Читать книгу A Sovereign Remedy - Flora Annie Webster Steel - Страница 6

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They found the summer sun had been at work for some hours on the storm-drenched world ere they woke to the lowing roar of the heifer from the neighbouring cow-house. Motherhood had evidently come to her at dawn, bringing its wider outlook, its larger self; and sure enough, when they scrambled down from the loft, they found at the foot of the ladder, penned in by an old door, a big, black bull-calf lustily answering anxiety by assertion.

The cottage over against them, however,--it formed part of a long range of farm-steadings, which stretched right away to the stream they had crossed the night before--showed no sign of life. The door was closed, the window-blinds down; the inmates were most likely sleeping sound after their broken rest.

So, their clothes being still damp, the two young men went up stream to a long, deep pool, and spreading them out to dry in the hot sunshine, had a morning bath, thereinafter drying themselves in the same fashion on a grassy bank, whence, looking up the valley, they could see the mountains closing in on the narrow strip of level pasture. Behind them, the downward view was absolutely shut out by the farm-buildings, above which showed a yew tree, and by a dense clump of rhododendrons, which trended away until it met the other wooded hillside of the little glen.

"I believe we are really on an island," remarked Ted, critically appraising the values of some willows and elders which, higher up beyond the pasture fields, seemed to betoken another channel of water.

"A desert island," said Ned, busy over the intricacies of cold water and a razor from his, shoulder-wallet. "We are reduced to the makeshifts of primitive manhood. What more do we want?--and all without that hundred pounds! I never slept better than I did in that hay."

"Small blame to you with feather pillows and best Whitney blankets! And as for money--we shall have to tip these people. I suppose half-a-crown will do----"

"Ahem," replied Ned somewhat doubtfully; "but it was beastly late, you know."

"Very; but that wasn't our doing: they were up with the 'hi'fer.' However, let's put it at three shillings."

"But, my dear fellow, consider the beefsteak pie--it was simply the best pie----"

"Charge it to appetite," said Ted, rising ready dressed, supple, clean, and strong. "Three shillings is ample. Come along if you're ready, and let us get off. I'm keen to start."

He looked it; but the starting was not so easy, for though on trial the door of the cottage was found to be on the latch only, no one could be made to hear.

"Let's leave the tip on the table," suggested Ted impatiently.

"My dear fellow," replied Ned, "I won't go without seeing the 'General,' and thanking her for that excellent pie. Besides--think how she simply scooped us up last night like half-drowned kittens and set us going again! I tell you, sir, that if--it being Saturday night--she had suggested washing my head, I'd have submitted meekly, as I used with old nurse. Why! I dreamt about frilled drawers all last night!"

Ted was irresponsive; a word had arrested his attention. "Saturday!" he echoed thoughtfully, "then to-day is Sunday!"

"First Sunday after Whitsun--No! Trinity Sunday, of course, the shortest night in the year and Midsummer Night's Dream all combined. How time flies...."

"What luck!" gloomed Ted. "I shouldn't wonder if the smith were to refuse us our cycles--they are like that in these wild parts--what beastly bad luck!"

Here Ned, who had been prospecting at the back of the passage, opened a door, suspecting it to be possibly a coal-cellar; but he fell back from the sudden blaze of almost blinding sunlight which poured in from a long, low, absolutely empty room, which stretched away on either side over boards scrubbed to whiteness to a wide oriel window.

At that on the left-hand side stood a parrot-perch, beside which was a tall girl in blue engaged in making a white cockatoo with a yellow crest talk.

"Gimme a sixpence," it muttered hurriedly as the bit of banana turned away with the girl at the interruption.

So for a second or two they stood; the two young men smitten helpless by the extreme beauty of that girlish figure, framed as it was by the great sprays of white June clematis and great trusses of scarlet ivy geranium from the garden beyond the window.

"Gimme a sixpence, gimme a sixpence," reiterated the cockatoo in guttural allurement. Then the girl smiled.

"You must have been very wet last night, I'm afraid," she said in an absolutely perfect voice, true, pure, sweet; the real voice of the siren, which none who hear forget.

The two at the door, who stood bare-headed, almost doubting the evidence of their own eyes, gave an audible sigh of relief. This was no vision then, this beauty of womanhood pure, and simple, with softly smiling eyes.

And yet? They glanced at each other doubtfully, and the three shillings in Ted's palm seemed suddenly to become hot and scorch him. Impossible to offer three shillings to perfection!

