Читать книгу Broken Barrier - Grace Helen Mowat - Страница 8

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Next morning Lydia rose early and prepared the simple breakfast carefully, just as Maggie had directed.

At eight sharp Trancher was seated at the table. She got ready a perfectly cooked dish of oatmeal to take in after he had finished the grapefruit which she had left at his place.

He was looking over the paper when she entered and was still absorbed in it when she returned with toast and coffee. She wondered resentfully if he would ever find it necessary to speak to her should she remain in his service for a year. Anyway, she thought, if he could not speak to her he could not discharge her, and perhaps, if she managed to save the whole sixty dollars a month, she might get away even sooner than she had planned. She still had the money for her passage.

She heard the front door close as she was clearing away the breakfast. Now she would have the house to herself for the day. She finished the dishes, tidied the kitchen, and then went about the house exploring.

It was a typical Victorian house, built in the ’eighties, with high ceilings and walnut furniture and an atmosphere of quiet dignity and comfort belonging to that period when houses were lived in by a decorous and home-loving generation.

She went upstairs and made the bed in Trancher’s room. On the bureau she noticed a framed photograph of a sweet-faced young woman dressed in the fashion of the ’nineties, and wondered if that were his mother. Another photograph of the same lady hung on the wall. In this one she was seated, and a small, curly-haired child in a velvet suit stood beside her. They made a charming picture. The mother was looking at her little son with a fond, far-away expression, as if seeing happy visions of his future. The child was leaning against her, looking at a picture-book that she held open for him. Still another photograph of the lady, grown older, was in the library. The hair was white and the eyes no longer looked into the future. But there was the same gentle refinement, with the added repose of tranquil maturity.

All day, as she worked in the lonely house, the presence of the lady of the pictures seemed to linger in every nook and corner. Lydia began to feel that she was employed by her, working for her rather than for the tall, silent man whom she was expected to feed periodically.

There was a room upstairs that had evidently been her bedroom. The dresses she had worn still hung in the closet. Silver toilet articles were on the dressing-table. A bookshelf was filled with books that had charmed the readers of a past generation—Tennyson, Ruskin, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Jean Ingelow, and Rossetti. On the wall were reproductions of paintings by Burne Jones and Alma Tadema, and faded photographs in oval frames. On the bureau, in a silver frame, there was an enlarged snapshot of two young men with bicycles, taken in the setting of an English landscape. One she recognized as the master, and felt surprised that he could ever have been so young.

Everywhere, everything gave signs of a refined and cultured presence that had long reigned there but had now vanished. It was evident downstairs, too, in the long and pleasant living-room. Against a piano in one corner a violin case rested, and near the window stood a little desk with account books and a telephone. The chairs were large and comfortable, and on the table was a work basket that evidently had remained long unused.

The library, where the master sat in the evening, was the most livable and least ghostly room in the house. Books filled one entire wall, and there were bookshelves on either side of the fireplace. There was a Morris chair by the fire, near a table strewn with books and papers.

Lydia looked over the books on the shelves—complete sets of standard authors, history, philosophy, biography—what a chance for reading in this quiet house when the work was done! She was enchanted. Here were books that she had always wanted to read, and books that she had never heard of but longed to explore. She had loved the English courses at college and here was a wide field open to her and no outside distractions to take up her mind. All the books she could possibly want. A year and a half would never be time enough to get through them.

She was quite happy now thinking about the books. They occupied the back of her mind in the kitchen during the afternoon while she carefully prepared a delicious dinner. Could she muster up courage to ask for one that evening? A good dinner might pave the way for such a request. So she broiled the steak with infinite pains, concocted a tempting dessert, and set the table with studied care.

But Trancher, when he came in to it, still behaved as if wholly unconscious of her presence. Like the rest of the house, he seemed a mute relic of a forgotten past. Lydia wondered what his voice would be like if he ever did speak. The thought of breaking such overpowering silence was too frightening, and she decided to wait another day or two before asking permission to borrow a book.

