Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 14

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The Lady Hermione Cranston, bride of little more than a fortnight, swathed her tall, blue-habited figure in the fur cloak which Havers held out to her, and stood for a while in quiet contemplation of the tail of the Cottesmore Hunt—her husband among them—jig-jogging white and scarlet up that short hill which leads alongside Laxton’s Covert toward Melton Mowbray. Then, tired from the morning’s unaccustomed gallop, she mounted to the rear seat of the Clement-Talbot, let Havers wrap the carriage-rug about her knees, and told him, “Home!”

As the big car gathered speed past the cross-roads and headed purring for “Whissendine village, two grooms eyed it with the curiosity of their kind.

“Who’s that?” asked the one of them. “Yankee?”

“Yankee!” laughed the other. “Not much. That’s old Rorkton’s daughter. Her that got married the other day. Not done so bad for herself, has she?”

Hermione, already three hundred yards away, did not overhear the comment, yet, momentarily, her thoughts ran almost parallel to it. After years of comparative poverty, years during which anxiety for her own and her boy’s future had etched itself deep and deeper into the surface of her young mentality, it seemed strange to lean back in one’s own car and realize the perpetual pettifogging nag of material considerations forever silenced. “Arthur,” she thought in that moment, “is safe—safe!”

The thought of Arthur’s safety was very pleasant; and as the car purred on, slowing through Whissendine, gathering speed once more when they rounded the red Methodist chapel and climbed past the windmill toward open country, her mind repeated it.

“Arthur’s safe,” repeated Hermione’s mind; and then, “We’re both of us safe—safe for all time!”

But at the second thought the violet eyes darkened doubtful under the hunting-veil, and the faintest smile of self-bewilderment crinkled the scarlet of her lips. “Is that why I married Gerald?” she asked herself; and again, “Were those my only reasons?”

For nearly half a mile she tried to puzzle out the complex motives which had driven her into this second marriage; till suddenly her habitual sense of humor, that curious capacity for inward fun which had alone enabled her to withstand the stresses of the recent years, reasserted its control; and—the catchwords “Safety First!” formulating themselves whimsically in her brain—she dismissed introspection with a laugh, to resume her contemplation of the country-side.

The car swung on, revealing, with each switchback of the road, fresh vistas of rolling ridged and furrowed green. This Leicestershire was Hermione’s own county. In the old days she had known every fence, every field and furrow of it. So that now, even as the thought of financial safety seemed pleasant, so did it seem pleasant to recognize each old familiar landmark—each memoried gateway, each patch of brown coppice, each lane-turning and each farm-roof that appeared and disappeared past the hunched shoulders of her uniformed chauffeur and the hurrying windows of her homing car.