Читать книгу The Messenger - Elizabeth Robins - Страница 5

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That hall at Kirklamont was for Gavan Napier, as he looked back, forever associated with the most decisive hours in his own fate, as well as that of his closest friend. It meant to him, perhaps more than anything, the abiding memory of that morning after the arrival of Miss Greta's "little friend."

He stood in front of the fireplace, waiting for Andrews to bring in the post. At that particular moment there wasn't anybody else in the hall. There probably soon would be somebody, Napier reflected, with a mingled sense of amusement and uneasiness. For this was about the time Miss von Schwarzenberg was astute enough to choose for her little tête-à-têtes with the private secretary—always elaborately accidental. Sir William would be out riding; Lady McIntyre dawdling over her late breakfast, and Madge in the schoolroom, as Napier could all too plainly hear, practising with that new ruthlessness introduced by Miss von Schwarzenberg.

Miss Greta was never so at a loss as to enter without her little excuse, "I think I must have left my knitting." Or, sans phrase, she would go to the writing table and consult Whitaker or Bradshaw. There was always a semblance of reasonableness in such preoccupation. For Lady McIntyre had fallen into the habit of going to Miss Greta for every sort of service, from somebody's official style and title to looking out trains.

It wasn't the first, by several score of times, that young ladies had shown themselves fertile in pretexts for a little conversation with Mr. Napier. He himself was not in the least averse, as a rule, to a little harmless flirtation—even with a governess. But suppose this particular young woman should, with the fatal German sentimentality, be really falling in love. One day, as he was sorting the letters, she had stood at the table beside him, durchblattering Bradshaw with piteous aimlessness. He suggested: "Shall I look it up for you. … Where do you want to go?"

With a heave of her high bosom she had answered that sometimes she thought the place she'd best go to was the bottom of Kirklamont Loch. Only the timely entrance of a servant with a telegram had, Napier felt, saved him from a most inconvenient scene. He reflected anxiously upon the high rate of suicide in Germany. It would be very awful if for sake of his beaux yeux Miss Greta should find a watery grave.

He looked at the clock. If the post was late, so was Miss von Schwarzenberg.

Suddenly it came over Napier that she timed these entrances of hers, not according to the clock, and not according to his own movements. He was sometimes twenty minutes waiting there alone for the post to come in.

"God bless my soul!" he ejaculated mentally. Wasn't she invariably here about two minutes before Andrews brought in the bag?

Before Napier had time to readjust himself to this new view of the lady's apparent interest in him—there she was!—in her very feminine, rather Londony, clothes; her intensely white, plump neck rising out of a lace blouse; her yellow hair bound in smooth braids round her head; a light dust of pearl powder over her pink cheeks.

She came straight over to the fireplace, "Mr. Napier, I should like to speak to you a moment."

Napier lowered his newspaper, "Yes, Miss von Schwarzenberg."

"I don't know if you gathered yesterday … the Pforzheims are old friends of my family."

"Oh?" said Napier.

"Their father and my father were brothers-in-arms," she went on in that heroine-of-melodrama style she sometimes affected. "They have been close friends since their university days."

"Really." Napier's calm seemed to detract from her own.

The color surged into her round cheeks, but she held her head dauntlessly on its short white neck as she confessed, "Carl and Ernst have known me since I was a child."

Napier laid down the newspaper. "Indeed!"

"I suppose," she challenged him, "you think, that being the case, it was very odd we should meet like strangers?"

"Oh, I dare say you had your reasons," he said, as Andrews came in. Napier walked the length of the hall to where the man had put down the bag.

Miss von Schwarzenberg did not move till Andrews had gone out. She did not move even then, until Napier found his keys, selected his duplicate, fitted it to the lock, and at last threw back the leather flap and drew out the letters.

That instant, as though she had only just resumed control of her self-possession, Miss von Schwarzenberg, handkerchief in hand, moved softly down the hall and stood at Napier's side. It came over him that this wasn't the first time that she had executed this simple manœuver, if manœuver it was. He knew now that he had been imputing to his own attractiveness her invariable drawing near while he transacted his business with the letter-bag. The little pause before Andrews left the room he had set down as a concession to the proprieties. More than ever—so he had read her—if she laid traps for little talks with the private secretary, was it important that the servants should not be set gossiping. But now, with an inward jolt, he asked, had he been making an ass of himself? His hand, already inserted a second time to draw out more letters, came forth empty. He noticed that her eyes were on it as he turned the palm of his hand toward him, fingers doubled and nails in a line. He studied them.

