Читать книгу Anthony Adverse - Hervey Allen - Страница 17

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Early the next morning after dashing a bucket of cold water over himself in the courtyard to the amazement of the stable boy, and looking after the comfort of Solange, who was now comfortably ensconced in Maître Honneton's largest stall, Denis proceeded to dress in his room with unusual care. The time he spent on shaving and the arrangement of his hair while looking at the bottom of Maître Honneton's most highly scoured milk pan would have satisfied a professional macaroni. As he was giving the ruffles of his finest shirt the final touch he had the ineffable satisfaction of seeing the coach of Monsieur le Marquis de Carabas, with Puss-in-Boots on the lead horse as usual, swing around the great drive of the château and take the road for Royat.

So the field was clear! Of course, it would be the mill again. He had forgotten to say so, he remembered now. But surely she would know. He went out and saddled Solange, in the meanwhile questioning Honneton.

"Yes, monsieur, you can reach the woods that way," said the farmer walking out with him to the brow of the hill on which the farm stood. He pointed to a rut across the landscape lined by old walls and hedges, more like a ditch than a highway. "It is a very ancient lane, mon capitaine, used only by the hay carts in summer-time, and not much for that now since the fields have been put to vines. You will meet no one. Nor, unless one stands on the height here, could a person see you pass. We still occasionally use it ourselves when the salt carts from Beaumont wish to dodge the gabelle, but that is only at night," and his eyes twinkled.

"Thank you, Honneton," replied Denis mounting, "you will not forget how important it is that no one . . ." "Have no fear, monsieur. There are none but men here, except Marie, the cook, and--" he extended a sabot significantly, and laughed. The captain gave rein to his mare and disappeared a few minutes later into the mouth of the dark walls of hedge.

The lane, almost a tunnel under its sturdy hedges, extended across the landscape like a ruled line. Here and there the green way stretched before him on a straight level and he gave the mare full head. She sprang forward under him, quivering with the joy of the morning, and would have whinnied had he not checked her with his voice. "A bad habit, girl," he warned her, striking her across the neck with his glove, a punishment she danced under. On a steep slope her shoes rang on a bit of hard pavement where the turf had washed off. He saw the regular cut flagstone. A Roman road! Some of Caesar's work about Gergovia? Presently, as he had expected, the way opened out on the top of the hill into an old camp, an oblong court of green in which a few sheep were straying. Where the praetorium must have been, a young lamb was nuzzling his mother. He dismounted and ran up on the wall.

The old fossa was only a faint hollow now, filled with daisies, but he was much higher here than he had expected. He could look directly across to the hill of Gergovia. The roof of the château lay far below him in the trees. On the other side the beech forest began, and tumbled in waves of hills down to the river. The clear, cool, morning air, the glittering sunlight on miles of new leaves, the height, and the silence except for a continual undercurrent of faint birdsong from the woods, flooded him with a sensation of fresh and ardent well-being, a sense of youth and of being new-born in strength that almost caused him to shout. How triumphant to be alive, to have found his mate, to be above and beyond fear! It was a sheerly masculine experience. The small fountains of life stirred within him filling his frame with premonitory thrills of the ecstasies to come. He beat his gloves on his arm till it tingled. Wrapping his cloak about him in semi-bravado he strode along the parapet like Caesar himself. Down there, down there in the forest, he was going to meet her at the old mill.

He whistled to Solange who was sniffing uneasily at the sheep. A few seconds later and the forest had engulfed them. The mystery of the place closed about him. He missed his own shadow. The hoofs of the mare fell noiselessly on the moss. He might be a ghost riding under the branches. Who knew after all the end of the errand upon which he was bound? He wondered about his own father--when and where? Presently the mare was hobbled in a glade in the forest and he was in the sunlight again on the little green by the mill. But it had been rather eery descending the old stairs, and the place was lonely, without her. He wished that she would come now. How slowly the time passed here! It was so still except for the river. Did it after all move?

