Читать книгу This Little World - Francis Brett Young - Страница 7

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Of all his possessions Uffley Mill held the most cherished place in Miles Ombersley’s mind. In his boyhood, when all distance was magnified, it had seemed to him romantically remote and inaccessible. The Mill enshrined memories of heaped farmhouse teas and mugs of pale cider and of the one unforgettable moment of triumph in which, instructed by Eli Lydgate, he had caught his first trout.

The Lydgates had rented Uffley for three generations, and the mill was the sole survivor of the two ascribed to Urse D’Abitot, his wife’s ancestor, in Domesday. That was why Miles Ombersley had so stiffly resented his lawyer’s suggestion of selling it. It was hard to guess how much of the original mill-house remained; for when once a certain degree of antiquity is passed, the works of men (no less than themselves) have an aspect of agelessness. In Miles’s memory the building had always been shapeless and old and creaky, with low lintelled doorways beneath which a tall head—such as that of his friend Eli Lydgate—must be ducked; its sagging timbers complained of their centuries of tension; its flagged floor had sunk three feet below the level of the garden—unless, perhaps, it was the surface of the ground which had risen by gradual, infinitesimal accretions of dust and mould. On one side the leat and the stagnant depths of the mill-pond, where pike basked and floundered amid the flat leaves of water-lilies—on two others the trouty swirls of the Chaddesbourne Brook: Uffley Mill, with its dripping, moss-grown wooden water-wheel, stood well-nigh islanded by silent or singing water. And beyond the brook, overhanging its marly banks, lay Foxhall Wood, the impenetrable fastness from which it sprang. Set apart by a space so narrow that at sunset the shadow of trees thrown over the stream seemed to fall like a stealthy paw within a pace of the threshold, the wood and the house, Miles remembered, had both seemed to be watchful and drowsily alive, with a wariness resembling that of wild animals facing each other, crouched and motionless and rather frightening, so that he had not been unwilling to take Eli Lydgate’s strong hand when they went in to tea.

Now that he came to think of it, Eli Lydgate must surely be the only friend of his boyhood on the Chaddesbourne estate. Skirting Foxhall Wood on the day of his first visit to Uffley after his return he couldn’t help wondering what Eli would look like now. The mill, he supposed, would seem just as it had been, though probably smaller; but “young Lydgate,” who was fifteen years older than himself, might be startling; for, apart from his age, the man had had a strange history. In his youth and in early manhood Miles Ombersley remembered him well, as a gaunt, tall figure of a man with bold, rough-hewn features and the remarkable combination of red hair and crisping beard with dark eyes that appeared to smoulder beneath craggy brows. Even with the son of his landlord, Eli’s speech had been harsh and habitually curt, his manner ruthless. He lived, it appeared, in a world of his own: a lonely, forbidding world which few neighbours were minded to enter. All the Lydgates habitually “kept themselves to themselves,” and it was typical of the family’s nature when Eli, in early middle life, chose to marry a “foreigner”—Chaddesbourne left it at that—who had come into the district as lady’s maid to the elder Miss Abberley, and to whom he had given a lift one day driving home from Wychbury.

Mrs. Lydgate, who, in fact, came from Belgium, was a small shy creature with jet-black hair parted in the middle and a pale, placid face which, whenever she spoke (which was rarely and with an odd accent), seemed to glow with a swift incandescent vivacity. She was a Papist, so Miles had been told; every Sunday her husband drove her to the Roman Catholic chapel at Stourton to hear Mass. She harboured exotic graces, such as playing the piano (he had bought one for her) and singing quick, pattering songs, supposed to be French, and serving up spiced “kickshaws” fit to rot a man’s stomach. It was difficult, indeed, for Chaddesbourne to believe that such a strange woman could be moral. That was why, people said, Eli kept her cooped up at Uffley, so that nobody in the village ever knew more of her than the glimpse of her small, bird-like figure, perched high upon Eli’s dog-cart, and of her quick, illuminating smile—until, having borne him three children—two boys and a girl—she died, as quietly and as mysteriously as she had arrived.

After this Eli Lydgate grew more taciturn and Uffley more isolated than ever. His small family grew up and was scattered. He had never “got on” with his sons, and there was no work for young men at Uffley. In the days of his prime—those days that Miles Ombersley remembered—the Chaddesbourne farmers grew wheat and baked their own bread in a cooling-oven. Day by day loaded wagons were drawn to the mill with sacks to be hoisted. Miles remembered the sound of grain as it slid down the shute with a seething hiss like that of a smooth sea slowly creaming on shingle, while, below, the great grit-stones rumbled and made the floor shudder. He could see the wheel turning over so slowly that it always seemed to be stopping, yet never stopped; he could see the drops of silver splashed from its buckets and the boiling race below churned to rainbow spray. But no grist had come to Uffley Mill for many a day....

