Читать книгу Mine Inheritance - Frederick Niven - Страница 17

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With the boats came a letter from my mother in which she told me they were greatly perturbed because of certain articles they had been reading in several journals about the folly of Lord Selkirk’s scheme. Other news she gave me also: of the marriage of my brother James to Janet Lennox.

To Janet! My chief reason for leaving home I could not name for certain. Partly I had wished to be free of my elder brother’s suzerainty; partly I had wished to emancipate myself from my own tantalising vacillation over the distracting Janet.

So brother James had married her! Well, it served him ri—no, even on the point of saying so, “served him right,” a sense of blood being thicker than water made me stop, and—“Poor James,” said I to myself. Would she in the end, I wondered, break him, or would he in the end break her? Or would they live the sort of cat and dog life that perhaps both enjoyed? For myself such a life would not be enjoyable but, recalling each of them, it seemed that perhaps they would find a harsh inexplicable pleasure in it. Poor James!

And then I laughed, laughed at myself. For some time before leaving home, so constantly was I called to account, haled to the domestic court, there had been growing in me a tendency to search my actions for possible censorable points. I had left just in time, I think, to be saved from settled self-distrust. Had I stayed longer I might have begun to recant my every statement, repent my every action, and become intimidated into a constant perching on the stool of repentance. But I laughed at myself then, thinking of how little more than a year after having fled—and fled with a divided mind!—from the infatuating Janet, my whole being had been shaken by the mere glimpse of another girl as she passed through a room in which I sat.

Often since that evening at Fort Gibraltar I had hoped to see the half-breed girl again. In what spare time I had I frequently walked across the plain and dallied past the gates of Fort Gibraltar, or rode that way on a horse borrowed from some Indians after learning something of horsemanship, feeling sufficiently confident in the saddle. The disturbance in me was always feverishly renewed on these expeditions, the object of which was to have at least another glisk, another glimpse of her.