Читать книгу The Lady Paramount - Harland Henry - Страница 4

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It was gay June weather, in a deep green English park: a park in the south of England, near the sea, where parks are deepest and greenest, and June weather, when it is n't grave, is gaiest. Blackbirds were dropping their liquid notes, thrushes were singing, hidden in the trees. Here and there, in spaces enclosed by hurdles, sheep browsed or drowsed, still faintly a-blush from recent shearing. The may was in bloom, the tardy may, and the laburnum. The sun shone ardently, and the air was quick with the fragrant responses of the earth.

A hundred yards up the avenue, Anthony Craford stopped his fly, a shabby victoria, piled with the manifold leather belongings of a traveller, and dismounted.

"I 'll walk the rest of the way," he said to the flyman, giving him his fare. "Drive on to the house. The servants will take charge of the luggage."

"Yes, sir," answered the flyman, briskly, and flicked his horse: whereat, displaying a mettle one was by no means prepared for, the horse dashed suddenly off in a great clattering gallop, and the ancient vehicle behind him followed with a succession of alarming leaps and lurches.

"See," declaimed a voice, in a sort of whimsical recitative,

"See how the young cabs bound,

As to the tabor's sound—"

a full-bodied baritone, warm and suave, that broke, at the end, into a note or two of laughter.

Anthony turned.

On the greensward, a few paces distant, stood a man in white flannels: rather a fat man, to avow the worst at once, but, for the rest, distinctly a pleasant-looking; with a smiling, round, pink face, smooth-shaven, and a noticeable pair of big and bright blue eyes.

"Hello. Is that you, old Rosygills?" Anthony said, with a phlegm that seemed rather premeditated.

"Now, what a question," protested the other, advancing to meet him. He walked with an odd kind of buoyant, measured step, as if he were keeping time to a silent dance-tune. "All I can tell you is that it's someone very nice and uncommonly like me. You should know at your age that a person's identity is quite the most mysterious mystery under heaven. You really must n't expect me to vouch for mine. How-d'ye-do?"

He extended, casually, in the manner of a man preoccupied, a plump, pink left hand. With his right hand he held up and flaunted, for exhibition, a drooping bunch of poppies, poignantly red and green: the subject, very likely, of his preoccupation, for, "Are n't they beauties?" he demanded, and his manner had changed to one of fervour, nothing less. "They 're the spoils of a raid on Farmer Blogrim's chalk-pit. If eyes were made for seeing, see and admire—admire and confess your admiration."

He shook them at Anthony's face. But as Anthony looked at them with composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets," he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "would n't the apathetic man admire you?"

And he clasped them to his bosom with a gesture that was reminiscent of the grateful prima-donna.

"They look exactly as if I had plucked them from the foreground of a Fifteenth Century painting, don't they?" he went on, holding them off again. "Florentine, of course. Ah, in those days painting was a fine art, and worth a rational being's consideration—in those days, and in just that little Tuscan corner of the world. But you," he pronounced in deep tones, mournfully, "how cold, how callous, you are. Have you no soul for the loveliness of flowers?"

Anthony sighed. He was a tall young man, (thirty, at a guess), tall and well set-up, with grey eyes, a wholesome brown skin, and a nose so affirmatively patrician in its high bridge and slender aquilinity that it was a fair matter for remark to discover it on the face of one who actually chanced to be of the patrician order. Such a nose, perhaps, carried with it certain obligations—an obligation of fastidious dressing, for example. Anthony, at any rate, was very fastidiously dressed indeed, in light-grey tweeds, with a straw hat, and a tie that bespoke a practised hand beside a discerning taste. But his general air, none the less—the expression of his figure and his motions, as well as of his face and voice—was somehow that of an indolent melancholy, a kind of unresentful disenchantment, as if he had long ago perceived that cakes are mostly dough, and had accommodated himself to the perception with a regret that was half amusement.

His friend, by contrast, in loose white flannels, with a flannel shirt and a leather belt, with yellowish hair, waving, under a white flannel cricket-cap, a good inch longer than the conventional cut, was plainly a man who set himself above the modes: though, in his plump, pink way debonair and vivacious, not so tall as Anthony, yet tall enough never to be contemned as short, and verging upon what he was fain to call "the flower of a sound man's youth, the golden, gladsome, romantic age of forty," he looked delightfully fresh, and wide-awake, and cheerful, and perfectly in the scheme of the blue day and the bird-notes and the smiling country. Permit me to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by vocation a composer and singer of songs, and—"contrapuntally," as he would explain—Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and man of business.