When Maria came down the stairs and stepped out onto the little terrace she was terribly startled to see the white body of a young god flashing and swimming about in the mill race. For a minute her heart was in her mouth. It was as if she had surprised the youthful spirit of all these spring woods sporting in his secret pool. But the head thrust up through the lily pads was that of Denis. For a minute they both looked at each other with horrified surprise, and then burst into a laugh. The blood rushed to his face. "Wait in the tunnel," he cried, "I shall only be a moment." He could hear her laughter echoed from the fern-clad walls while he frantically slipped into his clothes. "I did not expect you so soon!" he called. "I should hope not, mon capitaine." The laughter continued. What a fool he had been, after dressing so carefully, too! Now look, there was mud on the ruffles of his shirt. And his hair!

But she loved his damp curls when she came to him at last. He could not hold her close enough. "Let me go, Denis!" she gasped at length. "You goose, I have something to tell you. Such news," she cried flinging her arms about him again, and whispering into his "driest ear." "He is going to be away for a week, for a whole week! I shall be all alone, and my own mistress at the château. It will be like a honeymoon. Let us call it that," and she clapped her hands like a child as she always did when pleased and excited. "Lucia and I have packed luncheon and brought it along. She thought of it. We might have supper here, too. He will be gone, gone all today, and tomorrow."

"And the day after that!" added Denis.

Her eyes grew large at the vista of endless happiness that was about to ensue. They began to plan out the time together, interrupting one another. He drew a little calendar in a patch of sand. Tomorrow they would drive out to a farm that Lucia knew of and get the puppy. "And the next day?" She faltered bewildered by the endless possibilities.

"We will go up on the high hill of Gergovia. It is a wonderful place that," and he began to tell her. The old story of the brave Gauls took on a new lease of life.

"And after that to the old tower on the hill I can see from the château."

"Why not?" he said. "Anywhere, anywhere with you! We can arrange it each evening and meet the next day. Only we must not be seen together anywhere. That would cause talk and might get back to the château. Remember after all a week is not so long."

How short, how terribly short it suddenly seemed. She had pictured him riding by the side of the little landaulet. It would have been so romantic. She could look back at him and drop her glove. He would dismount and bring it to her, and kiss her hand. The tableau enchanted her. It was not often she could imagine a scene so clearly as that. It was like something out of Paul and Virginia, more real than life and somehow more beautiful.

"It will be better to be very careful now, and so have many days all through the summer," he was saying.

So he was not planning to take her away with him soon. But why not now, this week, while Don Luis was away? They could be gone for days before he knew, she said.

"No, no, that would never do." He began to explain. "He would get the news in a few hours at most after she was missed." They must have some place to go to. He was writing a merchant at Marseilles about a ship. It would take some days, a week or so perhaps to hear. He had thought of Ireland, but America would be better on the whole. He had heard those who had campaigned there and knew the country. He began to tell her about it. By noon they were still lost in an idyll of forest life beyond the seas when Lucia called from the world above and reminded them of lunch.

She brought it down in a little basket; was charmed with monsieur, with his gift also. A brave gentleman, indeed! Her interest in the affair became quite enthusiastic. She laid the luncheon out on a white cloth under the trees and went back to keep watch. "I have mine in the cart, you know. Not many pass this way but it will be well to be with the pony. Monsieur will know what to do if I call--and madame? Ah, she is picking water-lilies!" She gathered a few, placed them in the empty lunch basket by the side of the race and departed to the world above.

They sat down under the trees and ate together. It was their first meal. In her heart she thought of it as a kind of lovers' sacrament. She said a little grace closing her eyes, while he looked on fascinated and remembered to cross himself just in time.

"Ah, it will be like this in America, will it not, Denis? We shall eat out in the woods this way often. And you will not let the savages nor the great beasts come near me?"