At ten o’clock she set the little tray on the library table near Mr. Trancher as he sat reading before the fire. The silence was still unbreakable. Apparently he had neither seen nor heard her and she slipped away as quickly as she could.

Next morning, however, when he came into the room as Lydia was tidying the library before breakfast, she courageously resolved to suddenly break the spell and said, demurely, “Good morning, sir.”

“Good morning,” he said, not unpleasantly. “I am looking for my fountain pen. Did you see it anywhere?”

“Yes, sir, I saw a pen on the hall table. I will get it for you.”

When she handed it to him he said, “Thank you,” very politely.

Lydia thought he had rather a nice voice. She was glad the spell was broken and bought a chicken for dinner when she went to the market that morning. In the evening at ten o’clock she would ask him for the book.

That evening after she had cleared away the dinner and washed the dishes she sat in the kitchen and wrote to Janet. When she had finished, she read some government literature on agriculture until the clock ticked slowly to the hour of ten. She made the cocoa and set the cup on the tray with some ginger cakes she had baked that morning. The sensation of stage fright came over her again.

The master, as usual, was reading when she went in. She set the tray beside him, but he did not look up. Did she dare disturb him? She turned to go, but when she reached the door she summoned up all her courage. It was ridiculous to be afraid to ask a man to lend her a book. He could do nothing worse than refuse her.

“Mr. Trancher,” she began. “I would like to ask you something.”

He looked up slowly, his expression rather unpromising. “Well,” he said, “what is it?”

“I wondered if you would mind if I borrowed one of your books. I would be very careful of it and put it back where I found it.”

Trancher looked surprised but relieved. “Oh, is that all!” he said. “I thought perhaps you wanted to borrow the living-room to give a party for your friends.”

Lydia smiled an elusive, shy little smile. “I don’t wonder you were alarmed. I am not quite so presumptuous. Besides, I have no friends, at least not here. I only came to New York three weeks ago and I don’t know anybody.”

Trancher lowered his book and studied her with some attention.

“Won’t you be rather lonely here?” he asked.

The man spoke quite kindly! This was going to be a real conversation!

“I don’t think so. My home was in a lonely place. I am used to being by myself. I won’t mind if only I can have one of your books. I love to read and I have plenty of time in the evening and sometimes in the afternoon.”

“Why, certainly,” he said, “take any book you like if there is anything that would interest you among my old books.” He remembered Maggie’s comments on his taste in literature.

“Oh, Mr. Trancher, I think you have wonderful books. I dust them very carefully every day.”

“Do you?” he said, and smiled approvingly. “I am pleased to hear that. Maggie always expected me to dust them with my pocket handkerchief.”

He seemed to have suddenly become quite human. Lydia had touched him in his vulnerable spot.

“When I dust those books,” she said, “I always feel I am in such good company.”

“Books are very companionable,” he replied. “It is a pity more people do not realize it. What book would you like to take?”

“I would like to read a great many of them, but perhaps I had better begin with one of the older novelists like George Eliot or Jane Austen.”

“They are both good,” he said, rising and going to the shelf where rows of standard novels were kept.

“I have only read The Mill on the Floss,” Lydia said, “and I enjoyed it.”

“Then try Middlemarch,” he suggested. He brought it to her as she stood in the doorway. “Try this and when you have finished it come back for another.”

“Thank you so much, sir,” she said. “This is a wonderful opportunity for me. I could not always get the books I wanted when I was living at home.”

“Where is your home?”

“On the River Saint John. I lived on a farm there with my grandfather. When he died I came to New York to look for work.”

“What is your name?”

“Lydia Allen.”

He frowned slightly. “Have you any other name besides Lydia that I could call you by?”

“Not a very useful one. It is a surname. I was baptized Lydia Sewell.” The thought struck her that it would, on the whole, be much better to work under another name so long as she was acting in this strange drama. “You might call me Sue or Susan. That would be near enough.”

