Читать книгу Hill O' the Winds - L. M. Montgomery - Страница 3

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Mrs. Edward Wallace puffed up the Hill o’ the Winds. Having called her Mrs. Edward Wallace once by way of conventional introduction, I shall hereafter call her Cousin Clorinda because everybody who knew her called her that, even those who were of no relation at all. And few ever left off the “cousin” in spite of the indefinable awkwardness of it; nobody could call her Mrs. Wallace, and yet there was something about her that forbade plain Clorinda to all but her husband and a few old, intimate contemporaries. She was so sweet and lovable—and dignified. You see, she had been born a Cooper.

She was a fat, sonsy lady who at sixty still retained the asking eyes of a girl and yet had something about her capacious maternal bosom that made you want to lay your head on it if you were tired or troubled. You could tell without half looking that she was a perfect cook, and that her children rose up and called her blessed.

She was addicted to wearing light-tinted dresses which she admitted calmly were far too young for her. She wore one now, a pink-flowered muslin, and a shade hat trimmed with clouds of pink tulle and daisies. She looked like a big, full-blown cabbage rose in it, and as she had all the outdoors of the sun-steeped summer afternoon around her for a background, she was not unpleasing to the æsthetic sense.

This is quite enough to say of a woman who is not the heroine of this story.

Cousin Clorinda did not come up to Hill o’ the Winds very often. Elizabeth Cooper, who reigned there, was only a second cousin who kept up all the Cooper traditions and disapproved strongly of Cousin Clorinda’s flower-hued dresses and daisied hats. Cousin Clorinda drove up on a duty visit once a year and was painfully polite to Elizabeth, who was painlessly polite to her.

But Cousin Clorinda, weighing one hundred and eighty, would not have walked up to Hill o’ the Winds on a hot, dusty afternoon to see Cousin Elizabeth if she never saw her. She was going up now to see Romney Cooper, walking because she could not get a horse that day and to have waited another day without seeing Romney would have killed her. She had loved him as her own son in his boyhood days when he had spent his vacations nominally at Hill o’ the Winds and actually down on her seashore farm. But she had not seen him for ten years and she was hungry for a sight of him. He had been such a darling.

He was, in the strict way in which the Coopers tabulated relationship, her “first cousin once removed.” Elizabeth was his aunt. Elizabeth didn’t deserve such luck, thought Clorinda. Romney had gone into journalism in a distant city when he was through college and had ceased to come to Hill o’ the Winds for his vacations. But he had had pneumonia in the winter, followed by some complications, and had been ordered to rest wholly for the summer. So much Cousin Clorinda knew because Elizabeth had so told Doctor John Cooper, who told Clorinda. But there were a million other things she wanted to know if she had breath enough left to ask them after she had reached the top of that terrible hill.

She stopped at the gate when she did get up and leaned against it thankfully. Really Hill o’ the Winds was a lovely spot. It was the old Cooper homestead so Clorinda had a prescriptive right to be proud of it, although she herself had never lived there. The old house was a fine, stately, white building hooded in trees that had taken three generations to come to that wide-spreading, leafy luxuriance; there was an old, formal garden, with clipped cedars, thick, high hedges and broad paths beautifully kept; and the view of the big, green, sunshiny valley all around it below, with gauzy hills on one side and the long, silvery sand shore of the hazy blue sea on the other, was something strangers always raved over. The Coopers themselves never said much about it; they were too proud of it to talk of it.

“It’s an awful place to get to,” sighed Clorinda, “but when you do get here you’ve something for your pains. I wonder who Elizabeth will leave all this to when she dies. I know it won’t be me or any of mine, so I can wonder about it with a clear conscience. John Cooper is rich enough already and has no sons. But she hates almost everybody else. She ought to leave it to Romney, but she disapproves of him. She likes him well enough but she disapproves of him. So he has no chance. Now I must go in and talk to her a few minutes first, I suppose. Good Lord, send me something to say!”

Few of Cousin Clorinda’s associates would have supposed she could ever be in want of something to say. But she always found it very hard to talk to Elizabeth, that high-bred, stately, old-maiden Lady of the Hill, who could, so Doctor John was wont to aver, be silent in all the languages of the world. At least Cousin Elizabeth never talked the language of gossip, and gossip was Cousin Clorinda’s mother tongue.