She studied the letters already lying in an unsorted heap. They seemed not to interest. She pressed her handkerchief to her lips and raised her eyes. "I would have told you before—only—only,"—her beautiful mouth quivered and her eyes fell again—"you … are difficult to talk to."

"Am I?" said Napier, in a tone of polite surprise, still studying his nails.

"For me. Yes. … You make it difficult. Why do you, Mr. Napier?"

That man must have a heart of stone to resist an appeal so voiced. "Perhaps you imagine it," he said, taking refuge in pulling out the rest of the letters and sorting them into piles.

She stood as though too discouraged to continue, too listless to go away. But when, in the midst of his sorting, Napier glanced at her, he discovered no listlessness in the eyes that kept tally of the letters he was dealing out. What earthly good does it do her to read the outsides of our envelopes? he wondered.

"I've been unhappy," she went on, "most unhappy under my enforced silence. I've wanted so much that you anyhow should know the truth."

"I don't know why I especially—" he began.

"No, no, no!" she said a little wildly, in spite of the hushed softness of her tone, "you don't know. And it's a good thing—a good thing you don't. But I'm too unhappy under the innocent little deceit that's been forced on me. You see, we had quarreled, the Pforzheims and I. That is, they quarreled. They each wanted to marry me. Oh, it was dreadful! They wanted to fight a duel. … "

"About … ?" Napier laid a long official envelope on the top of Sir William's pile.

"About me," she said with lowered eyes. "That was why I went to America. I couldn't bear it. I said: 'We are strangers from this day!' And so,"—she pressed her handkerchief again to her lips—"and so we met like that. I told them I wouldn't stay here an hour if they swerved a hair's breath from the role of strangers. Now,"—her voice altered suddenly as though out of weariness after immense effort—"now you know."

Napier took out the last letters. "I expect," he said kindly, "it's been hard enough for you—at times."

"The strain is frightful." She swallowed and began again. "I—Maybe you've noticed. … They will write to me from time to time."

She waited. Napier's face as blank as the new sheet of blotting paper in front of the great presentation ink-stand.

"Well, is it my fault?" she demanded. "I've tried to make them see what an equivocal position it puts me in, how unfair—" her face yearned for sympathy.

Napier went on with his sorting.

"It's too nerve-racking," she said with increasing agitation. "Each one thinks the other has got over that old madness. But the letters they write me … ! Frantic!" She came closer still. She laid her hand on Napier's sleeve. "Do you know, sometimes I'm afraid. … " She drew back, as a step sounded on the gravel.

"The Pforzheims!" Napier said to himself.

But a very different apparition stood there. The girl in the Mercury cap. Not so blithe as the day before—eager still, but wistful.

"Why, my dear Nan!" Miss von Schwarzenberg said again, precisely as she had before. "I told you I would come for you!"

"Yes, in the afternoon, you said. But I couldn't wait. Don't look like that, dearest." She had lowered her voice as Miss von Schwarzenberg joined her in the lobby. "I began to be afraid I'd only dreamed that you were so near again."

Miss von Schwarzenberg answered in a voice lower still. Napier gathered up Sir William's letters and his own. As he went with them into the library, Miss von Schwarzenberg turned hastily. "I'll just go and see if Lady McIntyre can spare me two minutes. I'll meet you out there, by the clump of firs."

"All right," the girl said quietly, and turned away.

Miss von Schwarzenberg knew as well as Napier did that Lady McIntyre was in the breakfast-room looking at the illustrated papers over her second cup of coffee. But Miss von Schwarzenberg hurried upstairs.

Ordinarily Napier would have sat reading and answering his own letters till what time Sir William should come in from his ride. To-day he stood near the library fire—still seeing that face under the cap. What had the von Schwarzenberg been saying to her? It wasn't at all the face she had brought here the evening before. And if Julian Grant had been struck by the happy faith in its yesterday aspect, Napier found something rather touching in the hurt steadfastness it showed to-day.

"It isn't the same face," Napier repeated to himself; and before he had at all made up his mind what he should do next, he was going through the hall.

There she was pulling off her gloves, and holding her hands over the fire.

"It is cold," Napier said, and he seized the poker. The flames sprang up and danced on the girl's face.

