Читать книгу A Question of Faith - Lily Dougall - Страница 5

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The laws which govern circumstance do not arrange the details of life to suit the lovers of a perfect tale. It might so easily have happened that one or both of the men who were chiefly interested in Alice Bolitho should have passed by, or just above, the place of her misadventure at the right time, and have heard her cry and rescued her; but, instead of that, Harvey and Knighton together had left the place long before she approached it, and Harvey, returning to it by himself, came just too late.

He had taken lunch at the inn, looked at the quaint little village, and glanced curiously through the gates at Norcombe House. After that he returned and established himself in the cottage upon the hill, and strolled again to the spot whose beauty had so fascinated him—the upper entrance to the combe.

The path here was a descending ledge, and the side of the hill curved in and out with the winding of the stream below. Descending a little way, Harvey was standing above the path among the trees, and was feeling rather than observing the prospect before him, when suddenly in the stillness of the place he heard a light footfall coming up with speed. As he looked, a girl came round the turning into view. Her face was very white; indeed, it appeared to Harvey to be so blanched of all color that he did not truly know for a moment whether he looked at a woman or at a ghost—if a ghost could sustain the weight of ordinary clothing.

As for the girl, when she caught sight of him she hesitated, first, as it seemed, with an impulse of renewed terror, and next, apparently, with an eager desire to speak. So astonished he was, he stood still, leaning perforce, as he had been, against a tree to keep his footing, and the girl, as these changes of impulse passed over her, stood upon the path looking up to him. It proved, however, that the white lips formed no word, that there was no voice to come from the throat of this pallid creature. A few moments more, and she had gone on as she came, running with light fleet step up to the moor.

Harvey followed, but at a more reasonable pace, for when her back was turned the ordinary habits of life so far reasserted themselves as to remind him that to run upon the heels of a young lady would not tend to lessen her fears if she were afraid, and in any case was a proceeding too odd to be justified by the mere sight of a sheet-like countenance.

When he reached the open, he still saw the figure which had recently been near him. She was traveling upon the upper path in the Norcombe direction, and as he followed, returning to his rooms, he still saw her in advance, until she went over the hill where it dipped suddenly to the Village.

Twilight crept gray and silent over the moor. Harvey realized that he had come to sojourn in the world’s most quiet corner.

After dinner he met Knighton by appointment at Norcombe Inn, whence they were both to repair to Miss Bolitho’s drawing-room for that first interview, so terrifying and at the same time so interesting to Harvey. Harvey had, however, now a counteracting subject of interest.

“I never saw any one look in more of a funk,” he said to Knighton, after having related the incident.

“Most extraordinary! What did she wear?”

“Haven’t the slightest idea.”

“Well, I mean was she a gentlewoman?”

“Yes, certainly that.”

They were walking together in the dusky night towards Norcombe House. Knighton’s questions came sharply, with pauses for reflection between.

“Was she thin—in a black dress?”

“No.”

A longer pause; then Knighton said, in a voice that had a studied effort of calm:—

“It must have been Miss Bolitho. She is the last person I would have expected to be frightened in the way you describe, unless there was very sufficient cause, which I trust there was not.”

Knighton was tramping along at a great rate as he spoke. If Harvey had been more at leisure from himself, he would have observed that the motive power of this swift walking was inward perturbation; but he observed nothing, his mind was full of the idea that possibly he had already seen his lady-love, and he was trying to recall more particularly what she was like.

The night was not dark; the stream running in the grass of the park was just apparent as they passed over. Through the leafless twigs of high trees the stars were shining. In the lower windows of the square white house there was light.

“But who,” said Harvey, “is the thin person you mentioned, with the black dress?”

“You did not suppose that Miss Bolitho lived here all alone?”

“I never thought anything about it.”

“Mrs. Ross, a young widow who is a distant relative, is staying with her.”

“Both young! Are they attached to one another?”