Perhaps the good Lord whom Cousin Clorinda invoked thought it would be easier to prevent an interview with Cousin Elizabeth at all than to furnish conversation for it. Elizabeth met Clorinda at the door of the dim, cool old hall and said distantly:

“I suppose you have come to see Romney. Go right upstairs to the tower room. I’ve given him that for a sitting room for the summer.”

Cousin Clorinda swam up the stairs. Cousin Elizabeth looked up at her from the hall.

“An old ewe dressed like a lamb,” she thought contemptuously.

She herself wore dark purple velvet with a real lace collar. It was old fashioned but very handsome. She returned to her embroidery with the comfortable feeling born of a justified contempt for somebody we have never—really—liked.

But then Cousin Clorinda didn’t care.

“What luck!” she thought as she made her way to the tower room.

“Cous-in-Clor-in-da!” said Romney, between hugs.

He sent a tender, persuasive “Co-oo-ee” down into the Edgelow garden. The girl looked up. Then she coolly turned her back and walked into the house.

“So you really know me?” said Cousin Clorinda complacently.

“Know you! You haven’t changed a particle! Know you! Could I ever forget you?”

“I’m much fatter,” said Cousin Clorinda with a sigh.

Then she held him off and looked at him. Yes, he was just as handsome as ever; his dark, reddish hair was just as thick and wavy, his gray eyes just as kind and luminous and twinkly, his figure just as fine and well bred. Cousin Clorinda was strong on breeding. But he was far, far too thin.

“Kiss me again,” she said. “And then we’ll sit down and talk. I’ve come up to pump you. I’m going to ask you about everything. You’ve got to tell me about everything.”

“Of course,” said Romney. He found her hatpins for her, pulled them out and took her hat off. He looked admiringly at her thick, brown-gold hair lying in sleek waves in which was not a thread of silver.

“You darling thing, you’re as young as ever,” he said. “I was a little afraid you might have grown old. I was coming down to see you to-night—did you know it?—you and your jam closet. Have you a jam closet still?”

“I couldn’t wait for to-night; I want what I want when I want it. And of course I have a jam closet. While I live and move and have my being I’ll have a jam closet.”

“And a dairy full of cream? Do you remember how I used to steal cream out of your dairy?”

“The dairy is there all right. But we separate the cream now.”

“Oh, cousin, I’m sorry! No more delightful big, brown panfuls to skim! But you’ll give me plenty to drink, won’t you. I must have plenty of cream, Cousin Clorinda; the doctors insist that I must have oceans of cream. And raspberry vinegar—they didn’t tell me I must have raspberry vinegar because they didn’t know anything about it. They would have, if they had known. Mind the time I stole a bottle of it to christen a boat? And you smacked my ear for it? I’ve been lopsided ever since.”

“You haven’t changed much,” said Cousin Clorinda in a satisfied tone.

“Of course not. Sit here, dear thing, right by the window. I’ve been sitting here for an hour, musing on the Edgelow garden. When all’s said and done it’s finer than the Cooper garden.”

Cousin Clorinda gave a scornful glance at the Edgelow garden as she filled the big chair with her pink billows, arranged them to her liking and leaned back as ineffably contented as a cat with its tail folded about its paws. She had not climbed Hill o’ the Winds to discuss the comparative merits of Cooper and Edgelow gardens.

“How do you feel, Romney?” she asked anxiously.

“Lazy and contented. I’ve always been lazy but never before have I felt contented. As for the rest, I’m as poor and orphaned as I ever was. Lordy, but it’s good to see you again! I’m going to stretch out on this sofa and feast my eyes on you. I love you in that pink. Why do ladies of sixty—excuse me, of course I’m not implying that you are sixty, ageless being!—generally go about so soberly and dourly clad? Sixty is the very time they should bloom out into gorgeousness, like autumnal trees.”

“I always liked bright colors,” said Cousin Clorinda complacently. “I shall wear ’em till I die. They can bury me in black if they like, but as long as breath is in me, I’ll have pink ribbons in my nightdress. Dear Elizabeth is likely throwing a fit down in the parlor now because of this pink dress. How have you been getting along in journalism, Romney?”