Anthony sighed.

"I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the transports of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming. The last you knew, I was in California; and here I might have tumbled from the skies."

Adrian regarded him with an eye in which, I think, kindled a certain malicious satisfaction.

"Silence," he said, "is the perfectest herald of joy. Besides, you must n't flatter yourself that your home-coming is so deucedly unexpected, either. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months; and no longer ago than yesterday morning, I said to my image in the glass, as I was shaving, 'I should n't wonder if Tony turned up to-morrow,' said I."

"That was merely your uneasy conscience," Tony expounded. "When the cat's away, the mice are always feeling prickings in their thumbs."

"Oh, if you stoop to bandying proverbs," retaliated Adrian, "there's a proverb about a penny." He raised his bunch of poppies, and posed it aloft before him, eyeing it, his head cocked a little to one side, in critical enjoyment. "Shall we set out for the house?" he asked.

"No," said Anthony, promptly, with decision. "I 'll set out for the house; and you (unless your habits have strangely altered) will frisk and gambol round about me. Come on."

And taking Adrian's arm, he led the way, amid the summer throng of delicate scents and sounds, under the opulent old trees, over the gold-green velvet of the turf, on which leaves and branches were stencilled by the sun, as in an elaborate design for lace, towards a house that was rather famous in the neighbourhood—I was on the point of saying for its beauty: but are things ever famous in English neighbourhoods for their mere beauty?—for its quaintness, and in some measure too, perhaps, for its history:—Craford Old Manor, a red-brick Tudor house, low, and, in the rectangular style of such houses, rambling; with a paved inner court, and countless tall chimneys, like minarets; with a secret chapel and a priests' "hiding-hole," for the Crafords were one of those old Catholic families whose boast it is that they "have never lost the Faith"; with a walled formal garden, and a terrace, and a sun-dial; with close-cropped bordures of box, and yews clipped to fantastic patterns: the house so placed withal, that, while its north front faced the park, its south front, ivy-covered, looked over a bright lawn and bright parterres of flowers, down upon the long green levels of Rowland Marshes, and away to the blue sea beyond—the blue sea, the white cliffs, the yellow sands.

Anthony and Adrian, arm in arm, sauntered on without speaking, till they attained the crest of a sweeping bit of upland, and the house and the sea came in view. Here they halted, and stood for a minute in contemplation of the prospect.

"The sea," said Adrian, disengaging his arm, that he might be free to use it as a pointer, and then pointing with it, "the sea has put on her bluest frock, to honour your return. And behold, decked in the hues of Iris, that gallant procession of cliffs, like an army with banners, zigzagging up from the world's rim, to bid you welcome. Oh, you were clearly not unexpected. If no smoke rises from yonder chimneys—if your ancestral chimney-stone is cold—that's merely because, despite the season, we 're having a spell of warmish weather, and we 've let the fires go out. 'T is June. Town 's full; country 's depopulated. In Piccadilly, I gather from the public prints, vehicular traffic is painfully congested. Meanwhile, I 've a grand piece of news for your private ear. Guess a wee bit what it is."

"Oh, I 'm no good at guessing," said Anthony, with languor, as they resumed their walk.

"Well—what will you give me, then, if I 'll blurt it out?" asked

Adrian, shuffling along sidewise, so that he might face his companion.

"My undivided attention—provided you blurt it briefly," Anthony promised.

"Oh, come," Adrian urged, swaying his head and shoulders. "Betray a little curiosity, at least."

"Curiosity is a vice I was taught in my youth to suppress," said

Anthony.

"A murrain on your youth," cried Adrian, testily. "However, since there 's no quieting you otherwise, I suppose, for the sake of peace, I 'd best tell you, and have done with it. Well, then,"—he stood off, to watch the effect of his announcement—"Craford's Folly is let."

"Ah?" said Anthony, with no sign of emotion.

Adrian's face fell.

"Was there ever such inhumanity?" he mourned. "I tell him that—thanks to my supernatural diligence in his affairs—his own particular millstone is lifted from his neck. I tell him that a great white elephant of a house, which for years has been eating its head off, and keeping him poor, is at last—by my supernatural diligence—converted into an actual source of revenue. And 'Ah?' is all he says, as if it did n't concern him. Blow, blow, thou winter wind—thou art not so unkind as Man's ingratitude."