He protested again and again that he would not. The tears came into his eyes as he thought of what must be ahead of her in hardships, of the long journey, the ship, a strange land, nowhere to turn, and he a poor man. For a moment his heart failed him. Could he ask that of her? She was so daintily lovely here, so fragile it seemed to him now; almost artificially beautiful with her face like a cameo against the dark convolutions of the roots in the bank before which she sat. Those little rosebuds and garlands embroidered on the clear silk of her gown, what would become of them in Canada? Could he after all? Ah, could he not!

That delightful little golden head! He was mad about that, the face that looked up at him with so much wonder and appeal, so much hope, and innocence and abandon. He must have that near him in the future, forever. The future? Why, here he was dreaming when she was near him now! Who could tell about the far-off days to come? God held them in fee. But this now, this was his, and she was near him. As if he were drawing her back from the shadows of the unknown and would save her from all that his mind might forebode but could not certainly form, he suddenly caught her to him. She saw that he had been weeping. An access of wonder, and unreasoning pity overcame her. She comforted him for she knew not what, for some sorrow that lay within her, too. A great tenderness engulfed them both. Of all the doors by which love enters pity is the widest. Passion, the incendiary, is always waiting close by in the disguise of an importunate beggar to glide over the threshold and set fire to the house.

The afternoon shadows slowly lengthened over the grass. The river fled away forever modulating a monotone. The dead windows of the mill with little pine trees on the sills looked out at nothing. A small bird flitted back and forth over the white table-cloth on the grass. He looked doubtfully at the two figures by the bank under the pine trees. They did not stir. Finally he lit upon a thin stemmed glass and tilting back his little head drank delicately. It was a light, sweet wine but it made him a bad, bold bird. He began to scatter the fragments of Maria's cake wantonly. Finally he put his head under his wing in broad daylight and went to sleep. Under the pine branches there was nothing to show that the two who lay there were alive except the long, slow rise and fall of their breasts. The wind tangled their curls together as it would if they had both been dead. Caught in the full tide of spring they drifted closer and closer together through the long afternoon.

When Denis rode home through the starlit forest that evening it was as if he had discovered himself as an entirely new person. He was inherently one of those rare but strong and natural people in whom the realities of passion actually experienced invariably transcend expectancy. Nor was this due to a lack of imagination. It was merely that his mind could not remember with a thought vivid enough to compass the actual feel of the flesh.

For the first time as he went home that evening he began to realize that he was in a predicament. He had already been caught in the eddy of a current that flowed through him and possessed him. Once in the main stream of it he could neither control nor direct. As his imagination had been unequal to his capabilities, so his will might be found inadequate to the unexpected strain. "Might be?" He knew it would. It came upon him like fate. Yet what could he do? He could not go away now. By every tie that his heart and soul knew he was bound to her. Yes, even despite her marriage, by every tie of an honourable mind. That her father had sold her with good intentions was no reason why he should recognize the bargain. Society, the society he knew, would scoff at such scruples. Her marriage was a circumstance to be circumvented. He would do that. He would make her, so far as the world knew, honourable amends. Beyond the sea they would be man and wife. That last small remnant of his grandfather's estate and the sale of his commission would enable him to . . . oh, yes, that was all quite possible, a matter of correspondence and some little time.

Time, that was it! Could he control himself, tomorrow, or the next day? They had been so near the verge this afternoon. He knew it now. But he did not care when he was with her. He had become for a time, what? Putty in the hands of some outside force that might mould him as it desired, not as he willed. But he would summon his self-control again. He ground his teeth together and gripped the mare with his knees so that she started forward.

They came up out of the forest into the old camp again. He forced the horse onto the rampart and stood looking back. A low chattering of night birds and hooting of little owls trembled up to him through the night. The moon was just rising and a light breeze that seemed to follow the path she laid over the miles of new leaves rippled the forest like a lake. The breeze increased in intensity and pressed against him. It was warm, damp, and fragrant, moulding itself into every fold and hollow of his body. Wisps of it blew like hair across his lips and the smooth hands of the mistral caressed his cheek. He was holding her in his arms again. For an instant the spell of the afternoon recurred in full force. Every nerve of his body shuddered toward her. The past and the future were forgotten. His entire consciousness became aware of the meaning, blent with, and seemed to pass on into the languorous longing of the spring night.