Cousin Clorinda spoke rather doubtfully. No other Cooper had ever “gone in” for journalism. It seemed a foolish, inconsequential occupation for a Cooper. The Coopers had been solid folk.

“I haven’t made any money. I’m poor as a rat,” admitted Romney. “But I’ve had a darned interesting time. Have you had that, Cousin Clorinda?”

“No,” said Clorinda, one of whose charms was honesty.

“Nor any of the other Coopers hereabouts?”

“I suppose not,” reflected Clorinda. “No, I think they’ve all been as dull as I. But if you can’t make any money at your profession, Romney, how are you ever going to keep a wife and family?”

“But Cousin Clorinda, darling, I haven’t a wife and family to keep.”

“Don’t you ever expect to have?” Cousin Clorinda was slightly severe. The Coopers had always thought it a highly respectable thing to be married. “You are thirty, Romney. It is time you were married.”

“Oh, cousin, did you come all the way up here to lecture me on getting married—to twit me with my single cussedness?”

“No, I didn’t——”

“And at sixty—you have annoyed me, cousin, by casting my years up to me, so I won’t pretend you aren’t sixty—you shouldn’t be interested in marrying and giving in marriage!”

“I thank my stars that I didn’t lose interest in youthful things when I lost my youth,” retorted Clorinda. “I’ve lots of sentiment in me still and I’m not afraid to show it.”

“That’s what makes you so adorable.” Romney stretched out his hand, possessed himself of hers and kissed it. “If there were a young Cousin Clorinda about I’d snap her up. But as there isn’t I’m afraid I’m doomed to die a bachelor. They tell me it’s an easy death.”

“Why won’t you be serious?” reproached Clorinda. “When you were in your teens you used to tell me all about your love affairs. Do you remember your desperate flirtations with those Merrowby girls down harbor?”

“Of course I do. Say, those girls were delicious! What became of them? But I’ve no love affairs now, darling, or I’d certainly tell you all about them. I am not, never have been and never will be actually in love.”

“Why?” said Cousin Clorinda.

“Because I have an ideal.”

“Shucks, we all have. I had an ideal forty years ago. He was tall, like you, and gray-eyed like you—curly-haired, musical. And I married Ned Wallace, who was short and had hair so straight it wouldn’t even brush and who couldn’t tell ‘God Save the King’ from ‘Money Musk.’ As for his eyes—I’ve lived with him thirty-five years and I don’t know even now what color they are exactly. I think they’re green. But I’ve been happy with him.”

“I can’t fall in love with anybody but my ideal,” said Romney obstinately.

“What is she like?”

“Her name is Sylvia.”

“Sylvia. You have met her then?”

“I have not. But her name is Sylvia. She is tall and has very black hair, which she always wears brushed straight back from her forehead as only a really pretty woman can dare to brush it. Of course she is fortunate enough to have a widow’s peak. Then she wears it in a heavy, glossy braid around her head. She has intensely blue eyes, with very black lashes and straight black brows. She has a pale creamy face with a skin like a white narcissus petal, but a red, red, mouth—and lovely hands, Cousin Clorinda. A beautiful hand is one of the chief charms of a beautiful woman. Sylvia’s hands are—oh, I wish you could see Sylvia’s hands! I wish I could see them! But I never shall. It’s a depressing thought, cousin. But haven’t you a nice girl or two round to amuse me? You always used to have, shoals of them.”

“That was when my girls were home. They don’t come any more. Girls are scarce, it seems to me. Soon as they grow up now they’re off and away. I’ve the school-teacher boarding with me. She might do—she’s cute and pretty. And it would be quite safe for both of you,” concluded Cousin Clorinda solemnly, “because you would never really fall in love with her and she has a young man of her own.”

“Maybe the young man would object.”

“Oh, he’s away out West. She writes to him every day. You’ll find her good company.”

Romney hid a smile behind his hand. Cousin Clorinda was so deeply in earnest in regard to providing amusement for his summer, the darling, thoughtful old thing!

“You darling thing, you’re as young as ever,” cried Romney. “I was afraid you might have grown old.”

“I’ve been chumming with Samuel Rice since I came,” he said. “Our acquaintance is only twenty-four hours old but we are sworn friends. Know him?”

