Читать книгу Secret Bread - F. Tennyson Jesse - Страница 11

There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed, awaiting his marriage and his death—a silence so hushed that it was not broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All life, both without and within, was dying life—waning day at the casement, failing fire on the hearth, and in the shadowy bed a man's soul waiting to take wing.

Ruan lay with closed eyes, so still he might have been unconscious, but in reality he was gathering together all of force and energy he possessed; every sense was concentrated on the bare act of keeping alive—keenly and clearly alive—until the wished-for thing was accomplished. Then, the effort over, the stored-up vitality spent, he hoped to go out swiftly, no dallying on the dim borderland. As he lay his closed lids seemed like dull red films against the firelight, and across them floated a series of memory-pictures, which he noted curiously, even with a dry amusement.

He saw himself, as a big-boned surly lad, new to his heritage; then as a middle-aged man, living in a morose isolation save for Annie and the children. Little half-forgotten incidents drifted past him, and always, with the strange detachment of the dying, he saw himself from the outside, as it were, even as he saw Annie and the children. Finally, his travelling mind brought him to the present still hour of dusk, so soon to deepen into night. Thinking of that which was to come, his mouth twitched to a smile; he flattered himself he had kept his neighbours well scandalised during his life; now, from his death-bed, he would send widening circles of amazement over the whole county, and set tongues clacking and heads wagging at the last freak of that old reprobate, Ruan of Cloom. He lay there, grimly smiling, the pleasure of the successful creator in his mind as he thought over the last situation of his making. The smouldering patches of red on the crumbling logs shrank smaller and smaller as the close-set little points of fire died out, and the feathery ash-flakes fell in a soft pile on the hearthstone.

Opening his eyes, Ruan turned his head a little on the pillow, so that he could watch the changing square of sky. A ragged curtain of cloud, blurred and wet-looking at the edge, hung almost to the hill-top, but between ran a streak of molten pallor, and against it the hedge of wilted thorns that crowned the hill stood out black and contorted. One great ploughed field stretched from the garden to the hill-crest; in the middle of its curve a tall grey granite monolith reared up, dark where its top came against the sky, but at its base hardly distinguishable from the bare earth around, which was charmed by the hour to a warm purple hue; when Ruan's eyes left the gleam in the sky they could find out the subdued green of the nearer hedge-row. For the last time, he told himself; then, as the gleam faded from the sky and was gone, he swallowed hard upon the knowledge that never again, for him, would the daylight live behind the clouds. He rubbed his finger up and down the sheet, that he might still feel a tangible sensation at will; then, lifting his bare forearm, he looked closely and curiously at it, noting the way the brown hairs lay across the back, and the finer texture of skin down the inside of elbow and wrist. He, his living self, was in that arm—he could still make the fingers contract and straighten, could still pinch the flesh gently till it whitened—could still call it part of himself. He was not thirsty, but he laboriously lifted the glass of water at his side and drank, because the fancy took him to feel one of the accustomed old sensations, the commonplaces of his every-day life, now that his body would so soon be beyond his power. As the slow fingers pushed the glass on to the little table again, the click of a gate sounded sharply, followed by the noise of footsteps on a paved path. The smile flickered back to Ruan's lips, and he settled himself to enjoy his last little comedy.

Up bare stairs came the footsteps, then the room door opened with a protest of rusty hinges, and Ruan saw the Parson standing on the threshold. A woman's face, pale and strained, swam out of the darkness behind, and to Ruan, materialist though he was, came the thought that the pale blur looked like the face of someone drowning in a black flood. He put the idea aside and nodded slightly at the woman. She gave a gasp of relief, and, pushing by the priest, walked over to the bed.

"So you've not cheated me, James!" she said. "I made sure to find 'ee dead when I brought Passon—I thought you'd ha' done it to spite me."

"Dear woman," answered the Squire gently, "it's for my own pleasure I'm wedding you, and not to make an honest woman of you. I've a fancy to have the old place carried on by a child who's got a right to my name, that's all."

"An' our first-born, Arch'laus, can go begging all's days, s'pose? An' t'other lads and Vassie can go starve wi' en?"

Ruan's face changed, grew darker, and he spoke harshly.

"They were the children of our passion—true love-children. They remind me of the days when I was a fool, and I'll leave them only my folly. But the child that's coming—he'll be blessed by the law and the Church—quite a gentleman of quality, Annie; far above the likes of you. He'll live to breed hatred and malice in the pack of ye, and every hand of his own flesh and blood'll be against him. … Parson, do your duty, and tie the holy knot—small harm in it now nothing can hold me long."

The Parson came forward without a word. He was a clever man, whose knowledge of souls was deep, if not wide, and he refrained from asking whether repentance urged this tardy compliance with the law of his religion; such a question could only have provoked a sneer from the old cynic in the bed.

Annie groped along the mantelshelf until her fingers met a tallow rush, which she lit by holding it to the fire, and in the wan flare of yellow her weary figure showed that she was very near to her confinement. She turned to the bed and set the candle on the table, meeting the Squire's quizzical glance with eyes lit only by the tiny reflections of the candle flame—expressionless eyes, the blue of them faded and the life dulled. Then she went out of the room, and the stairs creaked beneath her descending feet; the clamour of her voice came to the two men above as she called through open doors:

"Katie! Kat-ie! Passon's here, and you'm to fetch Philip and come up to wance."

More feet sounded on the stairs, clattering hobnails among them, and Annie returned, accompanied by Katie Cotton, the dairymaid, and her sweetheart, Philip Jacka. Philip was a lithe, restless youth, with curly hair that caught the light and bright, glinting eyes. He was far better-looking than his girl, and far more at his ease; sturdy, high-bosomed Katie was guilty of an occasional sniff of feminine sympathy; Philip looked on with the aloof superiority of the male.

The service began, and Annie listened to the words she had longed to hear for twelve years past, the words that would make her mistress of Cloom Manor. Morality meant as little to her as to any of the half-savage folk of the remote West in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the post of squire's mistress was merely considered less fortunate than that of squire's wife; but socially Annie was gaining—for she would become an eligible widow-woman.

With fumbling hands Ruan slipped his signet-ring on the ugly, work-worn finger of the woman who was at last his wife.

* * * * *

That night Annie gave birth to the latest heir of the house of Ruan, and in the grey of the dawning, when, with the aid of parson and lawyer, the Squire had arranged all his temporal affairs in a manner to ensure as much ill-will as possible in the family he was leaving behind him, he was gathered to his fathers.

In the big kitchen, where the mice skittered nervously over the last night's supper-table, and the tall clock chuckled before it struck each hour, huddled a group of frightened children. The eldest was angry as well, for, while the younger boys and the little girl were but dimly aware that all their world was tumbling about their ears, he, with the precocious knowledge of the ten-year old country lad, knew more nearly how the crying babe was ousting him from his previous height. Resentful, sleepy, fearful, and exiled from the rooms of birth and death they crouched together and watched the paling sky, their own quarrels forgotten in their common discomfort; and overhead the cries of the new-born child pierced the air of the new day.