"Oh, my! How nice! You are the private secretary, aren't you?"

"What makes you think that?" he asked, a little on his dignity.

"Well, the other one was 'Julian,' wasn't he?"

Napier didn't much like this familiarity with a Christian name on the part of a stranger. "Yes. I'm Gavan Napier."

"I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Napier." She held out her hand.

He said nothing, only glanced round the hall in an undecided fashion after releasing her hand, and then put his letters down on the nearest chair. "I hope I'm not in your way," the girl said. "You see, I don't know at all what private secretaries do. You are the first one I ever met."

He laughed, and said they were a good deal like other people so far as he'd observed, and didn't do anything in particular.

Miss Ellis declared she knew better than that. "That's where you sit, isn't it?"—she nodded at the big table—"writing your state documents. And I suppose everybody goes by on tiptoe. And nobody dares speak to you … and of course I oughtn't to be here!"

"Oh, yes, you ought."

"No. I ought by rights to be out by the firs. But I was cold. I didn't see why I should wait out by the firs when there was a fire here doing nobody any good."

She misinterpreted his steady look. "Oh, my! you think I ought to have gone out and waited by the … !"

"Nothing of the sort! I shouldn't have thought half so well of you if you'd gone out and waited by the firs."

But the wing-capped head with its overweight of hair turned anxiously toward the staircase by which Greta had vanished. "I've often heard Greta say, 'The great thing is to learn instinctive obedience.'"

"But why on earth should you obey Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

"Because Greta's the cleverest as well as the most splendid person in the world." She glowed with it. "And knows more in a minute than I do in a year."

Napier laughed at that reason, so Miss Ellis produced another. "And then, you see, ever since I was quite young I always have obeyed Greta—when I was good!"—she threw in quickly with a self-convicting laugh.

"How long have you known Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

"Oh, for ages. Ever since I was seventeen."

"That must have been a long time ago!"

"Well, it is. It's going on six years. Will it hold me too?" She looked doubtfully at the brass bar of the fender.

"Oh, yes," he reassured her, "it would hold ten of you." His smiling glance took note of the small-boned hands that clutched the brass. From the delicate ankles and the impossible feet, up to the slim neck, there wasn't enough substance in her to furnish forth a good British specimen of half her age. Yet when she stood up she was not only tall, she was almost commanding. That was partly carriage, he decided, and partly—well, what was it?

"The trouble about Greta," she went on, "is that she's a person everybody is always wanting. Then, added to that, she is the best daughter in the world. Every year she went home for several months. But she always got back in time!" The girl smiled an odd smile, not as though intended for Napier at all. "She always got back (we've often talked about it) just as I was about to commit some awful mistake."

Napier was morally certain he could have got her—if only for the honor and glory of Greta—to enumerate one or two of these timely rescues, if, by a stroke of rank bad luck, Julian hadn't appeared at that moment.

"Oh, my!" said Miss Ellis under her breath—which, was silly as well as slightly irritating.

With a casual "Hello!" Julian came marching over to the fireplace.

"You're being very energetic all of a sudden," Napier said, with his smiling malice. "This early worm, Miss Ellis, is Mr. Grant."

"I'm very glad to meet you." She stood up and held out her hand.

"Hasn't it been a splendid morning?" she asked. And did they have many days so un-Scotch-misty as this?

They went on uttering banalities about the morning and the countryside, and smiling into each other's faces.

Napier sat on the fender-stool, chuckling to himself. Fancy old Julian! Do him all the good in the world to have a girl looking at him like that.

She did so want to see as much as ever she could of "this lovely coast." Perhaps Mr. Grant would advise her what to begin with?

Oh, Julian could advise. There was nothing he was readier at.

"Stop! stop!" the girl interrupted, "I mustn't be made greedier than I am; for I've only got two or three days."

"Two or three—! Where are you going?" Julian demanded.

"Greta thinks London."

"London?"

"Well, there is the National Gallery, and the old city churches," Nan said, with marked absence of enthusiasm. "Oh, I don't doubt really but I shall find it perfectly fascinating. … And then from time to time Greta will run up for a day or two."

"It isn't my business," Julian said, in that tone people use when they have definitely adopted the business in question, "but it sounds to me the very poorest—" He left it hanging there.

"Surely," Napier observed quietly, "when you came, you meant to stay longer?"