"Silence," Anthony mentioned, "is the perfectest herald of joy."

"Pish, tush," said Adrian. "A fico for the phrase. I 'll bet a shilling, all the same,"—and he scanned Anthony's countenance apprehensively—"that you 'll be wanting money?"

"It's considered rather low," Anthony generalised, "to offer a bet on what you have every ground for regarding as a certainty."

"A certainty?" groaned Adrian. He tossed his plump arms heavenwards.

"There it is! He 's wanting money."

And his voice broke, in something like a sob.

"Do you know," he asked, "how many pounds sterling you 've had the spending of during the past twelvemonth? Do you know how many times your poor long-suffering bankers have written to me, with tears in their eyes, to complain that your account was overdrawn, and would I be such a dear as to set it right? No? You don't? I could have sworn you did n't. Well, I do—to my consternation. And it is my duty to caution you that the estate won't stand it—to call that an estate," he divagated, with a kind of despairing sniff, "which is already, by the extravagances of your ancestors, shrunken to scarcely more than three acres and a cow. You 're wanting money? What do you do with your money? What secret profligacy must a man be guilty of, who squanders such stacks of money? Burst me, if I might n't as well be steward to a bottomless pit. However, Providence be praised—and my own supernatural diligence—I 'm in command of quite unhoped-for resources. Craford New Manor is let."

"So you remarked before," said Anthony, all but yawning.

"And shall again, if the impulse seizes me," Adrian tartly rejoined. "The circumstance is a relevant and a lucky one for the man you 're fondest of, since he's wanting money. If it were n't that the new house is let, he 'd find my pockets in the condition of Lord Tumtoddy's noddle. However, the saints are merciful, I 'm a highly efficient agent, and the biggest, ugliest, costliest house in all this countryside is let."

"Have it so, dear Goldilocks," said Anthony, with submission. "I 'll ne'er deny it more."

"There would be no indiscretion," Adrian threw out, "in your asking whom it's let to."

"Needless to ask," Anthony threw back. "It's let to a duffer, of course. None but a duffer would be duffer enough to take it."

"Well, then, you 're quite mistaken," said Adrian, airily swaggering.

"It's let to a lady."

"Oh, there be lady duffers," Anthony apprised him.

"It's very ungallant of you to say so." Adrian frowned disapprobation. "This lady, if you can bear to hear the whole improbable truth at once, is an Italian lady."

"An Italian lady? Oh?" Anthony's interest appeared to wake a little.

Adrian laughed.

"I expected that would rouse you. A Madame Torrebianca."

"Ah?" said Anthony; and his interest appeared to drop.

"Yes—la Nobil Donna Susanna Torrebianca. Is n't that a romantic name? A lady like the heroine of some splendid old Italian story—like Pompilia, like Francesca—like Kate the Queen, when her maiden was binding her tresses. Young, and dark, and beautiful, and altogether charming."

"H'm. And not a duffer? An adventuress, then, clearly," said Anthony.

"You 'll never get the rent."

"Nothing of the sort," Adrian asserted, with emphasis. "A lady of the highest possible respectability. Trust me to know. A scrupulous Catholic, besides. It was partly because we have a chapel that she decided to take the house. Father David is hand and glove with her. And rich. She gave the very best of banker's references. 'Get the rent,' says he—as if I had n't got my quarter in advance. I let furnished—what? Well, that's the custom—rent payable quarterly in advance. And cultivated. She's read everything, and she prattles English like you or me. She had English governesses when she was a kiddie. And appreciative. She thinks I 'm without exception the nicest man she 's ever met. She adores my singing, and delights in all the brilliant things I say. She says things that are n't half bad herself, and plays my accompaniments with really a great deal of sympathy and insight. And Tony dear,"—he laid his hand impressively on Tony's arm, while his voice sank to the pitch of deep emotion—"she has a cook—a cook—ah, me!"

He smacked his lips, as at an unutterable recollection.

"She brought him with her from Italy. He has a method of preparing sweetbreads—well, you wait. His name is Serafino—and no wonder. And she has the nicest person who was ever born to live with her: a Miss Sandus, Miss Ruth Sandus, a daughter of the late Admiral Sir Geoffrey Sandus. She 's a dove, she 's a duck, she 's a darling; she 's completely won my heart. And I"—he took a few skipping steps, and broke suddenly into song—

"'And I, and I have hers!'