When he came to again, the mare, as if she had seen a ghost, was shivering under him in the moonlight, and the last fringes of the mistral had passed over the ramparts. The wood which the wind had passed through was strangely silent. He rode home with a fear and doubt of himself knocking at his heart. Of the young man who strode so confidently along those ramparts that very morning nothing but a vague memory remained. There was only one thing that was stronger than his fear and that was his longing. When he got to his room the single candle was burning in the window at the château. He lit his own and signalled. But there was no answer. Maria had evidently gone to bed.

And, indeed, she had. Lucia had seen to it. It was only by the exertion of some tact and will power that she had prevailed on her mistress not to go down to supper in the great hall. With the quick instinct of her kind she had realized that the girl was in a state that might well attract the not unobservant eyes of Pierre. Hence the evening dress, which with great trouble and some impatience had been put on, was now with evident relief and no trouble whatever taken off. Supper was served in the room. A complete lethargy seemed now to have fallen upon Maria. She had resigned herself into the hands of Lucia as if it were a relief to have someone else make even the smallest decisions for her.

The older woman had now long passed the point where she was striving to make herself agreeable from pure self-interest. All her motherly instincts had been aroused, and it was plain from every little motion and attitude as she waited upon Maria that she was actuated by strong affection for her. Indeed, she had been completely captivated by her young mistress whom she now pitied, admired and loved with all her heart. The affair of madame had consequently taken on for Lucia a new aspect. It had become a vicarious experience of her own. She had not expected that it would be so serious and absorbing either to Maria or to herself. Denis was exactly the kind of person she would have chosen for Maria, and with the sudden turn of the affair she was at once delighted with the present and fearful for the future. Absorbed in the fate of the lovers, she scarcely paused to consider what might happen to her should a crisis of any kind occur. Her first loyalty was to her mistress, beside that any other duty as a member of the marquis' household was too pale and abstract to engage her attention. She was one of those persons whose actions were controlled purely by likes or dislikes. She loved her mistress and she disliked Don Luis.

Being of a somewhat bovine temperament herself, it was a surprise to Lucia to note the effect of an afternoon spent in the presence of her lover upon the highly strung young girl whom she was now trying in vain to soothe. That this was not the effect of surrender but of being tremendously aroused without full satisfaction, she was wise enough in the ways of her own sex to know. The result of having for the first time been stirred to the depths of her being was to Maria like the after effects of a strong and over-stimulating drug. She was now completely unnerved. Had she been a weak character she would have been hysterical. She had come away in a daze. Her body and spirit were now in an indescribable tumult. Nowhere could she find rest or satisfaction. The sense of the physical absence of her lover was devastating. At the thought of him she experienced a longing for which there seemed no adequate human control. She threw herself on her knees before the madonna, but it was in vain. The very passivity of the statue and her own attitude was an aggravation. It was now like a final twist of the rack that the thought of Don Luis intruded itself upon her mind. For the first time she fully understood what that meant. A spiritual nausea and darkness overwhelmed her. She cast herself on the bed and then leaped from it in loathing. Finally she took to walking up and down the room repeating, "Denis, Denis, where are you? Denis!"

"Hush, madame, hush, the servants will hear you." Lucia strove to engage her attention. "See, I shall put the candle in the window for him. It is a single one. You will see him tomorrow."

The girl took the candle from her and rushed to the window with it herself. She raised the light up and down several times, but there was no answer. Then she turned and burst into tears.

"Do you love him so much?" said the maid stroking her hair.

"Oh, Lucia, Lucia," cried Maria.

A few minutes later she had been put to bed and was asleep. Lucia bent over her. Except for a faint spasm now and then in the throat muscles, she was calm again, worn out. Presently she sighed and lay utterly still.

