Читать книгу Vanessa - Hugh Walpole - Страница 11

Table of Contents

It is perhaps my illness, but whatever the reason I cling to this old house as never before. My mother’s presence is everywhere, but, beyond that, the house itself for ever speaks to me as though this were the last time it would ever shelter me, as though I were the last human link it will ever have with all the life that is gone. And that is true enough. There is no one else alive but myself who knew it as it was. When I first came here Francis and Jennifer were living, David and Sarah were remembered and had seen old Rogue Herries himself ride up, looking for his wandering wife. David, Jennifer, my own mother died under its roof. Violet has done all she can to ruin it, as the house very well knows. How easy and pleasant to have left some of it as it was—at least the little parlour that my mother so dearly loved. I can yet see it as it was when I was a child—the old spinet with the roses painted on the lid, the famous music-box that was played for me when I was good, with the King in his amber-coloured coat and the Queen in her green dress. Then the carpet, upon which I sprawled with John, that had the pictures of the great Battle, cannons firing and horses rising on their haunches; the Chinese wallpaper with pagodas of blue and white, temples, bridges and flowers. Best of all the sofa, the stuff of which was decorated with apple-trees and red apples. How well I remember that room and the way the clock with the gold mandarin would strike the hour, coughing a little between the strokes.

All gone now and also the things from my mother’s bedroom, the red chairs, the four-poster bed. All gone, all gone, the house to-night seems to echo around me. And instead so many ugly things, mahogany wardrobes like coffins set up on end, attempts here and there to be in the fashion with imitation Morris wallpapers, sham Burne-Jones tapestry in the drawing-room—but the dining-room how awful with its circular cellarette, the vast Sheffield soup-tureen, the side-board with its malignant and obscene carved ends, the lacquered knife-tray, the needlework bell-pulls that Timothy tugs at so furiously when he is impatient, the sheep-faced mahogany clock—and all these things both Violet and Timothy think so handsome! Yes, I can hear the old house groaning through all its brickwork. I am the only one who knows how deeply ashamed it feels!