Indeed, when Miles Ombersley approached it that afternoon (it was May, and Foxhall Wood was floored with a mist of bluebells), it seemed to him as though the place had not merely shrunk (as he half expected), but gone grey—so silvery were its timbers—and then died in its sleep. It was one of those bad days for Uffley when the north wind blows, carrying over the hills fine dust from the Black Country’s smoke-screen and blearing the sky with a yellowish film which absorbs light and flattens every colour in the landscape. As he rode up to the door over the wide bridge that spanned the mill-race, his horse’s tread gave a wooden sound, unreal and hollow, and the face of the house looked as blank and disused as if it had been abandoned because of some curse.

Dismounting, he knocked at the door, but nobody answered. Then he heard steps behind him and, turning, perceived a shape, human—or rather sub-human—hurrying towards him with the gait of a land-crab. It was the kind of form that might have been expected to emerge from that mass of worm-eaten timber. Its spine, distorted in youth by the dead-weight of flour-sacks, had been twisted; one shoulder was tilted higher than the other, so that even as he walked (or shambled) he still seemed to carry an invisible burden and his head was bowed. The eyes that peered upward from beneath his furrowed forehead and tangled hair—they were gentle as those of some patient animal, and quite incredibly blue—appeared to regard Miles Ombersley with mingled surprise and pleasure.

“Why, bless us, bistna thee Master Miles!” he said. “Don’t yo’ tell tell me yo’ dai’ remember me?” (Could this be Lydgate? Miles Ombersley thought. Was that possible? He smiled uneasily.) “Yo’ remember Joe Warley, Master Miles, what used to dig worms for yo’ when yo’ came fishing. Us ’as been looking to see yo’, me and the gaffer, this long time. Thee ’asna changed that much neither, not considering. Come inside, Master Miles.”

“A boy ... a man ... a hobgoblin who used to dig worms for me!” Miles Ombersley thought. “Joe Warley ...” The name raised an echo somewhere, but that was all. Yet this welcome was genuine; the creature seemed pleased to see him. “Of course I remember you,” he said.

At that moment the door moved inwards. A young girl had timidly opened it. She had a pink and white face, and cheeks to which colour ran quickly when she saw a stranger standing so close; her eyes were coal-black, her brows straight, like a pencil-stroke in a Japanese drawing; she had a small, tender mouth, lips brilliantly red, which she opened now with a little gasp of surprise. Her hair, drawn smoothly down from the middle line, displayed a white parting.

“A pretty child,” Ombersley thought. “She doesn’t look English: a Spanish Madonna.” He remembered hearing that Lydgate had married a foreigner—but could it be possible that he had a daughter as young as this? “No older than my Catherine,” he thought. Joe Warley was speaking:

“Now, Mary, my dear, you run along quick and tell your grandpa it be Master Miles—Captain Ombersley, rather. Hark at me forgettin’ my manners!” he chuckled; “but old times is old times. Step in, Master Miles, step in!”

Miles Ombersley ducked his head and stepped down; he remembered the drop of the threshold.

And the house, though no grain had been ground in the mill for long enough, was still permeated (unless that were the hunchback’s clothes) by the nutty odour of flour. Joe Warley, still chuckling, followed him as he groped his way over the sunken flagstones.

“So that girl is Eli’s grandchild?” he asked.

“Ah, that’s our Harry’s girl, that is. ’E were lost in the war, our Harry; but his wife took up with another chap before Harry was killed. The wench, she takes after the mistress, her grandma, like. Two steps up, this time. Look out, Master Miles!”

Miles Ombersley stumbled up. Yes, this room was exactly the same as he had always remembered it: black oak furniture, knotted and uneven as if its shape were the product of growth rather than carpentry; bright brass and pale pewter gleaming in the light of a wood fire flickering in vast recesses of chimney; geraniums in bloom on the window-sill (how their hot scent came back to him!), and there, heavily rising from his seat in the chimney corner, less gigantic by far than he had imagined, but somehow the same, the figure of his youth’s adoration, Eli Lydgate. Miles Ombersley held out his hand; Lydgate grasped it.

