Читать книгу Sword and Gown - George A. Lawrence - Страница 7

In Tresilyan’s face

Fault finds no grace.

So, when the sick man cried out to her, through his sobs, to kiss him and forgive him, the dreary, monotonous voice only answered, “I can kiss you, father;” and when she had laid her icicles of lips on his forehead, she glided 11 out of the room like a ghost that has accomplished its mission and hastens away to its own place. Sir Ewes never tried to call her back; he scarcely spoke at all intelligibly after that; but lay, for the few remaining hours of life, moaning to himself, his face turned to the wall.

For a very short time after her father’s death, Mabel seemed to take a pleasure in roaming about the gardens and woods from which she had been debarred so long; but the walks grew gradually shorter, and she soon shut herself up in the house entirely, seeing only a few of her near relatives. It was one of these who, at her own request, painted the second portrait—a rude performance, but it must have been a likeness. She seemed to feel an odd sort of satisfaction in looking at the two and comparing them. Her brain was somewhat clouded and unsteady; but I fancy she was counting up all the harm and wrong the hard world had done to her, and calculating what amends would be made in the next. I doubt not they were kind and pitiful and indulgent enough there; but on earth she found no source of comfort strong enough to banish from her eyes that terrible look which haunted them within five minutes of her end.

When spirits assemble from the four corners of heaven, how many thousand companions, think you, will greet the Gileadite’s daughter?

Before you saw Cecil Tresilyan’s face, the curve of her neck, and the way her head was set on it, told you that she was by no means exempt from the family failing which had laid its hand so heavily on her ancestors. Yet it was not a hard or habitually haughty, or even a very decided face. There was nothing alarmingly severe about the slight aquiline of the nose; the chin did not look as if it were “carved in marble,” or “clasped in steel,” or as if it were made of any thing but soft flesh prettily dimpled; the delicate scarlet lip, when it curled, rarely went beyond sauciness; though the splendid violet eyes could well express disdain, this was not their favorite expression—and they had many. The head would certainly have been too small had it not been for the glossy masses of dark chestnut hair sweeping down low all round it, smooth and unbroken as a deep river in its first curl over a cataract. Candid friends said her complexion was not bright enough; perhaps they were right; but the color had not forgotten how to come and go there at fitting seasons; at any rate, the grand clear white could never be mistaken for an unhealthy pallor. An extraordinarily good constitution was ever part of a Tresilyan’s inheritance; and if you doubted whether her blood circulated freely you had only to compare her cheek on a bitter March day with some red-and-white ones, when a sharp east wind had forced those last to mount all the stripes of the tricolor. By the way, are not the “roses dipped in milk” going out of fashion just now? A humble but stanch adherent of the house of York, I like to think—how many battle-fields, since Towton, our Flower has won!

But if Cecil’s face was not faultless, her figure was. Had one single proportion been exaggerated or deficient, she could never have carried off her height so lithely and gracefully. She might take twenty poses in a morning, and people always thought they would choose the last one to have her painted in. Here, she was quite inimitable. For instance, women, I believe, used to practice in their own room for hours to catch her peculiar way of half-reclining in an armchair; but the most painstaking of them all never achieved any thing beyond a caricature. Yet no one could accuse her of studying stage-effects. If a trifle of the Incedo Regina marked her walk and carriage, it was à l’Eugénie, not à la Statira.

Indeed, she was thoroughly natural all over; cleverer and more fascinating, certainly, than ninety-nine women out of every hundred; but not one bit more strong-minded, or heroic, or self-denying. She had been very well brought up, and had undeniably good principles; but she would yield to occasional small temptations with perfect grace and facility. Great ones she had never yet encountered; for Cecil, if not quite fancy-free, had only read and perhaps dreamed of passions. She had known one remorse, of which you may hear hereafter (not a heavy allowance, considering her opportunities), and one grief—the death of her mother. She entertained a remarkable reverence for all ministers of the Established Church; yet she was about the last woman alive to have married a clergyman, and would have considered the charge of the old women and schools of a country parish as a lingering and unsatisfactory martyrdom. There never was a more constant attendant at all sorts of divine service; though perhaps the most casual of worshipers had never been more bored than she was by some of the discourses to which she listened so patiently. She would confess this to you at luncheon, and then start for the same church in the afternoon, with an edifying but rather comic expression of resignation. I am sure she would not deliberately have vexed the smallest child; and yet the number of athletic men who ascribed the loss of their peace of mind to her, was, as the Yankees have it, “a caution.” Some of the “regulars,” wary adventuresses of three seasons’ standing, had brought off several pretty good things by following her, and picking up the victims fluttering about helpless in their first despair, just as the keepers after a battue go round the covers with the retrievers.

If there were any more antitheses in her character, they had better speak for themselves hereafter; nor is there much that need be told about her companions.

Mrs. Danvers, or “Bessie,” as she liked to be called, had been Cecil’s last governess, and was retired on full-pay, which, she flattered herself, she earned in the capacity of traveling chaperone and censor; but, inasmuch as when she really held some tutelar authority, her pupil had never taken the slightest notice of her prohibitions, she could hardly be expected now to exercise any very salutary influence or control.

Dick Tresilyan was absurdly proud and fond of his sister, and performed all her behests with a blind obedience; but when he heard that he was to attend her during a whole winter’s residence abroad, he did think that it was stretching her prerogative to the verge of tyranny. No wonder. A dragoon who has lost his horse, a goose on a turnpike-road, or any other popular type of helplessness, does not present so lamentable a picture as a Briton in a foreign land, without resources in himself, and with a rooted aversion to the use of any language except his 12 own. In this case, the victim actually attempted some feeble remonstrance and argument on the subject. Cecil was almost as much astonished as the Prophet was under similar circumstances; but she considered that habits of discussion in beasts of burden and the lower order of animals generally were inconvenient, and rather to be discouraged; so she cut it short, now, somewhat imperiously. Thereupon, Dick Tresilyan slid into a slough of despond, in which he had been wallowing ever since. A faint gleam of sunshine broke in when one of his intimates, hearing he was going to France, suggested “that’s where the brandy comes from;” but it was instantly overclouded by the remark which followed. “I suppose, though, you won’t be able to drink much more of it than you do here:” on realizing which crushing fact, his melancholy became, if possible, more profound than ever. Indeed, since he crossed the Channel, he had spent most of his leisure moments in a sort of chronic blasphemy, which, it is to be hoped, afforded him some slight relief and consolation, as it was wholly unintelligible to his audience; for, to do Dick justice, in his sister’s presence the door of his lips was always strictly guarded.

However, to Dorade they came—hours after their time, of course, but perfectly safe: no accident ever does happen in France to any thing properly booked, except to luggage sent by roulage, to which there attaches the romantic uncertainty of Vanderdecken’s correspondence. Cecil rather liked traveling; it never tired her; so, by midnight she had seen Mrs. Danvers, weary and querulous, to bed—gone through a variety of gymnastics in the way of accolades, with Fanny Molyneux—taken some trouble in inquiring about shooting and other amusements likely to divert her brother from his sorrows—and yet did not feel very sleepy.

They ignore shutters in these climes; and her reflection was still flitting backward and forward across the white window-blinds as Royston Keene came home from the Cercle. He knew the room, or guessed who the shadow belonged to; and as he moved away, after pausing a minute or two, he waved his hand toward it, with a gesture so unwarrantably like a salute that, were silhouettes sensitive or prudish, it might have proved an offense not easily forgiven.