“No. He’s Elizabeth’s man’s son, isn’t he?”

“Nephew—orphan nephew. Aged ten. The most amazing compound of mischief and precocity I’ve ever come across. Aunt Elizabeth detests him and frowns on our league of offense and defense. But you’d love him. He’s taken on all our traditions because his uncle works for us, even the old family feud. He parades the Whispering Lane, whistling impudently, and last night I caught him firing stones over the hedge into the Edgelow garden. He was quite indignant because I stopped him.”

“Why did you stop him?”

“Why—did I—why? Cousin Clorinda, do you think I should have let him go on firing stones over there?”

“Of course. It would serve old Jim Edgelow perfectly right, and give him the exercise he needs throwing them back again, the lazy old sinner!”

“You don’t mean to say that you keep up the old feud still? Of course Aunt Elizabeth does, but you—a moldy old scrap like that. Do you even know who and what began it?”

“I do not, and it’s no difference. A feud’s a respectable thing and should be kept up like all the other family customs.”

Romney examined Cousin Clorinda’s face and eyes to see if she was being sarcastic or facetious. He concluded that she was neither, but wholly in earnest, and the wonder of the thing almost staggered him.

“It’s the only honest-to-goodness passion in our existence,” continued Clorinda. “It lends spice to everything. I’d get tired to death of going to church if it wasn’t for the fun of sweeping past Mary Edgelow from Clifton, and staring her brazenly in the face without a hint of recognition every Sunday. But I admit that the feud isn’t what it was once. There are fewer Coopers, and no Edgelows at all except Mary and old Jim. When they die the feud will die with them. But he’s only sixty and most of the Edgelow men lived well into the eighties.”

“The men, but not the women.”

“Well, the men killed them, of course—in different ways, all quite legal. I never knew a happy Edgelow woman. Look at that old cream-brick house there—nice, chubby old place all grown over with vines. Yet it’s been full of tragedies. Old Jim tortured his wife to death for thirty years, by denying her everything she wanted and showering on her everything she didn’t want. She was smothered and starved. Of course in the first place he really courted her to cut out Ronald Cooper. Then, when he got her, he lost his enthusiasm. Now they say he’s lonely. I’m glad of it, though I’m afraid it’s too good to be true.”

“He doesn’t look any more amiable than of yore,” said Romney. “I saw him glowering at me from his front doorway last night precisely as he glowered at me twenty years ago. Wouldn’t you think anybody’d get tired of glowering in twenty years? I smiled at him and shouted ‘Good evening.’ He went in and banged the door.”

“You shouldn’t have demeaned yourself.” Cousin Clorinda was as severe as she could be with Romney.

“Cousin Clorinda, where is the sense of keeping it up?” he pleaded.

“There isn’t any. But hate’s a good lasting passion. You get over love but never over hate. And as for the sense of it—there’s no sense in heaps of things we do. There’s no sense in your forswearing marriage and the comforts of home because you’ve got an impossible ideal. Still—you do it.”

“Still—I do it,” echoed Romney in a melancholy tone. “You’re right, perfectly right, divine one. Man cannot live by bread alone; he must have either feuds or ideals. My ideal means everything to me, everything, even though I shall never find her.”

“Oh, maybe you will yet,” said Cousin Clorinda with cheerful optimism. Cousin Clorinda couldn’t believe that tall, wax-skinned girls with black hair and blue eyes were as scarce as Romney seemed to think.

“Never,” said Romney in a tone of profound conviction. “She is chatelaine only of my castle in Spain. I shall never find her in the flesh.”

He sighed and went to the window, looking down into the Edgelow garden. He stood there for a few seconds. Then he said calmly:

“There she is now, down in the Edgelow garden.”

Cousin Clorinda gasped, got up and went over to the window. There was a girl in the Edgelow garden, walking about bare-headed, pulling a flower here and there. She was a slender thing with heavy, glossy black hair. She was too far away for her eyes to be read, but her skin was as creamy as a lily and her mouth was crimson. She wore a dress of pale green and one great pink rose was stuck in the braid of her hair over her ear.

“You’ve been making fun of me,” said Clorinda severely. “You knew all about that girl. You’ve been describing her to me. You——”

“Cousin Clorinda,” interrupted Romney solemnly, never taking his eyes from the girl, “your suspicion is natural but unjust. I give you my word of honor that I never saw her before, save in my dreams. I didn’t even know there was a girl over there. Who is she?”