“So it’s you, Master Miles!” the familiar voice said. “I’ve been laid by the heels, or else I’ld have come to the Hall. And I couldn’t get down to the funeral: the floods were out. Joe and I had our hands full, I can tell you!”

“I know you’ld have come if you could. Let’s have a look at you, Eli.”

“I’m not much to look at. Not too bad for seventy-five, though—apart from the rheumatism.”

He moved slowly towards the light. “Yes,” Miles thought, “his face is the same, but less harsh than it used to be. With his red hair turned white and his beard cut like that to a point, he’s remarkably like Helen’s father. It’s a face of enormous distinction,” he thought; “you could almost imagine the man had D’Abitot blood in him. And why not? The Lydgates have probably been in the district as long as they have—perhaps even longer.” He said: “Sit down, Eli, and tell me how things have been going in Chaddesbourne.”

Lydgate laughed defensively. “In Chaddesbourne? We know naught of Chaddesbourne here nor Chaddesbourne much more of us. Best ask Mr. Healey. He’ll tell you.”

“He has told me. He’s not encouraging.”

“I pay my rent, don’t I?”

“Indeed you do, Lydgate. I wish some of the others were like you.”

“Meaning Cookson? That isn’t a hard one to guess. I don’t like the man, never did; but he’s called a good farmer. He’s put as much into The Moat as he’s taken out. You try farming yourself, Mr. Miles, and you’ll learn all about it. Mary’s getting us a cup of tea. That won’t be the first cup of tea you’ve drunk in this house.”

“No, indeed! ... Nor the last, I hope.”

Miles thought: “He talks to me as if I were still a boy, and makes me feel like one.” In the gloom—on these days of “blight” it was always dusk at Uffley—he was aware of the girl, Mary Lydgate, passing to and fro as she set the table. She moved softly, like a shadow; and her deft movements, now that he came to think of it, were what one would expect from the delicately shaped hands and feet he had noticed. “She shows breeding, too,” he thought, “but of a different kind;” and, with this, his thoughts went back to Eli Lydgate’s odd marriage, of which he knew nothing but hearsay: the vivid, fragile foreign woman and this rough-hewn, taciturn man who, even now, as the two sat together, after forty-odd years without meeting, had not spoken a word for five minutes by the slow-ticking clock. “What a strange life,” he thought, “for a friendless foreigner, alone, in this creaky house—so old, so remote—with a husband whose words—to say nothing of his thoughts—she probably never quite understood till the day she died. Yet that’s hardly more strange,” he told himself, “than the life of this child, coming back, like a little ghost of the other, to flutter through the same shadows, with no company but this frosty old man and that hobgoblin Warley: they might just as well put her in prison!” Then he thought of his own girl, Catherine (who was, he imagined, about the same age as Lydgate’s granddaughter), and how richly coloured her life must be in comparison. Well, that wasn’t any business of his, he supposed. If she’d come here from a bad home she probably thought Uffley a paradise. Meanwhile, he desired to pursue the subject of Cookson, from which Eli had deftly retreated.

“This man at The Moat ...” he began. “You and I are old friends. You can help me by being candid.”

Eli Lydgate grunted. “I’ve told you. Cookson’s a good farmer, by all accounts, but not a good manager. He’s well liked; and when too many people like a chap it’s apt to turn his head: makes him think he’s a bigger man than he is and forget his station until he comes down with a bump—and then, maybe, it’s too late. George Cookson has too many friends, and they’re not all good ones.”

“Healey speaks very well of him.”

Eli Lydgate was silent. “Ah, that’s where the wind blows,” Miles thought. “What has Healey been up to? You get on well with Healey?” he said.

Once more Lydgate grunted. “An agent is paid to keep tenants quiet. Isn’t that so? I don’t bother him much. I know better than that. You ask him.”

“You mean there are things that want doing here, and that Healey refuses to do them?”

Eli Lydgate laughed bitterly. “Not one penny’s been spent on this place for the last ten years except what I’ve paid myself. Take a look for yourself at the roof of the barn and the rotten gates and fences and the pumps that won’t work. It’s your property, not mine, Mr. Miles, and I’m not complaining.”

“You know money’s been tight, Lydgate.”

“I’ve had cause to know that better than most. And now it’s too late, I take it.”

“Too late? What d’you mean?”

“If you’re going to sell Uffley Mill, you may as well sell me up with it.”

“To sell Uffley Mill ...?”

