Читать книгу The Sheltered Life - Ellen Glasgow - Страница 10

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"Let me see, how old are you, Jenny Blair?" Mr. Birdsong asked, with flattering interest, while he settled himself beside her on the pile of lumber.

"Going on ten. I'll be ten years old the twenty-first of September."

"You're old for your age, and you get better looking, too, every day. It won't surprise me if you grow up to be one of the prettiest girls in Queenborough. You have the eyes and hair of a wood-nymph, and when you have eyes and hair, it doesn't matter a bit if God has forgotten your nose and chin. You may take my word for it, I've seen many a beauty who had worse points than yours."

A beauty! She drew in her breath sharply, as if all her thoughts were whistling a tune. Never before had any one held out the faintest hope that she might grow up to be pretty. "Handsome is as handsome does," her mother had replied only yesterday to a charitable visitor, who had remarked in the child's presence that she was becoming more attractive in feature as she grew older. And now Mr. Birdsong (who was one of the most adorable persons she had ever seen) really and truly thought that she might be a beauty. With her enraptured gaze on his face, she nodded as vacantly as a doll, because she felt her heart would burst if she spoke a single word of the torrent of gratitude raging within her.

"So you're nine years old," he said very slowly, as if he were counting.

"Going on ten. I'm nine years and seven months and three weeks." She corrected him as patly as if she were reciting a lesson.

"Well, that's getting on. That's getting on in life."

"Yes, that's getting on," she assented switching one of her plaits over her shoulder and tying the bow of plaid ribbon. Down in Penitentiary Bottom the shadows were thickening. From beneath the fire-coloured sunset, rays of light were spreading like an open fan above a drift of violet-blue smoke.

"I should think," he continued gravely, "that nine years and seven months and three weeks would be old enough to keep a secret."

She looked round quickly, her pride touched. "Oh, I can keep secrets. I've always had to keep secrets of my own. You can't get far in this world," she added, repeating a phrase of Aunt Etta's, "if you tell everything that you know."

With a gay and tender laugh, he leaned over and patted her hand. "If you've found out that, you may go as far as you please. But how about this idea? Don't you think it would be more fun if we kept all this--I mean everything we've done this afternoon--a secret between us?"

What a surprise! What an adventure to fall back upon! "Do you mean everything?" she asked in a whisper of ecstasy. Never had she dreamed of having a secret that belonged to her and Mr. Birdsong and nobody else.

"Everything." His accent was so firm and grave that for an instant she wondered if she could have mistaken his meaning.

"The whole afternoon?" she inquired eagerly.

"The whole afternoon," he repeated even more firmly. "Everything that has happened from the minute you left Washington Street. It has just occurred to me," he explained, "that it would be great fun for us to have a secret between us."

"Oh, great fun!" she echoed.

"Of course," he said, looking more closely at the cut on her forehead, "you will have to tell your mother you had a fall. I suppose you could have a fall anywhere."

"Oh, anywhere." Then she glanced down uneasily. "But I've left my skates at Memoria's."

"You did, eh? Well; I'll bring them up to my yard. I'm going to drive down this way to-morrow, and I'll get your skates and leave them--Where shall I leave them?"

She thought a moment. "You might put them down by Old Mortality's pool. Are you sure," she asked abruptly, "that you aren't doing it all just to shield me? Mamma says Grandfather shields me too much."

"You needn't bother about that. But it's better not to tell your mother that you had a fall in Canal Street. It might make her feel worse, you know, and I've never found it did any good to make people feel worse. They usually feel bad enough as it is."

With this she was in earnest accord. "No, it never does any good. I always try not to tell Mamma anything I know will make her unhappy."

"You're a sensible child, and very grown up for your years, including the extra months. And it would certainly hurt your mother if you told her that you had run away and skated on that bad pavement. You might so easily have broken your bones."

"She'd feel dreadfully if she knew I'd gone because the children at school dared me. It upset her when she heard me tell Grandfather I wanted to see where the bad smell comes from."