“It must be Dorcas Edgelow,” said Clorinda, compelled to believe him.

“Dorcas. Nonsense! Her name is Sylvia, must be Sylvia.”

“I never heard of a Sylvia Edgelow. But I did hear last spring that old Jim was expecting his niece Dorcas for a visit this summer. She’s Martin Edgelow’s daughter from Montreal, you know.”

“Well, whoever she is, she’s mine. It’s a staggering thing, Cousin Clorinda, to look out of a casual window thus, and see the very girl you’ve been dreaming about all your life.”

“But Romney, you can’t marry her! She’s an Edgelow!”

“I don’t care. I told you I had cast off the Edgelow feud with the shackles of the past. That girl there is mine——”

“She’s old Jim Edgelow’s heiress, too. He’s worth nobody knows how much. She’ll be very rich; she won’t—won’t——”

“She will. I don’t care whose heiress she is nor how rich—at least I don’t now. At three o’clock to-night I’ll probably care horribly. But now I’m drunk, Cousin Clorinda, I’m drunk just with looking at her! I’ve seen all my fancies, ideals, hopes, dreams in a human shape. She looks like love incarnate. I know her eyes are blue and her name is Sylvia.”

“Dorcas—Dorcas.”

“Sylvia! Look at her hands. Did you ever see anything so perfect?”

“The Edgelow hands,” admitted Cousin Clorinda. “They were always noted for fine hands. Oh, she’s a lovely thing, Romney, and it’s not likely you’re the first man that’s noticed it. She’s likely engaged already.”

“Not a bit of it. She was predestined for me. Look, she’s smiling to herself, cousin! I do like to see a woman smiling to herself. Her thoughts must be so pleasant and innocent. I wish she’d look up? Can’t I rap on the glass?”

“She’d think you were crazy, Romney. This was just how you carried on over the second Merrowby girl when you were eighteen.”

“Slanderer! I did not, nor with the first nor third Merrowby girl—rollicking, soulless young nonentities! Of course I’m crazy. She’s driven me crazy, so she might as well know it.”

Before Cousin Clorinda could prevent him Romney had thrown up the window and leaned out. He put his hands to his mouth and sent a long, tender, persuasive “Co-oo-e-e” down into the Edgelow garden.

The girl looked up startled. Romney waved his hand at her and smiled. For a moment both he and Cousin Clorinda thought she was going to smile back. Then she coolly turned her back on them and walked into the big cream-brick house and shut the door.

Romney pulled his head in and sat down.

“Have I made an awful ass of myself?” he said doubtfully.

“You have,” said Cousin Clorinda comfortingly. “But,” she added as an afterthought, “either she liked it, or she is a born flirt.”

From a vine-hid upstairs window Miss Edgelow watched Romney as he walked away, the rose in his pocket.

“Her rose fell out of her hair as she went in,” said Romney. “It’s lying there on the porch. I wonder if old Jim Edgelow would shoot me if I went over and got it. I think I’ll risk it.”

“Romney!” gasped Cousin Clorinda. But Romney had gone. She looked out of the window in helpless fascination, saw him appear below, saw him cross the Cooper garden, open the gate, go along the road to the Edgelow gate, disappear, reappear again round the corner of the house, and pick up the rose in triumph.

The door opened and old Jim Edgelow came out.

“What are you doing here, you impertinent pup?” he growled.

“Why be so unoriginal?” asked Romney cheerfully. “Anybody could call me a pup. Why not think of something worthy of the Edgelows? Besides, I’m not a pup really. I’m quite a middle-aged dog. I just came after your niece’s rose. I’m going to marry her, you know.”

“Will you get out of this before I kick you out?” asked old Jim with dangerous calmness.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to stay. I’d have been gone before this if you hadn’t detained me, uncle-that-is-to-be.”

Romney took out his pocketbook, carefully placed his rose therein, shut it, restored it to its place, bowed low to his ancient enemy and returned to the tower room with the air of a conqueror.

From a vine-hid upstairs window of the cream-brick house Miss Edgelow watched him as long as he was in sight.