Ruinart like, Mother?”

“A great black sheet of water with splintered rocks about it and Castle Ruinart perched high upon them, with huge black towers to match—or they always looked black to me against the sky. And all the windows stare down into the loch. Very picturesque, they call it, but I never liked it. The Black Douglas built it in the year thirteen hundred and something.”

The whirring wheel grew slower, the noise subsided, she slackened foot and hand and was dreaming herself back to the island in the Atlantic waves. I touched her arm.

“But what were the Kyriels like, Mother?”

“In my young day it was old Lord and Lady Kyriel and the two sons, Malcolm Ruthven, the elder, and this man, James. James was a young man and had been an officer in Burma under his uncle, General Ruthven. He was home on leave then. And one day, when the two were out fishing in the river that runs into the loch, a most awful storm came on suddenly, as it does among the mountains, and Malcolm was drowned. James was in great danger, and had to spend the night on a little island in the loch before they could rescue him. He went back to Burma after that, but when his father died he became Lord Kyriel and came back for good.”

I digested this in silence. Then, “Who did he marry?”

“A beautiful Russian woman, daughter of some prince or other, before the country was turned topsy-turvy. She died when the daughter was born. I never saw her.”

“Have you seen the daughter?”

“Once, riding. But you know she’s seldom here and not long out of school. Dark and pale, like a foreigner.”

This did not sound bewitching, but I could offer no objection. The only image on my mind was a pair of small, high-heeled grey shoes.

“Castle Ruinart is full of ghosts,” she said abruptly. “When James Ruthven was born there was a thundering roll of wheels to the great hall door, and nothing there when they looked out in bright moonlight. That always happens when a Ruthven of Ruinart dies, they say, but to have it happen when a child is born—could you wish for worse luck?”

“Mother, Mother!” I said, trying to laugh. “With a telephone at your elbow and wireless that gives you every trombone in Plymouth, I declare it sounds like a lunatic asylum to hear you talk of ghosts and dreams. I don’t think you really believe a word of it!”

But I knew she did, and it was not pleasant talk for a man who had just got mixed up with Kyriel and knew his father was still worse mixed up. I laughed my best, but she would not smile. Her eyes were wide with fear.

“Why is it that Kyriel never has house-parties and great folk to stay with him, either here or at Castle Ruinart? Men of family and riches don’t live alone for choice, do they? And I know there was ugly talk about his cheating at cards, though they couldn’t prove it. But why do I talk of him, when to dream of him is bad enough!”

She rose as she spoke and pushed the wheel from her and went out to see about the tea, leaving me stuck there. And I had never felt so uncomfortable in my life before. It was truly as if the sea fog were creeping up and up and blotting out the earth and sky, leaving nothing to breathe or see but its own white, cold billows.

But tea came steaming in and the brown rolls and new bread, and fresh honey from the hives by the honeysuckle hedge, and thick cream from Damson Plum’s milk (as thick as cream can be), and brown eggs and what not—a royal spread—and my fears did not affect my appetite, be sure, for I loved my home and the good victuals. Yet at the back of it all lay a horrid doubt of Kyriel, and all he had said and done moved monstrous behind the haze of it, like a thing seen in a nightmare dream that strangles you to silence while it eludes you.

I asked one question more.

“Did father know Lord Kyriel in Burma?”

“How should I know? He never talks about Burma, as you know. And why should he have met Kyriel there? It’s a big place. And if he had, they would be either friends or enemies now, instead of nothing to each other. That stands to reason. Now, I won’t talk of the man any more!”

What she said was true, as far as it went. But my father and Kyriel were very much more than nothing to each other, if she had known it!