“Very well,” he said, “I may do that. I have family associations with the name of Lydia.”

She thought it probably had been his mother’s name. “I understand how you feel about it, Mr. Trancher. From now on I will answer to the name of Susan. I hope your cocoa has not got cold while we have been talking,” and she disappeared into the unlighted dining-room with Middlemarch under her arm.

“Not a bad little creature,” Trancher thought. “I wonder where on earth Maggie found her. She has a nice voice and certainly knows how to cook and dust books. Things may not be so bad after all.”

Next morning, when he reached the office, Mr. Trancher gave Tony some money and asked him to buy a wedding present for Maggie.

“What shall I get?” asked Tony.

“I don’t know,” said Trancher.

The resourceful Tony settled the question by telephoning Maggie and asking what she wanted. Maggie, taking this to indicate that the master meant to end hostilities, replied delightedly that she had always longed to pour tea from a silver service.

Nearly the entire morning was spent by Tony in the search of a silver tea service of good appearance for the money he had. He succeeded at last in finding a plated set by beating the salesman down five dollars.

On the following Sunday afternoon Mr. Trancher, carrying a large blue box, went to call on Maggie, now established as Mrs. Jeremiah Jenkins in her new home over the grocery store.

She received him with pride and delight, and was quite overcome by the magnificence of the tea service. As she took the various pieces from the blue box and removed the tissue paper wrappings, she placed each on the table, exclaiming happily, “Well, will you look at that, now. Jenkins ought to be a proud man. I venture to say nothing like that ever came in at his first wedding. Wait until some of his relations come nosing round about tea-time. Won’t that just open their eyes! You sit down, sir, till I get you a glass of wine and a piece of wedding cake. This place don’t look like much,” she explained, returning with the wine and wedding cake, “but I’ll fix it up real tasty after a while.”

“I am sure you will, Maggie. I consider Jenkins a most fortunate man.”

“He thinks that himself, now. I don’t know how long it will last. Tell me, how is Lydia getting on?”

“She dusts my books better than you did.”

“Does she, now? Well, she’ll soon get tired of doing that, for it’s a thankless job.”

“She says she likes my books.”

“I thought she would have had more sense. I never saw a room so cluttered up with old, trashy books as that library. I often thought I’d like to take an armful of them down to the furnace.”

“That was a cruel thought, Maggie. Where would I be without my books?”

“You’d be a sight better off. Nobody reads books nowadays. They can get all that in the movies.”

“So I understand, but then I don’t like the movies.”

“No, and you don’t like radios, either, and they’re very improving to the mind. I learned how to make that butterscotch pie off of the radio.”

“That would be a little out of my line, Maggie, I am afraid.”

“Radios put on a lot of that dry education stuff, too. Now Jenkins, he likes politics, but I don’t let him carry on with that for long. I just turn it to some good, interesting play.”

“What does Jenkins say to that?”

“He knows enough not to say anything.”

“Does he like to read books?”

“I let him read the papers when there’s nothing else for him to do.”

“I begin to feel great sympathy for Jenkins!”

“You needn’t. He can look out for himself and he’s used to being bossed around. The advantage of taking a man who’s been married before is that he’s broke in before you get him.”

“I see. He is resigned to his fate.”

“Well, he’s got me and he was dead set on that, and now we have a silver tea set. What more could he want?”

“I suppose that any man should be content with that,” Trancher said, as he rose to leave. “You are a good soul, Maggie, and I miss you, even if you are a tyrant. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, sir, and thank you for the nice present. Tell Lydia to come and see me.”

“Yes, I will. I fear the poor girl may be lonely. I have quite enjoyed being scolded again.”

“I only gave you a little good advice.”

“Very well. We can call it that. This new little creature seems to regard me with some respect.”

“Maybe she’ll see through you like I do, some day.”

“I dare say she will,” agreed Trancher, with a whimsical smile, and he turned and descended the dimly lighted stairway that led down to the street.