"Oh—yes! when I first came. But, you see, I didn't understand. I thought being a governess here was like being a governess at home." And quickly, as though to obliterate any suggestion of odious comparison, "Perhaps it's because we have so few governesses in California."

"Well, does that make it different for them?"

"Well, we give them time to themselves. I—I don't criticize your way," she threw in, a little flustered to find where she was going—"only we—Oh, here is Lady McIntyre!" she ended with much relief.

The manners of the lady of Kirklamont were in marked contrast to her pinched and chilled appearance. Her fairness was the kind that goes with a slightly reddened nose and a faint, bluish tinge about the mouth at this hour of the morning. She was most genial to Miss Ellis, and the girl was, in her turn, won to ease and confidence.

"No, thank you, I won't sit down. I didn't mean to stay but half a minute … though I'm afraid Greta may think, even now, that I still don't understand that her time belongs to you."

"But we are not such slave drivers!" The little lady shook her diamond ear-rings. Greta could certainly take any day off to be with her friend, and every day, she of course had several hours at her disposal, whenever she wished.

Miss von Schwarzenberg, in the act of descending the stairs, had paused the fraction of a second. "Oh, there you are!" she threw over the banisters toward Lady McIntyre.

It occurred to Napier that the girl standing between him and Julian was a little uneasy at being found so far this side of the firs.

"Yes," Lady McIntyre said, "I was just arranging with Miss Ellis that she must stay to luncheon."

"And I was just going to ask if you'd consent to our plan," Greta said as she joined the group. "We thought of lunching at the inn."

At sight of the smile on Miss von Schwarzenberg's face—still more at her "plan,"—the slight cloud of dubiety vanished from Miss Ellis. She stood in full sunshine.

"But why not lunch here?" urged Lady McIntyre.

"We want to talk America, don't we? And the old days?"

"Yes, yes," said her enraptured friend.

"Well, then,"—Lady McIntyre fell in with what she took to be the previous arrangement—"you'll bring her back to tea."

They all saw Miss Ellis to the door, and Miss Greta saw her to the first gate.

"I say," remarked Julian, when the lady of the house had also disappeared, "why shouldn't we take those two girls around?"

"Sir William. He'd never stand it."

"No, no! But after. He plays before tea, doesn't he?"

"Yes, before."

"Very well, then. We'll take 'em round after. I'll come with the motor." He caught up his cap. "You arrange it with the Paragon." Julian bolted off toward the footpath leading to the inn.

Did she realize that, the woman coming back with the reflective air? Apparently not. She lifted her bent head, and when she saw Napier was waiting there at the door alone she smiled. She was certainly very charming when she smiled.

"I don't want to disparage the golfing powers of either Bobby or Madge," Napier said, "but what do you say to a round with me after tea?"

She looked at him oddly. It struck Napier that she didn't apply her formula, "You are very kind." He was conscious of a slight embarrassment under her scrutiny.

"You say that because Lady McIntyre asked you to."

"Not only for that reason."

Whereat Miss Greta lowered her eyes. "What should I do about Nan Ellis?" she said.

"Oh, we've thought of that. Mr. Grant will look after her while you and I—" he smiled. "Shall we say half-past five?"

The china-blue eyes turned to the open door and to the gaitered rotundity approaching—Sir William coming up from the stable. "Half-past five, then," she murmured. On her way to the schoolroom she caught up a book with the air of one who finds at last a boon long sought.

Sir William was inclined to be facetious over "catching you and the Incomparable One. I've always known the day would come. … "

Instead of tackling the letters, he went on with his absurd chaffing.

"The fact is," Napier said, when he had shut the library door, "I've been wanting to say a word about this lady."

"What's up?" Sir William was still smiling roguishly.

"I'm thinking of the matter of the translation. Surely an official document of that description ought not to be in chance hands."

What did he mean? It hadn't been in chance hands.

It had been in the hands of Miss von Schwarzenberg. And Miss von Schwarzenberg, Napier reminded his chief, was an outsider. Or, if not that (hastily he readjusted himself to the McIntyre view) she was at all events outside the official circle.

"My dear boy, of course she is. She is a woman. And beyond knowing an English equivalent for a German word, she understands as much about the bearing of a paper on International Commerce—as much as that Aberdeen terrier."

"I think, sir, you underrate Miss von Schwarzenberg's intelligence."