"Thank you, yes--I mean no--I mean that we were wet, quite wet--but now thanks to the kindness of your----" Ned paused. Much as he admired "the General," he could not affiliate to her this radiant creature.

Ted, becoming conscious vaguely that here was something new to him, something which held possible danger to his outlook in life, remembered his hurry and came to the point.

"We are very much obliged, and so, if you please, as we are about to start, we should like--I mean if you----"

Here absolute terror lest Ted should really offer those three shillings to the glorious creature in the first flush of a womanhood which seemed to Ned to be worth the whole world, made him step forward, holding out a shining sovereign.

"We've really been most awfully comfortable," he said apologetically, "and if you--if you wouldn't mind giving this----"

"Why!" she exclaimed, all eagerness, snatching at the coin, "I believe it's a sovereign! Fancy that! A whole sovereign!"

Ned felt outraged at her indecent haste; and at the back of Ted's brain lay an instant regret concerning the three shillings; he would then only have been responsible for one and sixpence instead of ten shillings.

Suddenly she held the coin up to the window, laughed--a rippling laugh like running water--and handed it back again. "Thanks for letting me see it; I hadn't seen one before, but, as grandfather says, it blocks the sunlight just like a penny!"

"You--you hadn't seen a sovereign!" said Ned feebly.

She shook her head. "We don't have money in this house. Grandfather doesn't hold with it."

"Not hold with it!" echoed Ted argumentatively. "But you must--you must pay your debts; and we want to pay ours."

Her face grew serious. "Ah! you want to pay something. That's Martha's business. Here! Martha! These gentlemen want to pay you a sovereign."

At an inner door the figure of "the General" appeared with floury arms and her prim bob curtsey.

"Hope the hi'fer didn't disturb of you, gentlemen," she said cheerfully; "but really there ain't nothing owin', let alone a sovereign's worth."

"But there must be something; and we tried to find you before, but you were asleep," protested Ned in an aggrieved tone.

"Asleep! Lord save us!" laughed Martha. "Why! Adam bein' that sound after the calvin', I was over to the loft myself three times afore I come in to my stove. But there ain't nothin'. The yay was 'ome grown, and welcome, seeing 'twas but beddin' stuff at best, and none spoilt for use by humans sleepin' on it." A faint chuckle showed her sense of superiority.

"But there was the beefsteak pie," began Ned.

Martha's giggle increased. "'Twouldn't never 'ave kep' sweet over Sunday, sir, so the pigs 'ud 'ave 'ad it if you gentlemen 'adn't."

That was an unanswerable argument.

"Will you please take it back," said the girl imperiously, holding the gold out in the easy clasp of her finger and thumb.

"But there was the tea--and the pillows and the blankets," protested Ted severely.

She turned on him swiftly. "Don't you hear Martha doesn't want it, and I don't want it. So if you don't want it also, we'd better give it to Cockatua, for I'm tired of holding it. Here, Cockatua, is a golden sovereign for you."

The bird's great yellow crest rose with greed as it grabbed at the prize, but fell again at its first hasty bite. The beady black eyes showed distrust; it turned the coin round, and bit at it again; then again. Finally, with a guttural murmur of "Gimme a sixpence," it dropped the sovereign deliberately into its bread and milk tin.

Every one laughed, Martha, however, checking herself with a hasty "Drat them scones; they'll be burnt as black as the back o' the grate," and disappearing whence she came, her voice calling back in warning to Miss Aura, not to forget the master's message.

"Aura?" questioned Ned quickly. "That's not a very appropriate----"

"My name is Aurelia," she said quite frankly, "and the message is that grandfather would like you to breakfast with him. I think you had better," she added still more frankly, "for you mightn't get anything in the village. It's Sunday, you know."

They glanced at each other mechanically, though each had decided to accept the invitation. So she led them through the kitchen, where Martha was bustling about over her stove, into a hall. This further house had evidently been joined on to the back of the cottage by the long room in which the cockatoo lived.

"We breakfast in the verandah," said Aurelia, turning to the left into a large low-roofed room, lined from floor to ceiling with books, but containing no other furniture save a chair and a writing-table.

The glimpse afforded by the open hall-door showed them that Ted's surmise had been correct. They were on an island, for to the right of the garden a stream, after dashing over some rocks, disappeared behind the high wall enclosing the orchard which filled up the end of the valley, while, as they passed on through the book room, a lawn lay before them sloping down to a deep, still pool, a pool shadowed by surely the biggest yew-tree they had ever seen. Its great arms spread themselves out, and, bowed to earth by their own weight, found a fresh foothold for another upward spring, until the one tree seemed a grove.

