Читать книгу The Tragic Bride - Francis Brett Young - Страница 5

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It is extraordinary to think how forty-eight hours had turned this amazing, sexless creature into a woman. The problem of a dinner-dress was solved for her almost at once by Jocelyn himself. As soon as they were safely back at Maple's he asked her if she really wanted to dine with the Halbertons at the Shelbourne, and when she said, "Of course!" he produced a five pound note from the pigskin case that he carried in his coat-tail, and turned her loose in Grafton Street. An hour later she returned, breathless with excitement, carrying the dress that she had bought, a frock of white muslin, high at the neck and hand-embroidered with a pattern of shamrock. Life was becoming a matter of great excitement.

The maid at Maple's dressed her in the evening, a blowsy young woman from Carlow who called her 'my darlin,' and told her that she had a beautiful head of hair. Biddy had never told her that her hair was beautiful, and Gabrielle herself had always considered it something of a nuisance. In the hotel bedroom a cunning combination of mirrors showed her the thick plait hanging down her back. She had never seen her own back before. Looking at it she shrugged her shoulders to see what they looked like.

Of course she was ready dressed long before she need have been. She went down into the hall of the hotel and waited for her father. She hoped, and was almost sure, that she looked lovely. While she stood there, looking into a huge oval mirror, an old gentleman of much the same cut as her father came in and stared at her as though she were some new and curious animal. She turned and smiled at him. She would have smiled at anyone on that evening. He did not give her a smile in return. He only went red in his bald scalp and cleared his throat, hobbling up to his room and wondering what the devil Maple's was coming to.

A moment later Jocelyn arrived, very stately in the evening dress of the seventies. His face looked brown and hard and weathered, like a filbert, against his white spread of shirt-front. His eyes twinkled, his temples were flushed, and the twisted cord of an artery could be seen pulsating across each of them: all three being symptoms of the bottle of Pommery on which he had dressed. When he saw Gabrielle he said "Ha—very good, very good," and she, in an access of enthusiasm, kissed him and smelt his vinous breath.

It was no more than a stone's throw from their hotel to the Shelbourne, Jocelyn remembering his long-forgotten manners stepped aside courteously when they crossed the road as if he were escorting a real lady. Gabrielle couldn't understand this at all; she would have liked to jog along with him arm in arm. The magnificence of the Shelbourne with its uniformed porters overpowered Gabrielle, and when she reached the Halbertons' private room, she, who had often been reproved for talking the heads off Biddy and Mr. Considine, was dumb. Jocelyn, however, pouring gin and bitters on his Pommery, did talking enough for both of them. He was in excellent form. His talk flowed steadily and Gabrielle, drifting as it were, into an eddy, was left at liberty to examine her cousins and their company.

Lord Halberton and Jocelyn Hewish had very little in common. The peer she noticed wore an air of great fragility, as though he had been sprinkled with powder to preserve him. His movements were all minute and precise. He walked with short steps; and when he smiled, as Jocelyn, already in the story-telling stage, compelled him to do, his lips twitched apart for a moment and then closed again as if he were afraid that any expression more violent might make his teeth fall out. Gabrielle decided that he must be very old, so old that he was only kept alive by these precautions. She had noticed, too, when she shook hands with him that the flesh of his fingers was limp, and that the joints were stiff like those of a dead man.

Lady Halberton, who, at the Horse Show had struck her as an ancient and withered woman, now appeared middle-aged, scintillating in a scheme of black and silver. Her dress and her toupet were black, relieved by silver sequins and a silver mounted tiara. High lights in keeping with the scheme were supplied by other jewels on her fingers, her glittering filbert nails and a diamond pendant that sparkled on the white and bony ridge of her breastbone. The Halberton daughters, whose accents Gabrielle had been imitating in her bedroom when she lay awake with excitement the night before, were inclined to be friendly with her; but as all their conversation had to do with a world of which Gabrielle knew nothing, they did not get very far. Both of them were over thirty and unmarried. From time to time, taking new courage, each in turn would make a pounce on Gabrielle with some question that led nowhere, and then flutter off again. The fact that she obviously puzzled them amused Gabrielle, and she soon regained the confidence that the sight of the hall porters had shaken. From time to time Lady Halberton would turn on her a smile full of glittering teeth, and twice, apropos of nothing, Gabrielle heard her say: "Sweet child! You must really let her come and stay with us at Halberton, Sir Jocelyn," though the baronet did not seem to hear what she said.

They dined en famille. Lord Halberton ate as gingerly as he smiled, probably for the same reason. The party had been squared by the addition of two young men, one of them a soldier from the Curragh, named Fortescue, and the other a naval sub-lieutenant, named Radway. He and Gabrielle, as the least important persons, found themselves in each other's company, while Captain Fortescue dished up the kind of small talk to which they were accustomed to the two Halberton girls, Lady Halberton continuously sparkling at Sir Jocelyn and her husband presiding over the whole function with set lips like a cataleptic.

