Читать книгу Seibert of the Island - Gordon Young - Страница 24

Oreena told everything that Nada asked to know; and she told much of it with cynical frankness.

Seibert from the first had seemed old to her; and he was not handsome, with his huge, fleshy body and sunburned redness, big white teeth always showing in unconvincing cheerfulness; but he had a heartiness very like contempt for all people, and this had satisfied her dislike of them; he drove his blacks and their overseers, and this was like mastery; his groves grew in straight rows that climbed hills and down again, which was wealth.

Northward lay destiny; and she trotted forth from her father's dark, gloomy house and advanced over Seibert's well-made roads, deliberately to find him.

On the first day that they met he spoke, sweeping off his broad-brimmed panama, showing the hairless, sunburned forehead. She answered aloofly, but she answered. Then with a flaring gesture of a big muscular arm he put the road at her feet, and mentioned the outlook from the hilltop three miles farther on. She thanked him, and rode on until she came to the sweeping view of the great estate which seemed fitting to her hopes.

Not regularly, but often, she rode on his land. They met from time to time. Presently she knew that he was watching out for her. They began to ride together, he boasting and pointing, always respectful; but soon she was aware that he had determined on ownership, and somehow it made her uneasy; she had obscure doubts, felt hesitant, ached for something unknown. Nevertheless, she continued now to ride across to him every morning, though she dreaded the big hands that waved and groped in air, as if blindly reaching, and some day must close. She was a little puzzled by the delay, since by the signs which a woman only can read she knew what lay ahead.

Then one day down at Pulotu a great quantity of crated stuff was taken out of a ship and put on the wharf for Seibert. Wagon-loads of it went creaking up the roads and to his house, which had been enlarged and freshly painted, with blue trim. Sweating and shouting, but delighted in a big, ponderous way, he stood about, ordering this and that into place. He had brought out half a shipload of furnishings. Then he offered it all to her.

She trembled with refusal, but could not speak. Something about him—she didn't know what, but something in the beaming red face and big roundness of body—made her physically dread to refuse.

She had dropped her head and leaned against him. He laughed good-naturedly, and the big, muscular hands closed.

They were married by the dark, consumptive missionary who was brought out from Pulotu. That was all; and Seibert became her husband—a big man, with no youth, wearied day after day by riding and climbing and striding among black labourers that shrank instinctively.

In the morning he would go over accounts and reports, swearing with abruptness, but somehow unangered even when displeased; then he rode out to see for himself what was being done. Always he rode a powerful horse. It had to be powerful to carry him.

After dinner he would doze over a cigar and snore, sweating as he slept in the heat of the day. After supper he smoked and dozed and snored. The house was pervaded (she said) with stable smells, the odour of soil and stale tobacco.

Sometimes he would say, "Come here," and she came. He was not gentle and not rough, and would often stare at her with a sort of stupid dullness, as she had seen him staring at flowers.

When he ate a roasted fowl at the table, he would take it by a leg in each hand and tear it open good-naturedly.

"I've looked at picked bones on his plate and shivered, I don't know why. He treats me like a child, and I am a woman—older than the jungle that he hates, and a part of it!"

Seibert had a peculiar liking for blue, and this was everywhere apparent. There were borders of blue lobelia, and great masses of blue hydrangeas; but it was in the house that his preference for this colour was especially seen. Oreena was inescapably shut in by blue; she would have liked something more blazing; but even in her room it was his taste that dominated. There was a daintiness about blue and white that was difficult to associate with a man so gross in appearance, and even more so in manners; and in this room that she used more than any other as her "very own" (Seibert thought it foolishness that she should want one room to herself when the entire house was hers) the colour was chillingly blue; or, at least, Oreena felt that it was chilling.

True, in this room there were many other than blue objects; but she thought these absurd, all excepting the cuckoo clock, which she liked. On the shelves, on the table, on the stand before her mirror, were many pieces of German ware fashioned to represent little boys in bright clothes, a Gretchen or two with long, plaited, golden hair, odd little men in strange jackets with staffs in their hands and standing beside hollow tree-stumps—all strangely clean, meaningless, and to Oreena colourless. These were things of a sort that Seibert had admired in shop-windows years before, and remembered when he set about furnishing his house for her.

For all of his apparent good nature—and he was always beaming when near her—Seibert was as hard as iron. Whatever he wanted done was done. There was no flexibility about his wishes, even those inspired by a desire to please her, as in the matter of colour, and the waterfall, where she wanted the jungle roughness of overgrown foliage. He knew how such things should be landscaped. He really did. And what he thought best had to be done; always, and in just the way that he wished.

"I hate him! I want to be loved, and he makes me afraid. He smiles like——" She grinned, mocking his cheerfulness. "You never know when he's angry or happy or what. Always——" She savagely repeated the caricature of his grinning.