Читать книгу A Sovereign Remedy - Flora Annie Webster Steel - Страница 4

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"Oh! Dash it all!... I'm so sorry...!"

"Oh! Dash it all!... I'm so sorry...!"

The coincident exclamations and their sequent apology were separated by a crash, followed by a pause, during which the two cyclists who had collided picked themselves out of the dust unhurt and looked quickly at their machines; finally turning to each other with a smiling bienveillance born of relief--for there was no denying that the affair might have been serious, and they were both conscious of sin.

"It was my fault; I was looking at the view," said one of the two young men candidly. He was a trifle the taller, the broader, and distinctly the better looking; but they were both excellent specimens of clean, wholesome-looking British manhood; curiously alike also, not only in feature, but in resolute adherence to the conventional type.

"But so was I!" returned the other. His voice was the pleasanter, not perhaps so resonant, but with more modulation in it. "Besides, your machine is damaged, and mine isn't--Oh! by George! I hadn't noticed the pedal," he added, following the other's look. He bent for closer inspection, then gave a laugh which was but half rueful; in truth, he was not altogether dissatisfied with this justice of Providence.

"About equal--so we'll cry quits," he said.

"It means walking for us both," said the other with a shrug. "Are you going my way?"

He nodded towards the blue depths of the valley, which, from this gap in the wavy outline of rolling hill where they stood, dipped down to the distant sea that lay half-way up the sky like a level pale-blue cloud.

The gap was the summit level between east and west; as such, a meeting-place for much water, and many roads.

One of the latter meandered backwards over the wide stretch of pink bell-heather and tasselled cotton grass which told of a catchment bog, where, even in fine weather, the mountain mists dissolved into dew, and the dew gathered itself into dark peaty pools like brown eyes among the tufted lashes of the bents and rushes.

And on either side of this central track two others curved down the rolling moor, north and south, to turn sharply behind a patch of gorse and boulders to join hands, all three, for the steep descent before them, as if afraid of solitude in this new venture. Whence, indeed, had come the collision between the two cyclists, each intent on a suddenly disclosed view.

"There is no other way--except back on our traces--back to Blackborough--Good Lord!" came the reply.

The first speaker smiled. "So you are a Blackberry also--Well! it is an awful place--one can hardly credit up here that all the soot and dirt is only--say a hundred miles off. Here one can breathe----"

He looked as if he could do more than that, as, finally shaking himself free of the last speck of dust, he prepared to start.

"Left nothing behind, I hope," said the other, glancing back. "Hullo! There's a letter tumbled out of somebody's pocket in the stramash--yours or mine?"

It lay address upwards between them, and the taller of the two with a brief "Mine," picked it up and put it in his pocket. His companion stared at him.

"Look here," he said, holding out his hand. "You've made a mistake--that letter belongs to me--I'm Edward Cruttenden."

It was the other's turn to stare. "The deuce you are! Why!--my name is Edward Cruttenden!"

They stood thus staring at each other with a sudden dim sense of their own similarity, until the shorter of the two shook his head whimsically.

"This is confusing," he remarked in a tone of argument. "Let's sit down and have a pipe over it--we shall have to differentiate ourselves before we start out into the world together."

Almost at their feet a tiny trickle of water, scarcely heard in its soft bed of sphagnum moss, told that already the descent had begun; but this was stayed a few feet further by a rocky hollow in which the stream gathered and brimmed, so that as you looked out over the shallowing pool, the rushes which fringed it stood out against the far distant blue of the sea beyond, and there seemed no reason why the little lakelet should not take one wild leap into the ocean, and so save itself many miles of weary journeying through unseen valleys.

On the brink of this pool, their backs against a convenient boulder, their legs on the short sweet turf that was kept like a lawn by the hungry nip of mountain sheep, the two Edward Cruttendens rested, smoked, and compared notes; somewhat dilatorily, since the afternoon was fine and the effect of a sinking sun on moor and fell absolutely soul-satisfying.

"Let's differentiate our names somehow," said the pleasant-voiced one lazily--"Did your godfathers, etc., do anything more for you than Edward--mine didn't."

The other shook his head. Something in his handsome face had already differentiated itself from the amused curiosity on his companion's.

"That's awkward--we shall be driven to abbreviations. You shall be Ted, and I Ned--both dentals but philologically uninterchangeable; so they'll do for the present. Well, Ted, since you are twenty-seven and I'm gone twenty-nine, and my father died before I was born, we can't be complicated up as long--lost brothers--can we?"

Ted turned to him frowning sharply--"No! but--but what put that into your head. I----"

Ned laughed; a laugh as musical as his voice, but with a quaint aloofness about it as if he himself were standing aside to listen.