"Or maybe you," said Sir William, wrinkling his little nose with silent laughter, "maybe you underrate the Aberdeen's."

Miss Greta did not produce her friend at tea time. "Nan doesn't care about tea. Americans don't, you know. She will meet us at the links."

And it so fell out.

If Miss Ellis didn't "take to" tea, she "took to" golf "as if she'd been a born Scot," according to Julian. Why on earth Miss von Schwarzenberg should want to go on trying when the power to hit a ball was so obviously not among her many gifts, passed Napier's understanding. It struck him as rather nice of her that she wasn't the least disturbed by Nan's swinging efficiency. Was that because it got rid of her?—put wide stretches of sand and gorse between the ill-matched couples? Napier would hardly have stood it so amiably but for Julian's disarming frankness as to the satisfaction he, at all events, was deriving from the arrangement.

And Nan—planted high above a bunker, hair rather wild, face sparkling with zest for the game, or for the company, or for that she was Nan Ellis.

"Look at her!" Julian said, on a note so new in Napier's experience of him that he stood silent a moment, looking, not at the girl, but at his friend.

Napier was still in the phase of being immensely diverted at the spiffing progress of old Julian's flirtation—so much better for him than addling his brains over that scheme of internationalism that was going to save the world.

"Look at her," Julian repeated, "did you ever see anybody so, so … God's-in-His-Heaven,-all's-well-with-the-world!"

"Look here, Julian, I hope you're not. … "

"Well, do you know, I'm afraid I am," said his friend. "I don't really quite understand what it is that's happened. But something has."

With that childlike directness that was part of Julian's charm for the more complex mind, he turned to Napier just before the von Schwarzenberg came within earshot. "There's a fly in the precious ointment," he said. "This rot about her going to London. Look here, Napier, the von Schwarzenberg woman would do anything for you. Make her leave the girl in peace here."

"Impossible!" Napier said with decision. "How could I ask such a thing, you unpractical being!"

"That woman" was too near now for more, and Julian sheered off toward the figure on the sky-line.

On the way back to the hall, Miss von Schwarzenberg talked more intimately than ever she had to Napier. She told him about her home in Hanover. About her childhood. Her "years of exile." So she spoke of America. She had a story of how an odious Chicago millionaire had wanted to marry her.

"But why do I tell you all this?"

Napier too had been wondering.

"It must be," she went on, "because you are a little less 'remote' this evening, and I am suffering from Heimweh."

In a sturdy, practical tone Napier advised her not to give way to that! In order to divert her thoughts, "What do you think of … "—he nodded to the two on in front.

"Of what?" said Miss von Schwarzenberg, dreamily.

"Well, aren't you chaperoning your friend?"

"Chaperoning!" She came to, suddenly. Plainly she hadn't liked the word. "We are too near of an age for chaperoning."

"It's not a question of age, is it?"—Napier extricated himself quickly. "But perhaps it's only that I don't understand. I never can be quite sure about Americans."

"Exactly my feeling," Miss von Schwarzenberg struck in. "They are so old … and yet so passionate. Oh, there's more than three thousand miles of salt water between us of the Old World and the people of the New. They're a new kind of humanity."

They found Nan and Julian alone in the hall. As Napier stopped to unshoulder the golf bag, Miss von Schwarzenberg lingered too.

"What shall you do in that miserable inn all by yourself the whole evening?" they heard Julian saying.

At the sound of the golf clubs clattering into the corner, Nan called out, "Here they are!" She came running to the lobby. "I wanted to say good-by, dearest." She pressed Greta's hand. "Hasn't it been heavenly, learning golf? I never enjoyed myself so much."

"I wonder," Miss von Schwarzenberg said, smiling, "how many thousand times I've heard you say exactly that."

"Oh, have you, Greta? No matter how many times I've said it before, I never knew what the words meant till this minute. Good-by."

Julian walked on air at the girl's side. "I say," Napier called after him, "don't forget you're dining here."

"Here? Oh, no," said the unblushing Julian. "I'm dining at 'The Queen of Scots.'"

"Are you?" said Nan, stopping short. "I was thinking of asking you, but I didn't know I had."

"You hadn't."

"Oh! and do you in Scotland," she laughed, "invite yourself to dinner?"

"Yes, when it's an inn."

They went off arguing, laughing.

The hall seemed to grow suddenly dark. Miss von Schwarzenberg leaned against the big table as she unwound her scarf.