It was Lucia who managed next day that they should see each other only for a short time, and then not alone. In the morning she drove into the country with Maria and they returned with a puppy which was instantly taken home to the young girl's heart. It was at least a living and responsive being upon which she could pour out some of the affection that now constantly overwhelmed her. They stopped at the mill for luncheon where Denis was walking up and down distractedly. He had been there since early morning. But the good woman by the exercise of much harmless ingenuity contrived not to leave them alone. Long before sunset Denis had to watch the two women disappear along the road into the forest with Maria looking back, her scarf waving in the wind, and the small, brown face of the little dog peering over her shoulder. He was forced to admit to himself that Lucia was both right and understanding. Nevertheless, an indignation overcame him and a sick longing as they drove away and he found himself alone again without having taken Maria in his arms. Tomorrow, tomorrow, despite himself, despite Lucia, he would feel those lips on his. That hope alone made the night supportable.

Nor was he disappointed. Before noon the next day they had climbed the high hill of Gergovia and were standing alone together upon its top looking down upon all that part of Auvergne. It was the first hot day of the season and from the valleys already the warmth shimmered up to them to lose itself in the crystal heights. These in turn glowed up and away into a vault of deepest blue blown clear of clouds, quivering and sparkling.

Up here the red volcanic nature of the soil was apparent. From the rows in the vineyards below, where the grass had been stripped, emanated an almost violet hue. The domes of ancient volcanoes and little breast-like hills rolled all about them, dotted with white villages caught in a network of roads. From these came faintly but clearly the thin voices of bells. A large amphitheatre of hills covered with masses of vineyards and forest stretched southward and upward to the Puy-de-Dôme. Even from Gergovia they looked up to see the ruined temple of the Gallic sun god overlooking his ancient domain.

The entire bowl of surrounding mountains seemed to be catching the sunlight and flinging it back at them. Over the flat meadow on the top of the shoulder, where they were now standing, and where the town of the Gauls had once stood, the bees were greedy amid the clover as if they preferred the wild, clean sweetness of the flowers on that great height to the more cloying honey of the blossoms in the valley below. Indeed, from this place still exhaled the faint memory of a fresher fragrance as if the dawn had lingered there before moving westward to the lesser steeps. But now that whole hilltop was murmurous with wings, and vibrant with a passion of light and heat.

The arms of Denis closed about the body of Maria. Had anyone looked over the slight rim of that hollow mountain meadow to the very centre of which they had wandered, so that it enclosed them with a complete circle from all but the sky, he would have seen but one figure apparently, so close were they standing. Denis bent over Maria, while her hands, as if they were tapping at the door of his heart, fumbled at his breast. They stood for an instant with the spring concentrated in them. Then he picked her up and carried her over the rim of the slope.

A jumble of huge stones, once a gate tower that had hurled back the legions of Rome, lay scattered along the brow of the hill. He picked his way amid these rapidly. Where the foundations still remained they now leaned outward, overhung with brush or vines, and sheltering a ledge-like hollow filled with last autumn's leaves. A short distance below, the shoulder of the hill fell away at a tremendous angle. It was a place where in the winter the shepherds of the neighbourhood remembered to look for lost lambs sheltering themselves from the blast. Brushing aside the long, trailing tendrils like a veil, Denis laid Maria softly in the nest of dry ferns and leaves behind them. The veil fell again. To the curious sheep cropping near by it seemed as if the man and his burden had vanished into the old wall. Soon their bells continued to sound again gently.

Only once more during that noontide were they disturbed; this time by a soft, tremulous cry.

On the meadow above, the sound of the bees' wings continued growing a little deeper in tone as the heat of the day advanced. By far the majority of these honey gatherers were of the ordinary neuter and domestic kind for whom work was an end in itself. Here and there, however, amid this host of humble workers, who took good care to avoid so dangerous a neighbourhood, cruised a large male bumble-bee like a pirate or gentleman adventurer covered with the gold dust of the treasuries he had robbed. These for the most part seemed to have their nests or robber lairs about the tumbled stones of the old tower where a kind of white cornflower trailed through the grass.