We dote upon each other. She calls me her Troubadour. She has the prettiest hands of any woman out of Paradise. She 's as sweet as remembered kisses after death. She 's as sharp as a needle. She 's as bright as morning roses lightly tipped with dew. She has a house of her own in Kensington. And she's seventy-four years of age."

Anthony's interest appeared to wake again.

"Seventy-four? You call that young?" he asked, with the inflection of one who was open to be convinced.

Adrian bridled.

"You deliberately put a false construction on my words. I was alluding to Miss Sandus, as you 're perfectly well aware. Madame Torrebianca is n't seventy-four, nor anything near it. She's not twenty-four. Say about twenty-five and a fraction. With such hair too—and such frocks—and eyes. Oh, my dear!" He kissed his fingers, and wafted the kiss to the sky. "Eyes! Imagine twin moons rising over a tropical—"

"Allons donc," Anthony repressed him. "Contain yourself. Where is Madame Torrebianca's husband?"

"Ah," said Adrian, with a sudden lapse of tone. "Where is Madame Torrebianca's husband? That's the question. Where?" And he winked suggestively. "How can I tell you where he is? If I could tell you that, you don't suppose I 'd be wearing myself to a shadow with uncongenial and ill-remunerated labour, in an obscure backwater of the country, like this, do you? If I could tell you that, I could tell you the secretest secrets of the sages, and I should be making my everlasting fortune—oh, but money hand over fist—as the oracle of a general information bureau, in Bond Street, or somewhere. I should be a millionaire, and a celebrity, and a regular cock-of-the-walk. Where is Madame Torrebianca's husband? Ay! Gentle shepherd, tell me where?"

"Ah?" wondered Anthony, off his guard. "A mysterious disappearance?"

"Bravo!" crowed Adrian, gleefully. "I am not only witty myself, but the cause of wit in others." He patted Anthony on the shoulder. "A mysterious disappearance. The mot is capital. That's it, to a hair's breadth. Oft thought before, but ne'er so well expressed. The gentleman (as the rude multitude in their unfeeling way would put it) is dead."

"On the whole," mused Anthony, looking him up and down with a reflective eye, "you 're an effulgent sort of egotist, as egotists go; but you yield much cry for precious little wool."

"Yes, dead," Adrian repeated, pursuing his own train of ideas. "Donna Susanna is a widow, a poor lone widow, a wealthy, eligible widow. You must be kind to her."

"Why don't you marry her?" Anthony enquired.

"Pooh," said Adrian.

"Why don't you?" Anthony insisted. "If she 's really rich? You don't dislike her—you respect her—perhaps, if you set your mind to it, you could even learn to love her. She 'd give you a home and a position in the world; she 'd make a sober citizen of you; and she 'd take you off my hands. You know whether you 're an expense—and a responsibility. Why don't you marry her? You owe it to me not to let such an occasion slip."

"Pooh," said Adrian. But he looked conscious, and he laughed a deliriously conscious laugh. "What nonsense you do talk. I 'm too young, I 'm far too young, to think of marrying."

"See him blush and giggle and shake his pretty curls," said Anthony, with scorn, addressing the universe.

By this time they had skirted the house, and come round to the southern front, where the sunshine lay unbroken on the lawn, and the smell of the box hedges, strong in the still air, seemed a thing almost ponderable: the low, long front, a mellow line of colour, with the purple of its old red bricks and the dark green of its ivy, sunlit against the darker green of the park, and the blue of the tender English sky. The terrace steps were warm under their feet, as they mounted them. In terra-cotta urns, at intervals upon the terrace balustrade, roses grew, roses red and white; and from larger urns, one at either side of the hall-door, red and white roses were espaliered, intertwining overhead.

The hall-door stood open; but the hall, as they entered it from the brightness without, was black at first, like a room unlighted. Then, little by little, it turned from black to brown, and defined itself:—"that hackneyed type of Stage-property hall," I have heard Adrian lament, "which connotes immediately a lost will, a family secret, and the ghost of a man in armour"; "a noble apartment, square and spacious, characteristic of the period when halls were meant to serve at need as guard-rooms," says the County History.

