Читать книгу Paddy-The-Next-Best-Thing - Gertrude Page - Страница 14

For several paces after the encounter at Warrenpoint, neither Jack nor Eileen spoke, and though he tried hard to see her face, she kept it resolutely turned from him toward the Loch.

“Is Mr. Blake’s friend someone staying with them?” she asked at last.

“I expect so,” he answered. “I don’t remember ever seeing her before.”

Eileen was feeling a little sick and dazed, so when they met Paddy and Ted Masterman, she suggested at once that they should return home, and Paddy, feeling irritated with things in general, agreed with alacrity.

“Oh, by the way,” she remarked later, as they were going up to bed, “Mr. Masterman and I met Lawrence Blake with that Harcourt girl, who used to stay with them. She’s a cousin or something, don’t you remember? Lawrence used to say she could talk as fast as three ordinary women in one, but that as she never expected to be answered, it was rather a rest, because you needn’t listen. That’s how he looked to-night; as if he were taking a rest.”

“Are you sure it was Miss Harcourt? I didn’t recognise her.”

“Quite sure. She looks very different with her hair up, that’s all. I should have stopped them, but I heard her say they were very late, and they seemed in a hurry, so I didn’t.”

Eileen turned away in silence, but a weight was lifted off her mind.

The following day, as she was sitting reading by the water, while Jack and Paddy were out fishing, a firm step on the shingle suddenly roused her, and Lawrence himself approached.

“How do you do?” he said, with a pleasant smile. “I came down here before going up to the house, rather expecting to find some of you such a beautiful afternoon.”

Eileen shook hands simply, with the usual greetings, but a lovely flood of colour, that she could not control, spread over her face, and was noted with a certain amount of gratification by Lawrence’s experienced eye.

“It’s pleasant to be seeing old friends again,” he said. “May I sit down?”

She moved to make more room for him, and asked at once after his mother and sisters.

“Mother is very well,” he said, “and the girls are full of frocks and hair-dressing. There’s to be a big dance next month, and I suppose I shall have to stay for it.”

“Were you going away again, then?”

“I rarely stay long anywhere,” a little ambiguously.

“Have you decided where to go?”

“Not quite. I shall not decide until a few days before starting, I expect. But how is everybody at The Ghan House? Does his lordship of the rectory hate me as cordially as ever? I see Paddy has not yet managed to get herself transported to a better clime.”

While Eileen replied to his questions, her slender white hands played a little nervously with a flower, and her deep eyes fluttered between the distant mountains and her companion’s face. She felt he was studying her, and knew there was admiration in his eyes, and her heart felt foolishly glad.

“Have we been away three whole years?” he said presently. “How strange! It seems like three months now I am back. Shall I find everyone as unchanged as you, Eileen?”

“I am three years older,” she said, with a little smile.

“Yes, but there are some people to whom the years make very little difference. I think you are one of them.”

“Yet I feel different.”

“How?” looking at her keenly.

“It wouldn’t be easy to describe. It is just different, that’s all,” and she gazed a little wistfully toward the mountains.

“I expect you are getting too thoughtful,” he said.

“You ought to go away somewhere, and see something of the world outside these mountains.”

“I am very fond of the mountains,” she told him simply. “I don’t want to go away. I do not think any place could be as lovely as this.”

“That is where you are wrong. I acknowledge the scenery among these mountains is very beautiful, but there are heaps of equally and indeed more beautiful places in the world.

“The only thing is one gets tired,” relapsing into a languid manner, that Eileen could not but see had gained upon him during his absence. “I’d give something not to have seen, nor heard, nor learned, more than you have. To have it all before me, instead of all behind.”

“But surely,”—leaning forward with ill-concealed eagerness—“the future is just brimming over with interest and possibilities for you.”

“Why for me particularly?”

“I was thinking of your brains, and your money, and your position—why you have everything to make life interesting.”

He shrugged his shoulders, and the expression on his thin cynical mouth was not pleasant.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. It’s too much bother altogether. I’ve seen behind the scenes too much to care; it’s all rather rotten at the core, you know—everything is.”

Eileen looked pained, and gazed away to her beloved mountains. “I am sorry you feel like that,” she said simply; “it is all so beautiful to me.”

“Just at present perhaps—but by and by—”

“I hope it will be, by and by also. Anyhow, I shall still have my mountains.”

“And after all they’re nothing in the world but indentations and corrosions on the crust of a planet, that is one in millions.”

There was a pause, then she asked slowly: “Is that how you look upon human beings?”

“Yes, more or less. You can’t deny we are only like midges, coming from nowhere, and vanishing nowhere; or at best, ants hurrying and scurrying over an ant-hill. ‘Life is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ ”

“Ah, no! no!” she cried, turning to him with a beseeching look in her eyes. “If that were so, where would be the use of all its sacrifices, and conquests, and nobleness?”

“Where is the use of them?” in callous tones.

She looked at him blankly a moment, then got up and walked to the water’s edge, feeling almost as if he had struck her.

After a moment he followed, and stood beside her, idly tossing pebbles into the water.

“Take my advice, Eileen,” he said, “and don’t get into the way of caring too much about things. It’s a mistake. Later on, your feelings will only turn, and hit you in the face.”

“And what is it your favourite poet, Browning, says?” she repeated half to herself—

“One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,

Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake.”

“It sounded well,” he sneered. “No doubt if I were to write a novel it would be full of beautiful sentiments that sounded well—and I should care that for them in my heart,” and he snapped his fingers carelessly.