Here in a sunny square formed by the joining of house and steading walls, they found a breakfast-table, and beside it, in an arm-chair, an old man with a thin face and Florentine-cut, silver-white hair.

"Excuse my rising, gentlemen," he said in a high, suave voice, his nervous hands gripping the chair-arms in rather a helpless fashion, "but I am somewhat--more or less--of a cripple at times--I suffer from rheumatism, and last night's rain----"

"Might have made us rheumatic also but for your kindness," began Ned politely.

"Not at all! Not at all--Martha does all that sort of thing well--an excellent creature--really an excellent creature, but alas! quite devoid of intelligence," said their host, and his large, restless, pale blue eyes which, from the smallness of his other features, dominated his face, took on a remonstrant expression that was curiously obstinate yet weak. "Yes!" he continued, "absolutely devoid of brains. One of those hewers of wood and drawers of water by desire and determination who stand so--so infernally--in the way of true socialistic development. But, by the way I am forgetting to introduce myself. I am Sylvanus Smith, President--but stay----! Aurelia, my child, fetch the Syllabus of the Socialistic Congress from my writing-table; that will be the best introduction. And here comes Martha with, I presume, breakfast. We generally have a parlourmaid, but"--the remonstrant expression came to his face again--"Martha is somewhat hard on maids. She--she doesn't believe in perfect freedom of soul and body, so the last left yesterday in--in a flame of fire! The young men of the village----"

Ned laughed. "We know about that, sir; we were taken last night for 'lazy good-for-nothin' Welsh libertynes.'"

Mr. Sylvanus Smith appeared shocked. "I really must speak to Martha," he said in an undertone, adding aloud, "Well, Martha, what have you there?"

The question was provoked by the setting down of a silver dish among the fruits, nuts, and other vegetarian diets on the table, and there was a certain tremulous authority in it.

The subservience of Martha's bob was phenomenal.

"Bacin an' eggs, sir, an' there's more ter follow if required."

The authority dissolved into an ill--assured cough.

"As a rule," remarked Mr. Smith helplessly, "we do not allow meat----"

"But lor! sir," put in Martha, beaming, "wasn't it jest a Providence as me and Adam had left that bit o' beefsteak pie, seeing that strawberries an' sech like are but cold comforts to stummicks as has bin drenched through by storm."

There could be no reply but acquiescence to this proposition, so the strangers began on the bacon and eggs. Mr. Sylvanus Smith breakfasted off some patent food, and Aurelia ate strawberries and brown bread, and drank milk; they seemed to have got into her complexion and hair--at least so thought Ned.

The clematis wreaths, the great bosses of the scarlet geraniums hung round them, the great yew-tree shot out fingers of shadow claiming the lawn and actually touching one of the jewelled flower-beds, while behind these, tall larkspurs and lychnis, their feet hidden in a wilderness of bright blossom, rose up against the rows of peas and raspberries in the kitchen garden, and the green of young apples in the orchard.

Against this paradise of flower and fruit they saw Aurelia, like any Eve, beautiful, healthful, gracious, smiling; and they lost both their hearts and their heads promptly--for the time being, at any rate.

They looked at her by stealth in the long silences which were perforce the fate of Mr. Sylvanus Smith's guests, for he could talk, and talk as he wrote well, of the future of Socialism, and the happiness of the many, oblivious altogether of the happiness or unhappiness, of the few that was being worked out in his immediate neighbourhood. That did not trouble him in the least.

Whether from happiness or unhappiness, past, present, or to come, the two young men were singularly silent as, after being piloted by Adam through the rhododendrons and across the drawbridge, they left the island paradise behind them.

"That was a beautiful garden," said Ted.

"Very," remarked Ned.

Then they were silent again; but they thought persistently of Aurelia, of her beauty, her unworldliness, her curious frank dignity, and the shrewd common-sense she had shown in every word she uttered.

The road to the village led through a wood at first; a wood--as such Welsh mountain woods are at Midsummer--all lush with fern and bramble and great drifts of foxglove envious of each other's height, and holding their heads higher upon the narrowing clefts, until some very ordinary spike, gaining a vantage of rock, out-tops the rest, and so lords it over all.

Then, after a while, the wooded slopes closed in to rock. Here the divided streams rejoined each other with a quick babble of recognition, and, as if out of sheer good spirits, gave a gladsome leap or two ere settling down to race hand in hand through a ravine but a few feet below the curving road.