It was Radway who saved Gabrielle from throttling herself with the flower of a French artichoke, a vegetable with which she was unacquainted, and in a burst of gratitude she confided to him the fact that this was her first dinner party. From this they slipped into an easy intimacy; easy for her because she was so thankful to find someone to whom she could babble, and for him because she was so utterly unguarded. It had been unusual for him to meet a girl of birth or breeding who was not preoccupied with matrimonial possibilities; and this creature was as frank as she was beautiful.

Radway had never been in Ireland before. The cruiser on which he served was visiting Kingstown, and at the Horse Show he had run across the Halbertons whom he had met when he was stationed in their own county at Devonport. Beyond them he didn't know a soul in the country, and the soft western brogue of Gabrielle fascinated him. He encouraged her to talk, and she was quite willing to do so, telling of Roscarna and the hills and the river, of her lessons with Mr. Considine, of her secret bathes in the lake and other things as intimate which would have persuaded him that she was an exceedingly fast young woman if he had not been already convinced that she was nothing but a child.

It gave her a great happiness to talk about Roscarna in this alien land. And Radway was glad to listen if only for the pleasure of hearing her voice.

Radway was a straight-forward young man, twenty-four or five years of age. That he was eminently presentable one deduces from the fact that the Halbertons condescended to entertain him, though Lady Halberton, as the years went by, was known to make social sacrifices for the sake of the dear girls. I do not think it is profitable to seek for much subtlety in Radway. It is better to accept him as the clean sturdy type of youth that Dartmouth turns afloat every year. Physically he was fair (Arthur Payne also was fair), with a straight mouth, excellent teeth, and blue, humorous eyes.

There is nothing younger for its age than a naval sub-lieutenant. In the traditional simplicity of seamen there is more than a tradition; for the inhabitants of a ship are a small island community in which grown men live and accept a glorified version of life at a public school until they reach the flag-list, or are shot out into the world on a pension that is inadequate for its enjoyment. The one subject on which the wardroom claims to be authoritative is that of women; and Radway was already as well acquainted with the Irish aspects of the sport as with the Japanese. In daring, as in physical perfection, the wardroom of the Pennant considered that the daughters of the Irish squirearchy took some beating; and Radway had heard, no doubt, stories of many wayward and passionate episodes with which the hospitality of Irish country houses had been enlivened. Gabrielle was the first of the kind that he had met, her frankness, her beauty, and her sudden, enchanting intimacy seemed to tell him that he was in luck's way and on the edge of an adventure. It was not the part of a sailor to miss opportunities of experience. He couldn't guess, poor devil, what the end would be, but naval tradition favoured the taking of all possible risks, and he determined to let the affair develop as rapidly as possible.

The dulness of the rest of the party isolated them. To all intents and purposes they were alone. The difference between this girl and all the others that he had met was that she withheld nothing, she didn't hedge, or try to protect herself with any assumption of feminine mystery. It puzzled Radway. He wondered, in his innocence, if he had succeeded in making a swift, bewildering conquest. Of course he hadn't done anything of the sort, but the speculation disarmed him, and by the end of the evening he was thoroughly bowled over.

So was Sir Jocelyn—but in another way. All the time that she had been talking to Radway Gabrielle had kept her eye on him. She knew that things were reaching a point of danger when she saw his eyes fill with tears as he told the sympathetic Lady Halberton of the loss of his wife. The achievement of sentiment in Jocelyn marked a fairly high degree of intoxication. In the middle of her description of the Roscarna black-game shooting Gabrielle stopped dead. Radway wondered what on earth had happened to her.

It was a difficult moment, for she hadn't the least idea of its conventional solution. She only knew that somehow she must rescue her father before he became impossible. She supposed that, in the ordinary way, it was his duty and not hers to bring the visit to an end, but she knew that as long as there was whiskey in the decanter he wouldn't dream of going. So she left Radway in the middle of her sentence, walked straight up to Lady Halberton and said, "Good-night," with a staggering abruptness, and before he knew what had happened Lord Halberton was handing Jocelyn his hat.

It took Radway more than a minute to recover from this cold douche; but he was too far gone to let the possibility of romantic developments slip, and before the Hewishes left, he contrived to let Gabrielle know that he wanted to meet her again. "Outside the gates of Trinity College to-morrow at four o'clock," he whispered. She said nothing. He wondered, for one moment, whether she was deeper than he had imagined. Then she looked him full in the eyes and nodded. It gave him a thrill of delight. He found himself listening in a dream to Lady Halberton's reminiscences of the Admiral's garden party, at which they had met, and a maternal appreciation of the accomplishments of her elder daughter, Lady Barbara.