"Well, she's right about that. You'd better keep away from that smell. But you're like me. You're too plucky ever to take a dare, or ever," he continued pointedly, "to tell a secret after you've crossed your heart."

"Oh, I wouldn't, not if--not if--"

"I know you wouldn't. That's why it will be such jolly fun having a secret between us. We must both be careful not to let anybody know that we've seen each other this afternoon. It would spoil everything if your mother should suspect."

"Oh, yes, that would spoil everything."

"If you let out so much as a hint of it, I'd feel, of course, that I could never trust you again. I'd feel, indeed, as if I couldn't trust anybody but Old Mortality."

Without a struggle, drugged with happiness, she yielded herself to his charm. Never had she imagined that a single afternoon (she called it evening in her mind) could be so filled with excitement.

"Then, that's a promise," he said, rising, and held out his hand.

"Yes, that's a promise."

"Cross my heart?" He illustrated the question.

"Cross my heart." She imitated the sign as perfectly as she could.

"Well, I knew you'd be the kind," he said in a caressing voice. "I always knew there was something plucky about you."

Intoxicated by his praise, she blushed over her thin little face and turned her eyes again to the sunset. Instead of moving on, as she had expected him to do, he sank back, still holding her hand, on the edge of the plank. Was it possible, she asked herself, for any one to feel happier than she felt sitting there on the pile of lumber, with Mr. Birdsong beside her? When her blushes had ceased tingling, her eyes wavered back to his face, and she thought what a nice and pleasant face it was when you looked at it closely. He must scrub very hard with soap to make his cheeks so fresh and clear and ruddy, and she was sure that Mammy Rhoda might brush all day long, but she could never, never bring that shining gloss to her plaits. In the paling glow she gazed up at his grey eyes, set well apart beneath eyebrows like dark edges of fur, at his straight, slightly aquiline nose, and his full red mouth, which curved outward beneath the faint shadow on his upper lip. Yes, she had never seen, not even in a picture book, a face she liked better.

"I try," she responded presently because it was the only thing she could think of that sounded serious enough for the occasion.

"Well, you do. It's a comfort to talk to you. The truth is, Jenny Blair, that I am not nearly so plucky as I should like to be. I don't seem able to hold fast to anything very long." He broke into a short laugh. "The trouble is, I was born with a roving nature."

Though she was saddened by the strain of melancholy in his voice and even in his laugh, she had reached at last, she felt, ground that was both firm and safe. "I'm afraid I was born with a roving nature too," she replied consolingly. What, indeed, but a roving nature could have taken her to Canal Street that evening, or have tempted her down to the place from which the bad smell sprang up?

"Well, you'd better bridle your nature, my dear little girl. You'd better bridle it tight before it runs away with you."

"Does it run away with you?" she inquired curiously.

Again he laughed, but this time the melancholy had passed out of the sound. "It is always running away with me."

"Then why don't you bridle it?"

"I'm not strong enough. Unless you bridle a roving nature in the beginning, it is obliged to get the better of you."

"And then what happens?"

"Trouble. That's what happens. Trouble and more trouble and still more trouble."

She sighed deeply, for she felt very sad--almost as sad as she had felt just before she came down with scarlet fever. "If you told Mrs. Birdsong, wouldn't it be a help?" she asked presently. "Aunt Isabella says she is helpful in trouble." Instinct warned her that she had left the firm, safe ground as soon as she had reached it, and was floundering helplessly in some primitive element. Though she had had sufficient experience with ruffled occasions, she felt inadequate to deal with obscure upheavals of conscience.

"Your Aunt Isabella is right," he said after a long silence, and his voice sounded thick and agitated, as if something alive and hurt were struggling inside of him. "I married an angel." Then, abruptly, another and a very different exclamation burst from him, and she watched the genial ruddiness stream back under his smooth, fair skin. "By George, I'm always forgetting that you are only nine years old. There's something so sympathetic about you."