She looked up and descried Jack and Paddy coming over the Loch toward them.

“Here are the others,” she said, almost with an air of relief. “They have just seen us and are coming in.”

“Hullo!” cried Paddy, as they came within earshot. “I hope your Serene Highness is well.”

“Very well, thank you,” replied Lawrence, giving her his hand as the boat reached the landing-stage. “I was just remarking to your sister, that you had not succeeded in getting yourself transported to a better clime yet!”

“No, the old proverb seems to be reversed in my case, I am not too good to live, but too good to die.”

“Or else too bad, and so you are always getting another chance given you,” remarked Jack.

“Be quiet, Jack O’Hara, for the pot to call the kettle black is the height of meanness. Come out of that boat and say ‘how do you do’ prettily to this great man from abroad,” and her brown eyes shone bewitchingly.

Everybody in the neighbourhood teased Paddy, and Lawrence was no exception.

“ ’Pon my soul!” he exclaimed with feigned surprise, “I believe you’re growing pretty, Paddy.”

“Nothing so commonplace,” tossing her small head jauntily. “What you take for mere prettiness is really soul. I am developing a high-minded, noble, sanctified expression; as I consider it very becoming to my general style of conversation. Father thinks it is ‘liver,’ but that unfortunately is his lack of appreciation, and also his saving grace for all peculiarities.”

“I should call it pique,” said Jack, “if by any chance I was ever treated to a glimpse of anything so utterly foreign in the way of expressions, on your physiognomy.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t recognise it,” was the quick retort. “ ‘Like to like’ they say; and I never find it is any use employing anything but my silliest and most idiotic manner and expression with you.

“But with Lawrence, of course,” running on mischievously, “it is only the high-souled and the deeply intellectual that he is in the least at home with. Witness his companion last night, with whom he was so engrossed he could not even stop and shake hands with old friends from cradlehood.”

“To tell you the honest truth,” said Lawrence, “my cousin, Miss Harcourt, had got so thoroughly into the swing of some extraordinary harangue, which required nothing but an ejaculation every five minutes from me, and seemed to go delightfully on without any further attention whatever, that it would have been downright cruelty to interrupt such a happy state of affairs. I knew I should be seeing you all to-day, and at the last moment my heart failed me. I might add that the harangue lasted until we got home, and a final ejaculation on the door-step, with a fervent ‘by Jove,’ satisfied, her beyond my best expectations. If my life had depended upon it, I could not have told anyone what she had been talking about.”

“It must simplify life tremendously, to have such a perfect indifference to good manners,” said Paddy, who could never resist a possible dig at Lawrence.

To her, he was the essence of self-satisfied superiority, and she apparently considered it one of her missions in life to bring him down to earth as much as possible. Lawrence found it on the whole amusing, and was not above sparring with her.

“You are improving,” he remarked, with a condescension he knew would annoy her; “that is a really passable retort for you.”

“I am glad that you saw the point. I was a little afraid you might have grown more dense than ever, after being absent from Ireland so long.”

“Ah! Lawrence Blake!” exclaimed a voice close at hand, as the General and Mrs. Adair joined them from a side walk. “How are you? I’m very glad to see you back again. We all are, I’m sure,” and he bowed with old-world courtliness.

Lawrence thanked him, and walked on a few paces with Mrs. Adair to answer her warm inquiries for his mother and sisters.

Afterward he told them about the dance to take place shortly, for his sisters’ “coming out” and left Paddy doing a sort of Highland Fling with Jack round the tennis court to let off her excitement. She tried to make her sister join in, but Eileen only smiled a little wistfully, and when no one was looking, stole off by herself to the seat down by the water, where Lawrence had found her in the afternoon.

There she sat down and leaned her chin on her hand, and gazed silently at the whispering Loch.

Was she glad or sad?

She hardly knew.

She could not forget the unmistakable admiration in his eyes, and yet—and yet—

“Like midges coming from nowhere and vanishing nowhere, or wits hurrying and scurrying over an ant-hill,” she repeated vaguely. “Ah! he could not have meant that—surely—surely he could not … For if so, what could one ant be to him more than another?”

For a moment her heart was heavy, then she remembered his fondness for his mother and took comfort again.

“It is only that someone or something has disappointed him,” she told herself, “and it has made him bitter and cynical, but it is only a passing mood. By and by he will change again, and perhaps I can help him.

“Yes,” her eyes glowed softly, “perhaps I can help him to find faith again, and to be happy instead of hard and indifferent.”

The stars came out and a crescent moon hung over the mountains.

The night was gloriously beautiful—gloriously still—and a deep restfulness stole over her spirit. In the deep, silent depths of her Celtic imagination, in which dwelt ever paramount, before all, that divine love of beauty which imbues a too often prosaic world with a vague wonder of loveliness, and fair promise, she saw only the heights to which men might rise, and the power of goodness, and held to her ideals in the face of all destroying.

She was aroused at last by a step approaching over the shingle that was so like the step of the afternoon that she started and held her breath in wondering expectation.

But it was only Jack, seeking for her with anxious qualms about the damp night air, and a certain glow in his eyes when he found her, which might have told her many things, had she had leisure to observe it.

“You had better come in, Eileen,” he said simply. “It is too damp to sit by the water. I have been looking for you everywhere; I was so afraid you would take cold.”

She got up at once, and with a murmured word of thanks, followed him silently to the house, still lost in a far-off dream of happiness.