"The position is--romantic; and novels have it so always. As if it were not frankly impossible in this England of ours to dissociate one man from another by breed--we're hopeless mongrels, kin to each other all round. Birth counts for nothing; so let's quit it--Upbringing?"

Ted interrupted shortly--"I--I never knew my father, and my mother died when I was born."

"So did mine," said Ned softly.

There was a pause in which the luring wail of a circling plover who deemed the intruders too near her nest, became insistent, and seemed to fill the mountain solitude with a sense of motherhood, until, once more, the musical, critical laugh struck in on it.

"'Come!' as Shakespeare says, 'there's sympathy for you!' So far we start fair. Education?--I was at Eton, and----"

"I was a Blue-Coat boy," interrupted Ted again, and something in his tone made Ned look the other way, and idly busy himself in trying to dissociate a tender trail of ivy-leaved mountain campanula from its coarser companions in the turf.

"A better education, I expect," he said at last, "though I admit the yellow stockings must be devilish; still"--he paused, settled himself yet more comfortably in his cleft, and with clasped hands behind his head, relapsed into smoke and silence. Even the plover, convinced of their innocence, had ceased her wheeling, luring wail.

So desultorily, sometimes in thought only, sometimes by question and answer, they sat trying to dissociate themselves from the tie of a common name. And before them the afternoon sun, slowly sinking towards extinction in the sea, began to send level rays of light to fill up the valley with a golden haze in which all things lost their individuality.

Finally Ned sat up, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe.

"About equal, I should say; except, of course, for money."

"That means we are unequal in all things," remarked Ted shortly. "You can't deny it. A clerk as I am, out for a Whitsun holiday with ten pounds to spend on it in his pocket, isn't--isn't in the same week with--well! what shall I say----"

"A man who employs clerks," suggested Ned with a smile.

Ted gave an impatient shrug. "As you will. However you come by it, you admit having a hundred pounds."

"A hundred and ten I should say," interrupted Ned, who was counting a handful of loose gold and silver. "I've a hundred in notes besides. However! That needn't be a difficulty!"

The level, golden sun-rays flashed on a curved gold flight, as a bright new sovereign flitted duck-and-drake fashion over the brimming pool at their feet, then disappeared, leaving a circled series of ripples like a smoke wreath on its shiny surface.

"Hold hard! I say--you know--here! stop that, will you--don't be such a blamed fool!" ...

There was imminent danger of a struggle in reality when a voice from the road behind them said with a mixture of appeal and authority:

"Do not quarrel, see you, my good fellows, but tell me the cause of your disagreement, and I will advise to the best of my ability."

The speaker, also a young man of some thirty years, was tall and dark with a jaw which should have been strong from its length, but was curiously marred by the almost feminine softness of contour which belied the blue shadow of a hard-shaven beard. For the rest he had a fine pair of fiery dark eyes, set close to the thick eyebrows which almost met on his high, narrow forehead. It was the face of a saint or a sinner, preferably the former; but whichever way, the face of an enthusiast.

"You're a parson," said Ned, ceasing from horseplay and eyeing the rusty black suit. "So we will refer to you, sir, since you are bound by your cloth to agree with me, and say that money is the root of all evil."

Apprised of the cause of dispute, the Reverend Morris Pugh, of the Calvinistic Methodist Church in the valley below, sat and looked doubtfully first at the loose gold and silver, then at Ned Cruttenden's critical blue eyes. Both appealed to him strongly; the poetry of his race leapt up to meet the one, the inordinate valuation of even a penny, also typical of his race, reached out to the other.

"Don't say it might be sold and given to the poor," said Ned with a sudden smile--"To begin with, the remark has been appropriated by Judas, and then, it's such a rank begging of the question! Poor or rich, the point at issue between us--my friend over there being a bit of a socialist is, of course, a bit of a mammon worshipper also--is whether gold is--is a sovereign remedy! I say not. It doesn't touch the personal equation, which is all we have--if we have that! So I contend that neither I, nor the world at large, would suffer if I made ducks and drakes like this ..."

Another curving flight of gold ended in a swift whit-whitter of lessening leaps and a final disappearance; but this time the detaining hand was Morris Pugh's. His eager face held no doubt as to his desire, though his mind evidently hesitated over a reason for it.

"You really, sir, ought not," he began; then paused.

"Why?" asked Ned quietly.

Ted answered. "Because it isn't really yours. You never earned it, I'll bet, and the wealth of the world is labour----"

Ned emptied his handful on the turf and interrupted him.

"I give them up! There they are, your sovereign remedies! What are you going to do with them? Why! spend them to please yourselves, of course, as I was doing, as every one does! So I repeat, it wouldn't matter a hang to the world or any of us three here present if I were to make----"

A third sovereign would have followed the other two, but for the arresting power of a new voice.