Square and spacious it was certainly, perhaps a hackneyed type none the less: the ceiling and the walls panelled in dark well-polished oak; the floor a pavement of broad stone flags, covered for the most part now by a faded Turkey carpet; the narrow windows, small-paned and leaded, set in deep stone embrasures; a vast fireplace jutting across a corner, the Craford arms emblazoned in the chimney-piece above; and a wide oak staircase leading to the upper storey. The room was furnished, incongruously enough, in quite a modern fashion, rather shabbily, and I daresay rather mannishly. There were leather arm-chairs and settles, all a good deal worn, and stout tables littered with books and periodicals. The narrow windows let in thin slants of mote-filled sunshine, vortices of gold-dust; and on the faded carpet, by the door, lay a bright parallelogram, warming to life its dim old colours. The rest of the room seemed twilit. Someone had been too wise to defeat that good oak panelling by hanging pictures on it.

"Not a creature is stirring," said Adrian, "not even a mouse. Sellers—oh, what men daily do, not knowing what they do!—is shut up in the scullery, I suppose, torturing his poor defenceless fiddle. That 's what it is to be a musical boot-and-knife boy. And Wickersmith will be at his devotions. He tells me he never gets leisure for his morning meditation till luncheon 's cleared away. And that's what it is to be a pious butler. I 'm doubting whether there was anyone to disembarrass that flyman of yours of your luggage. So he 's probably driven off with it all to his humble, happy home. I see none of it about. Never mind. There 'll be some of your old things in Mrs. W.'s camphor-chest, perhaps; or if it comes to a pinch, I can lend you a garment or so of my own—and then won't Craford of Craford cut a figure of fun! You will make her acquaintance … Let me see. To-day is Wednesday. We 'll call on her to-morrow."

"On whom?" asked Anthony, looking blank.

"Have we been talking of Queen Berengaria?" Adrian, with his nose in the air, enquired. "On whom? says you. We 'll call to-morrow afternoon."

"Not I," said Anthony.

"Not to-morrow?" Adrian raised his eyebrows, well-marked crescents of reddish-brown above his ruddy face, and assumed thereby a physiognomy of almost childlike naïveté. "Ah, well, on Friday, then;—though Friday is unlucky, and one rarely shines on a day of abstinence, anyhow. It's all a fallacy about fish being food for the brain. Meat, red meat, is what the brain requires." He slapped his forehead. "But Friday, since you prefer it."

Anthony seated himself on the arm of a leather chair, and, with calculated deliberation, produced his cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, returned his cigarette-case to his pocket, took out his matchbox, struck a match, and got his cigarette alight.

"No, dear Nimbletongue," he said at last, through a screen of smoke, "not Friday, either." He smiled, shaking his head.

Disquiet began to paint itself in Adrian's mien.

"Name your own day." He waited, anxious, in suspense.

Anthony chuckled.

"My own day is no day. I have n't the faintest desire to make the good woman's acquaintance, and I shall not call on her at all."

Adrian stretched out appealing hands.

"But Anthony—" he adjured him.

"No," said Anthony, with determination. "I 'm not a calling man. And I 've come down here for rest and recreation. I 'll pay no calls. Let that be understood. Calls, quotha! And in the country, at that. Oh, don't I know them? Oh, consecrated British dulness! The smug faces, the vacuous grins; the lifeless, limping attempts at conversation; the stares of suspicious incomprehension if you chance to say a thing that has a point; and then, the thick, sensible, slightly muddy boots. I 'll pay no calls. And as for making acquaintances—save me from those I 've made already. In broad England I can recall but three acquaintances who are n't of a killing sameness;—and one of those," he concluded sadly, with a bow to his companion, "one of those is fat, and grows old."

"Poor lad," Adrian commiserated him. "You are tired and overwrought. Go to your room, and have a bath and a brush up. That will refresh you. Then, at half-past four, you can renew the advantages of my society at tea in the garden. Oh, you 'll find your room quite ready. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months. Shall I send Wick?"

"Yes, if you will be so good," said Anthony. He rose, and moved towards the staircase.

Adrian waited till he had reached the top.

Then, "You 'll meet her whether you like or not on Sunday. Where on earth do you suppose she hears her Mass?" he called after him.

"Oh, hang," Anthony called back.

For, sure enough, unless she drove seven miles to Wetherleigh, where could she hear her Mass, but as his guest, in the chapel of his house?