From a fracture in the stone immediately above the little ledge where the lovers had hidden themselves a peculiarly beautiful specimen of this blossom had put forth. But a large black spider, who had also fixed on the same cranny in the rock for his abode, had fastened on this bud as a support for his web and had succeeded in dragging it to the ground. In the shadow of the rock, the flower, which could open fully only in the brightest sunshine, still lay even after the noon had passed with the small green tip of its maidenhead fastening its petals at the end of the pod.

Attracted by so lovely and virginal a store of honey, a bumble-bee lit upon this blossom and after stroking its petals for some time as if he were in love, began to tear away the small green membrane that still defended it from his assault. The petals opened slightly and began to curl. Settling back as it were upon his haunches, and raking his body back and forth over this small opening the bee finally succeeded in inserting himself into the flower. Here, as if in ecstasy, he dashed himself about. The flower opening ever wider, trembled, and drooped upon its stem. At this moment the spider suddenly becoming aware of what was happening, emerged from his nook and began to weave his web again across the bee.

Some hours after this lilliputian tragedy had occurred, Denis and Maria emerged from their place of concealment. All considerations except that of each for the other were now banished from their minds. The clear peace of the great height and the quiet of the late afternoon woods through which they began to descend found an answering echo in their own natures. Strangely enough it was this walk down the ancient road that approaches the plateau of Gergovia from its least precipitous side which formed for them the crowning experience of their love. The same cool mood of completion and benign contentment after having fulfilled the plan of creation that breathed from the panorama of landscape before them as the day verged toward its close, was for a few blessed moments their own. For a half mile perhaps, certainly no farther, they walked together in utter unity with each other and in complete harmony with the world without. It is this rare mood which perhaps more than any other deserves to be called "happiness." And it was this which they afterwards remembered and desired to return to and perpetuate rather than that "agony of pleasure," which, while it convulses the body, cancels the mind.

To Lucia, who had long been watching anxiously as the sun dropped toward the western hills, the lovers appeared to be subdued as they came down the forest road. It was difficult for the good woman to refrain from a smile as she noticed the subtle air of possession with which Maria now leaned against and held Denis' arm. The frantic welcome with which the young dog would have greeted her was hushed by his mistress as out of keeping with her mood and the place. Upon her face the colour now began to show.

In Denis' manner, however, there was no sign of embarrassment. Taking it as a matter of course that the maid must be in all their secrets from now on, he turned to her, and with a smile the undeniable charm of which was in itself a powerful appeal, confided Maria again to her charge.

"You will take good care of madame, will you not, Lucia?" he asked. Despite himself and to his surprise, his voice trembled.

"As if she were my own child! Oh, monsieur, do not doubt me," responded the woman deeply moved, "I love her, too."

"I am sure of it, sure of it," he replied, and added in a low tone, "You will trust me, also?"

She gave him a warm grasp of her hand.

Turning he clasped Maria to him murmuring, "Good-bye, good-bye." They stood together for a moment by the little carriage and would have parted with tears had not the dog in her arms insisted on trying to lick both their faces at once. His comfortable assurance that all was meant for him tipped the scales of their emotion into merriment.

"Oh, he is a dear, Denis, isn't he?" said she as he helped her into the cart. Under the guidance of Lucia the pony started forward. Riding for an instant on the step he had just time enough to snatch a kiss. Maria turned and tossed something back at him. He picked it up. It was a white cornflower whose petals, although it was now nearly evening, were not yet fully blown. As he raised it to his lips there floated from it the wings of a bee.

He picked both of them up out of the grass and folded them carefully along with the petals of the flower in his pocketbook. That night when he looked out of the window in his room at the farm there were two lights burning in the upper room of the château.