Читать книгу Patience Sparhawk and Her Times - Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton - Страница 8

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After Patience had put the kitchen in order she went up to her room. She slept at one end of the house, her mother at the opposite. Several of the hired men occupied a dormitory between; the rest slept over the dairy.

She lit her candle and began to undress, then extinguished the flame suddenly and went down stairs and out of the house. She felt sullen and heavy and depressed, and knew the remedy.

The moon was at the full; the great ploughed fields were a sea of silver; the dark pines on the hills opened their aisles to cataracts of crystal, splashing through the green uplifted arms. Strange shadows moved amidst the showers of cold light, twisting rhythmically under the touch of the night wind.

Patience loved nature too passionately to fear her in any mood or hour. She sped over the rough field, climbed the fence, and walked hastily toward the Mission, pausing now and again to inhale the rich perfumes of Spring. The ruin looked like the skeleton of a mammoth caught in a phantom iceberg. Even the dark things that haunted it were touched to beauty by the silver light pouring through the storm-beaten rose window over the massive doors, into the abysms between the arches.

Patience skirted the long body of the church with haste; mouldering skeletons lay under the floor, and like all imaginative minds she had a lively horror of the dead. She entered the open doorway and ascended the steep spiral stair in the tower. The steps were cut from solid stone and were worn by the trampling of many feet. As she neared the top she called—

“Tu wit! Tu woo!” and was promptly answered.

As her chin appeared above the floor of the little room, where the moonlight came through hollow casements, an old grey owl, a large wise solemn owl, advanced from the wall with slow and stately step; and despite his massive dignity there was expectancy in his mien.

“Poor Solomon,” said Patience, contritely. “I forgot your supper.” She climbed into the room and attempted to pat his head; but when he saw that the hand was empty, he flapped his wings, and turning his back upon her, retired to the wall, blinking indignantly.

Patience laughed, then sighed, and sank on her knees before the low window overlooking the ocean. The blue bay still whispered to the white sands sparkling like diamond dust in the moonlight, the yellow stars winking in its clear depths. But the ocean was uneasy, and hurtled reiterantly in great deep-throated waves at the rocky shore as if its giant soul were in final rebellion against this conventional war with a passive foe. About Point Lobos its voice waxed trumpet-toned. It shouldered itself into mighty waves and tossed the spray into writhing shapes. Everything else was at rest. The great forces of nature were the angry prisoners of the tides. The moon grinned in his superior way. The little stars seemed to say: “Up here we are quite composed, and as vain as pretty women. If you would only keep quiet you would make such a fine large looking-glass.”

As Patience gazed out upon the beautiful scene, her young mind shifted its impressions. She forgot her life, and began to dream in a vague sweet way. Not of a lover. Despite the fact that she had manufactured a composite which occupied a pedestal in her imagination, she thought little about love. Her reveries were a wandering of her ego through the books she had read, environed by the nature whom she knew only in lovely profile. Had she lived her fifteen years on the sterile plains of Soledad, she might perhaps have been as harsh and bitter as its sands, her soul as grey, so susceptible was she to the subtle influence of great externals. But Monterey had saved her, and on nights like this she felt as if she too were flooded with crystal light, now and again clouded by something which perturbed, yet vibrated like the music of the pines.

When in a particularly romantic mood, she imagined herself Mariana in the “Moated Grange,” or hummed “The Long Long Weary Day,” and tried to feel sad, but could not. She never felt sad in her tower, with the owl on guard and the slighted dead in the church below. Sometimes she took herself to task for not having a proper amount of sentiment, but concluded that no one could be unhappy when so high above the world and all its hateful details. Occasionally she looked longingly at the perpendicular mountain: it was many times higher than her tower; but she was a lazy little thing, and would not climb.

As she knelt, gazing out on the ocean, or up at the spangled night, she was a very different-looking being from the sharp practical child that had exhorted old Billy and berated her mother. The loosened hair clung softly about her pale face, whose freckles the kind moon with his white brush painted out. Her mouth had relaxed its stern lines. Her eyes were full of the moon’s shimmer, and of something else—the struggling light of a developing soul.

Patience’s soul had taken care of itself and showed virility in spite of the forces at war against it. What the little battling spark strove for, puzzled Patience even at that unanalytical age. Religion—Christianity, to be more exact—said nothing to her; it appealed to no want in her; even the instinct was lacking. John Sparhawk had clung to the rigid faith of his fathers with a desperation which Patience, child as she was, had half divined. He had had prayers night and morning, and compelled his daughter to learn her catechism and many chapters of the Bible. After his death Mr. Foord took her to church on Sunday mornings and occasionally read her a little lecture. She listened respectfully, but felt no interest.

Nevertheless, when alone in her tower at night, when she had set her foot on its lowest step with deliberate intent to get as high above the earth as she could, she was conscious of an upreaching of the spiritual entity within her, a wordless demand for the something higher and holier of which the supreme beauty of the Universe is symbolical.