“Well, it is for sale, isn’t it?”

Looking backward Miles Ombersley saw himself in the smoking-room at The Hall; he saw Dudley Wilburn’s solemn face and heard his dull voice speaking: “A client of mine is interested ... I hinted as much to your father ... a fancy price ...” Sudden fury flared up in him. Something happening behind his back! Was Wilburn in it? He said sharply:

“Where did you get that idea from, Lydgate?”

“It’s what everyone tells us.”

“Then everyone tells you a lie. As long as you’re living or I am, Uffley Mill won’t be sold. You may take that from me. Not a stone, not an acre of it! Now you know where you stand. Let’s shake hands on it.”

They did so in silence. That hand-clasp was an odd gesture for a man so habitually contained as Miles Ombersley. Yet this return to Uffley Mill, with its poignant reminders of youth and of inexorable time, together with the wistful atmosphere of that solitary house, the black wood that watched it, the mournful water, had induced in him a mood that was perilously susceptible to those emotional sentiments which he dreaded and usually suppressed. The tension was broken, fortunately for his self-respect, by a laugh from Lydgate, who said brusquely:

“In that case, Mr. Miles, you’d better have a look at the roof of that barn: I reckon it’s not quite past saving, if you can spare the cost of repairs.”

“I’ll do what I can for you, Lydgate. Never fear that. When you want a thing done, come to me.”

And Miles Ombersley meant what he said. This strange visit, oddly enough, though he had found it disturbing, had done more than anything else during the reaction which set in after his first triumphant enthusiasm on succeeding to Chaddesbourne, to strengthen his sense of rightful possession, his resolve—in spite of the odds against him—to do his duty and win through. That corner of the estate, dilapidated though it might be, was a unique survival of the Chaddesbourne he had dreamed of. The Lydgates had lived at Uffley a hundred years before he was born: a Lydgate still lived there in precisely the same manner as his forbears. “Continuity,” he thought. “A symbol of continuity. And that’s what I’m here for, too.”

Such reflections and aspirations continued to warm and to comfort his soul as, crossing the bridge, he walked his horse down the length of the village. Here the blight which had muffled Uffley all afternoon had been dissipated or transformed by the westering sun into an aureate haze that appeared not merely to lave, but to permeate and infuse the familiar shapes it enveloped. In this light he saw all Chaddesbourne, transfigured, grow golden—from the tawny surface of the road to the quickening hawthorn hedges; from these to the slopes of thatch and their rising smoke; from these, again, to the bursting leaf-buds which, beyond their bare boughs, fledged the ultimate airy twigs of the elms with soft plumage. It was that grateful, that elegiac moment when all creatures that have laboured turn homeward. He passed a hesitant trail of cows, with swaying udders and heavy, sweet breath, and a boy who whistled as he drove them; beyond these, two belated labourers, who halted and stared and touched their caps before they trudged on. From behind a hedge he could hear the impacts of a plunging spade; he could see the stooped shoulders of an old man planting potatoes, the flicker of a robin darting to seize the grubs he upturned; and the smell of the broken soil came over the hedge to meet him. There was no sweeter odour on earth, Miles Ombersley thought.

By the gates of the Hall he heard rooks overhead coming home from their foraging with a babel of harsh cries, a rustle and creak of wings. Leaning down from the saddle, he pushed the gate open; it swung to, the latch clinked. And there, down the length of the terraced walk, between the still water, where Irish yews were mirrored like cypress-spires, and the tulip-splashed border, he perceived a small, lonely shape: the figure of his wife, who, startled by the clink of the gate, looked up, turned towards him, and slowly waved her hand.

That small gesture, made, somehow, pathetic by distance, precipitated Miles Ombersley’s tender mood. He felt almost inclined to tie up his horse to the block and join her; to share with her the last ecstasy of that golden hour. He would slip his arm round the frail slenderness that was so dear to him (she had suffered so much and so bravely!); they would walk to and fro together between the still water and the tulips; she would tell him, like the eager child she still was, of her gardening plans. She herself, indeed, had that pale golden grace which, in autumn, tricks the fancy into sensations of spring.

For one moment he hesitated between inclination and the duty which had forced itself on him during his ride home from Uffley; and, as usually with him, duty won. He rang for the groom, and entering the house made straight for the smoking-room—they called it the office now—where he sat at his desk and composed a careful letter, in which he gave notice to Healey. By the time that it was signed, sealed and stamped the gold outside had faded.