Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 21

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But next morning, as the Rolls-Royce swung away over the tar-macadam from Oakham toward Lincolnshire, there was no fear of her husband in Hermione’s mind. This man who sat talking by her fur-coated side might not be of her world; but at least he was helpful, and interested—far more interested than her legal advisers, or her father when on various occasions she had consulted him—in the problem that had haunted her like a nightmare ever since Tony’s death.

“There’s mismanagement somewhere,” he told her, as Lees, honking furiously, slackened pace round the dangerous stone-wall turning at Empingham; “and I mean to get to the bottom of it.”

Then he fell silent till they made well-churched Stamford, and beyond Stamford, pale sepia on the undulating sky-line, the woods which hid Cosgrave.

Looking on those woods, all the feudalist rose up in Lady Hermione. This was Arthur’s inheritance, the inheritance for sake of which she must strive to bring him up worthy. One day, perhaps—thanks to this man at her side—Arthur would come into his own; would rule this wide demesne not as his father had ruled it, but in quiet honor, in orderliness and decency.

The woods loomed close and closer, bright in the winter sunshine. Their car rounded the last blind turning, the last brown curve of unbroken boundary wall, and so came to the high wrought-iron gates. But now, suddenly as it had come on her, the little mood of feudal overconfidence deserted Hermione. Cosgrave, as all the old things for which Cosgrave stood, was out of date, decaying, the last anachronism of her own order. Time’s self had betrayed the eagles above those gates. Broken-beaked, they were, and weather-beaten as the rheumy-eyed old woman who, at Lees’s hooting, came out from the dilapidated lodge to wrestle ineptly with their rusty fastenings.

At last the gates swung creaking on their unoiled hinges; and the old woman, recognizing her, advanced bobbing and stuttering to the window of their car.

“M’lady,” stuttered the old woman. “M’lady! Us didn’t know you were coming.”

They left her still stammering apologies; and their car gathered bumping way, along a pot-holed gravel road, past the tumble-down home-farm, deserted of cattle as of men. Presently the gravel road petered out to a grass-grown cart-track. Presently they reached the dim, ill forested larch woods. “Road’s pretty bad, sir,” said Lees, stopping for a moment.

“Never mind the road. Go on!” ordered Cranston.

They went on, the car rocking on its springs, till they made an avenue of unlopped elms, either side of which sloped deer-cropped park-lands. At the end of the avenue were other gates, open—and beyond these, Cosgrave itself.

The great house of Arthur’s inheritance stood vast as the eighteenth-century palace of which it was replica, broad and high and massive-pedimented on Italian terraces. But even at first glance its long desertion was apparent. The unpruned roses of the terrace-walls had gone back to tangles of leafless dog-brier, the unweeded flower-beds to graves of dock and twitch. Moss and lichen had eaten deep into pitted statuary and flaking stucco. No water jetted from the bone-dry fountain-basins. The twin eagles above the flanking archway, which led to stables capable of housing a cavalry regiment, were time-defaced and weather-beaten as the eagles of the entrance-gates.

Yet it was not until they had circled the terraces; not until, leaving the car, they had climbed a giant stairway to stand knocking at the pillared center doors whose dark paint was one peeling blister; not until hobnailed boots came noisy across creaking boards, and a tousle-headed, gray-bearded caretaker, stuttering as the lodge-keeper had stuttered, admitted them into cold and musty gloom, that Hermione comprehended the full neglect, the full hopelessness of Cosgrave.

The house might have been a vault. They wandered, the graybeard stuttering at their side, through chamber upon gigantic chamber, where plundered wall-spaces betrayed—square by frame-grimed square—how picture after unheirloomed picture had gone to pay the price of Tony Cosgrave’s prodigality, and the sheeted furniture loomed ghost-like in the dim rays that filtered through the crazy window-shuttering. They wandered, up a staircase whose marble struck cold through Hermione’s thin shoe-soles, down corridor upon dusty corridor, into enormous bedrooms whose curtains hung mildew-tattered from tester-poles of tarnished gilt. Everywhere was dirt, decay, neglect. In the attics the very floors rotted; and fungus sprouted toadstool-wise from the moldering wall-papers. The odor of the whole unventilated place was as the odor of a tomb.

At last Gerald finished his inspection; and they came back, the graybeard still at their side, to the long emptiness of the ball-room. Here no shutters barred the windows; and through the grime of them Hermione could see yet more terraces, and beyond the terraces, backed by the gloom of yet more larch woods, the gleam and glitter of the home-park lakes.

The caretaker fumbled to open one of the high French casements; and, breathing deep of the grateful sunshine, she followed him and her husband out of doors.

So far, save for an occasional mutter of disapproval, Gerald had hardly spoken. Now, however, he began to talk with the old graybeard; questioning him with sharp decisive questions; waiting, admirably patient, on his long-winded answers.

Hermione scarcely grasped the purport of those questions. Listless, she stood, now eying the house and now the lake below it. To her, as she looked on them, the house seemed all important, the lake and the woods mere scenery. And of what use was scenery? Even this beauty, even this sunshine could not banish the misery which the deserted chambers of Arthur’s inheritance had inspired in her.

Gerald and the caretaker talked on; but now their voices blurred and dithered in her listless ears. Her heart ached for the things that might have been, for the dreams that Tony had slain. Arthur, her little Arthur, would never rule this wide demesne; would never walk these terraces on some cool evening of early springtime, when the buds bloomed purple on the larches and the wild-fowl flighted low toward the quiet mirror of the misted lakes. She, Arthur’s mother, would never hear, from out of the tangle of these gardens, the merry barking of house-dogs and the sharp prattle of Tony’s grandchildren.

Never! All those dreams, and all that other greater dream, the dream of her love for Tony, were dead. Better, then, to bury love, bury all the joys and all the shames of it, here, at Cosgrave, in the vault that Tony had made of his forefathers’ home!

So, as she thought, the Lady Hermione buried her last dream, her last heartache; and burying them heard—across their imagined grave—the voice of her new husband.

“I don’t quite know what we can do about the house,” said Gerald Cranston. “But one thing’s certain”—he pointed with his stick across the lakes toward the woods—“and that is that if your agent Fordham had done his plain duty, he’d have turned your loss into a profit more than two years ago. Dash it, any man in his senses knows that you only need a circular saw and an engine for cutting larches into pit-props.”

The caretaker had disappeared; and Gerald Cranston’s lady, laying her gloved hand on her new husband’s powerful forearm, smiled up into his serious eyes. “Since I can’t love him,” ran the thoughts of Gerald Cranston’s lady, “the least I can do is to be grateful....”