Читать книгу Patience Sparhawk and Her Times - Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton - Страница 21

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The next morning Patience, after breakfast, carried a pair of tongs and a newspaper up to her room. She spread the newspaper on the table, then with the tongs extracted Byron from beneath the bed and laid it on the paper. She wrapped it up and tied it securely without letting her hands come in contact with the cover. That same afternoon she carried the book to the Custom House and threw it behind a row of tall volumes in one of the cases. Long after, Mr. Foord found it there and wondered. He was not at home when she arrived. When he returned she was deep in his arm-chair, reading Gibbon’s “Rome.” He was not without tact, and determined at once to ignore the events of the previous day and night.

“What!” he exclaimed, “are you really giving poor old Gibbon a trial at last? And after all your abuse? But perhaps you won’t find him so dry, after all.”

“I wish to read what is dry,” said Patience. “I’m going to take a course in ancient history.”

“No more poetry and novels?”

“Not a line.” She spoke harshly, and compelled herself to meet Mr. Foord’s eyes. Her own were as hard and as cold as steel. All the soft dreaming light of the past two months had gone out of them. They were the eyes neither of a girl nor of a woman. They looked the eyes of a sexless intellect.

Patience had done the one thing which a girl of fifteen can do when crushed with problems; she had twitched her shoulders and flung them off. She comprehended that her intellect was her best friend, and plunged her racked head into the hard facts which required utmost concentration of mind. The sweet vague dreams of the past were turned from in loathing. If she thought of them at all it was with fierce resentment that she had become conscious of her womanhood. The stranger was thrust out of memory. She went no more to the tower. The owl hooted in his loneliness, and she drew the bed-clothes over her ears. When she walked through the woods, to and from the town, she recited Gibbon in synopsis. She spent the day in Mr. Foord’s library, returning home in time to get supper. She did her household duties mechanically, and the eyes of mother and daughter never met. The man Oscar kept out of her way.

Miss Galpin had gone to San Francisco and would return no more: she was to marry. Rosita was visiting in Santa Barbara. Manuela, now a young lady, was devoting the greater part of her time to the Hotel Del Monte, where the flower and vegetables of San Francisco gather in summer. She went up to the tanks in the morning and to the dances in the evening; and informed Patience, one day as they met on the street, that she was having a perfectly gorgeous time, and had met a man who was too lovely for words.

The long hot days and the foggy nights wore slowly away. Patience grew thinner, her face harder. Mr. Foord did his best to divert her, but his resources were limited. She peremptorily forbade him to allude to the romance of Monterey, and he took her out in his old buggy and talked of Gibbon’s “Rome.”

Once they drove through the grounds of Del Monte—the trim artificial grounds that are such an anomaly in that valley of memories. On the long veranda of the great hotel of airy architecture people sat in the bright attire of summer. Matrons rocked and gossiped; girls talked eagerly to languid youths that sat on the railing. It was all as unreal to Patience as the fairy-land of her childhood, when she had hunted for fays and elves in the wood. She stared at the scene angrily, for the first time feeling the sting of the social bee.

“A vain frivolous life those people lead,” remarked Mr. Foord, who disapproved of The World. “A waste of time and God’s best gifts, which makes them selfish and heartless. Empty heads and hollow hearts.”

But Patience, gazing at those girls in their gay dainty attire, the like of which she had never seen before, experienced a sudden violent wish to be of them, empty head, hollow heart, and all. They looked happy and free of care. The very atmosphere of the veranda seemed full of colour and music. Above all, they were utterly different from Patience Sparhawk, blessed and enviable beings. Even the frivolity of the scene appealed to her, so sick unto death of serious things.