"Perhaps not; but it would be a most distinct injury to one Peter Ramsay, M.D. So just hand it over, will ye?"

Close behind them stood a sturdy, thick-set man, with bright red-brown eyes and bright bronze-red hair.

He had evidently come down one of the steep mountain sheep-tracks, leading his pony, for it stood beside him now, its hoofs half hidden in the moss, while it stretched its inquiring muzzle towards the glittering pile of sovereigns, as if suspicioning them as a new kind of corn.

"Welcome, sir, so far as I am concerned," replied Ned calmly. "But it isn't in any lack of claimants that our difficulty lies. We have in fact too many! Our reverend friend wants the shekels, why he would be puzzled to say, since he preaches that they have no purchasing power for the one thing needful. My namesake over there wouldn't be averse to them, though he holds the possession of gold to be a crime----"

"I never said so," broke in Ted hotly.

"Excuse me! It follows inevitably from your premise of equality. That gives the coup de grace to lawful personal possession of anything; since 'to possess,' means the having and holding of something extraneous to the personality, whereas if every personality has an equal amount of any one thing, that thing ceases to be a possession and becomes part of the personality!--which, of course, is mere hair-splitting! As for you, doctor, you also are illogical. Health and life are the goods you desire, yet money is no remedy for disease and death. Practically, I am the only one with a leg to stand upon. I am a pleasure seeker, pure and simple, so, as this gives me pleasure--here goes!"

The third curved flight of gold finished his remarks so pointedly that silence fell upon all four, as they looked out on the golden light haze, which, finding a mist-wreath in its path, had driven it, all transmuted into gold, to blot out both land and sea, leaving nothing visible save that foreground of rippled brimming pool, set in its fringe of rushes. The peewit, fearful once more lest the new comers should have keener eyes, wheeled and wailed; the pony, dissatisfied with the sovereigns, nosed and nibbled reflectively at the coarse grass and the delicate campanula.

"I'll tell you what," cried Ned suddenly, his face showing a half scornful amusement. "Let Fate decide which of us needs money most!" He took out a pocketbook as he spoke, and withdrew from it a sheaf of bank notes. "There's a hundred here, and I don't want it--that"--he pointed to the cash--"will carry me through for a week, so my namesake and I could start fair together for a holiday--if he chooses. I'll leave this, therefore, on deposit! There is a convenient cleft in the rock over there, and my tobacco-pouch will keep out the damp----"

He produced the latter also, and began leisurely to exchange contents, while the others gasped----

"But, sir, you can never mean," began the Reverend Morris Pugh, finding his voice first--"To leave money here, so close to the road!--think of the temptation!"

"To us, certainly," interrupted Ned dryly, "but to no one else. It is ours to take when we think the world--that is, of course, ourselves--wants it--but mind you--we are to say nothing about the taking to any one else in the world. Of course, we agree to treat it as--let us say, a sovereign remedy; therefore we're to use it only to--to cure what we can't cure without it."

"Or think we can't cure," amended Peter Ramsay with twinkling eyes, "my prescriptions are personal matters between me and my conscience. The idea is fetching, an unappropriated balance----"

"Hardly unappropriated," remarked Ned caustically, "it is apparently hypothecated--as you Scotch call it, doctor--to philanthropy, for I suppose charity mustn't begin at home."

"Why not?" put in Ned. "There's really no limitation of object or time. Any of us may withdraw the deposit to-morrow without notice to any one, if he possess a solid conviction that--that he can't do without it? Do you all agree?"

There was a pause.

"It's d--d rot," said Ted Cruttenden at last sulkily, "but on those conditions I agree."

The Reverend Morris Pugh looked abstractedly over the golden haze in which the whole world was hidden.

"Money is the root of all evil," he began.

"Bosh!" interrupted Dr. Ramsay, springing to his feet. "I'm game! I shall take that money, if some of you aren't too previous, for the first real necessity----"

Ned Cruttenden sprang to his feet also, and laughed. "So will I, if I can only make up my mind as to what constitutes a 'real necessity.'"

The two stood challenging each other, then the red-brown eyes under the shaggy bronze-red eyebrows softened.

"Not much, I'll allow; very often bare life."

Ned stooped to secrete the tobacco-pouch murmuring, "Il faut vivre! Pour moi je n'en vois pas la necessité!"

Then he looked up. "There it is, gentlemen, very much at your disposal. And now, namesake, we can start fair--for our walk to the first blacksmith's shop anyhow."

Five minutes afterwards the golden haze had usurped even the still unrippled pool and the cleft in the rock, while the four young men on the downward path were lost to view utterly.