Sympathetic! This was almost too much. While her heart fluttered with joy, she turned her eyes away in an embarrassed glance at the horizon. The last flare of sunset stained the whitewashed wall of the prison, and a soft mulberry-coloured dusk floated up from the hollow. Sympathetic! She rolled the long delicious word on her tongue.

"I feel, too, that you can be trusted," Mr. Birdsong continued earnestly, pronouncing each syllable very slowly and distinctly, as if he were trying to impress its importance upon her mind. "I feel that we would never, never give each other away."

"Oh, never, never!"

"Nothing could make us tell, for instance, about this afternoon."

"Nothing. Not--not wild horses."

"Even after you're grown up, we'll still have our secret."

"Always. Nobody shall ever know. Even if I live to be a--a thousand, I'll never tell anybody."

"Well, that's what I call loyal," he answered, and the strain seemed to relax in his voice. "You're a friend worth having, and no man has too many of them at my age. The best part of it is that you are sparing your mother, because she would be distressed to know how near you were to being hurt."

Slipping down from the pile of lumber, Jenny Blair put her hand into his warm and comforting clasp. A wave of adoration surged up, and it seemed to her that she was drowning in a kind of exquisite torment. Never before had she felt this yearning rapture, not for her mother, not for her grandfather, not even for Mrs. Birdsong, who was as beautiful as a dream. No, this was something new in the mingled ways of love and admiration and a strange sort of homesickness. Until this evening, she had always loved Mrs. Birdsong best, but now, she told herself, Mr. Birdsong was first of all, or at least the very next to her mother and grandfather, who were both trying at times, but must be loved because they were unable to be happy without her.

"Well, we'd better be going in now. I'll take you to your corner," Mr. Birdsong said, squeezing her hand.

"I think I'd better slip in the back gate. The alley is right over there."

"We'll cross here, then. If your mother asks you where you've been, what will you tell her?"

"Maybe she won't ask, but I can say I fell down and hurt myself because my roller-skates wouldn't roll right."

"You fell down and hurt yourself. That's right, and it's true."

"Oh, yes, it's true."

The flushed sky was paling into grey, and waves of silver-purple twilight flowed into Washington Street.

"Well, good-night, little girl." The gay and charming smile illumined the dusk for a moment; the grey eyes laughed; the caressing lips brushed her cheek. "You're a trump sure enough, and we'll always stand by each other."

Captivated afresh, she gazed up at him. "Oh, yes, we'll always stand by each other."

The back gate opened and shut, and she ran into the dim garden, where the light from the street drifted down through the faintly stirring boughs of the old sycamore. She could see the silver bole of the tree, and the glimmer of the rose-arbour at the end of the grasswalk. Then, as she sped by, the sound of whispers reached her, and she slackened her pace. "I mean honestly," said a deep voice that she recognized. "You know I mean honestly by you." Then a long, low, despairing sigh, and Aunt Isabella's plaintive notes, "But you don't understand, Joseph. You don't understand--"

Flitting on, while Aunt Isabella called sharply, "Is that you, Jenny Blair? Your mother has been worrying about you," she ran up the back steps and into the house. They might keep their precious secret, she told herself, for she had one now of her own that was far more important. From this evening, as long as she lived, she would have a part in that mysterious world where grownup persons hide the things they do not wish children to know.

"Well, my dear, we were growing anxious about you," remarked her grandfather, who was alone with William, she saw thankfully, in the library.

"My roller-skates tripped me again, Grandfather, and I fell down. You really will give me the money to-night, won't you?"

"I suppose I'll have to, my dear, I can't have you tripping up and bumping your head. Does it hurt?"

"It did dreadfully. And, Grandfather," she asked in a lower tone, "is it true that only bad people live in Penitentiary Bottom? Don't any good people live there?"

"Yes, my child, good people live wherever there are people."

"Is Memoria good, Grandfather?"

"Yes, Memoria is good. She is a good laundress and a good daughter."

"I know who is good too. Mr. Birdsong is good."

"Yes, George is good," the old man answered. "He is a good friend and a good sportsman. Now, you'd better run upstairs. Your mother has been worrying."