“Miss Bolitho has an affection for Mrs. Ross which is to me rather unaccountable, for I should not fancy Mrs. Ross to be very congenial.”

When they entered the house they were shown into a square sitting-room on the lower floor; oak beams crossed and recrossed each other in the low ceiling, the three windows opening on the park were low and square, all the furniture was dark and plain. At a square table the ladies sat with their work, and they both rose, coming forward a pace or two, and at first sight Harvey was sorry that he had been told that the thin lady in black was not Alice Bolitho, for she was fairer to look at than the other. On either side of a pretty face light, waving hair was brushed with nun-like simplicity; her very delicacy gave grace to her figure; if she was pale, the excitement of their entrance had brought a rose-flush to her cheeks; if she was older than her companion, she hardly looked it in the lamplight. Miss Bolitho, on the other hand, was a much more ordinary-looking person; she had an appearance of sturdy strength; her face, though fresh and pleasing, was not at all beautiful; her dark abundant hair was arranged with no attempt to make it appear either aesthetic or fashionable. Harvey distinctly felt that the stars in their courses might have been more favorable to him.

The shaded lamp did not allow him to be sure at the first greeting whether or not he had seen Alice Bolitho before. He sat a little back from the table, endeavoring to observe her face more carefully.

The conversation went lamely, for Knighton appeared to have the grim idea that Harvey, having been introduced, should now shine in the talk with uneclipsed light, and Mrs. Ross, with a pretty air of shy deference, looked to Miss Bolitho to answer all the remarks that either of the men made. Harvey anathematized Knighton as a tact-less fool, but it did not occur to him to make the same criticism upon the lady with the pretty face. At last he said:—

“I think I cannot be mistaken—I think I saw you to-day coming up the combe.”

“Yes; I was just thinking it must have been you whom I saw there.”

Ever since they had come in, Miss Bolitho had been replying with quiet, candid good sense. Harvey thought she would have been more attractive if she had shown the sensibility of the embarrassing nature of the occasion which her companion was displaying; and that she should also propose to treat their meeting of the afternoon as if nothing remarkable had characterized it, appeared to him distinctly cold and artificial. Now that he saw her in abundant health and calm of nerve, what he had witnessed in the afternoon appeared more and more extraordinary. Knighton, who was at this point fidgeting almost noisily with his chair, made an apparent effort to say nothing.

Harvey smiled across the table to his cousin.

“You surely were feeling faint or frightened when I saw you. I—I almost thought—almost thought you were a spiritual creature, you were so pale.”

“Yes; I was feeling faint and very much frightened.”

“Oh, Alice, my dear, how was it that you did not tell me? Feeling faint and frightened, and you were alone!” The words were uttered in a voice full of feeling. Mrs. Ross had come out of herself, it appeared, in her distress about the revelation just made.

Alice replied, with just the slightest touch of irritation in her voice, “The faintness was over in a minute, Amy; it was not worth mentioning.”

“Oh, my dear,” with great affection, “to think that you should have been faint —you who are so strong! If it had been me, now, it would have been nothing, not to be considered for a moment.”

Alice was silent.

“What frightened you?” This question came from Knighton, in a voice low and determined, and Alice looked across at him a moment with clear, kindly eyes before she answered. It seemed to rest her so to look and meet his gaze; but Harvey was not observing her, he was noticing Amy Ross, who was brooding over the rebuff of Alice’s silence. She had drawn her chair a little farther from the light; there was a look of pain and patience in her delicate face, and something that suggested that that look was frequently to be seen there.

“I walked through the combe,” said Alice. “You told me not to go” (this to Knighton), “but I thought that, being warned that the path might be loose, I was safe enough. Yet for some reason, when I got to”—(her voice faltered, it was a moment before she could go on)—“to the ledge over the rock—I became quite dizzy and frightened. I did not know before that I could be so foolish and weak.”

“What frightened you?” Knighton repeated his question with exactly the same force.

Alice smiled. “You know,” in an explanatory tone, “I am not the least superstitious. I don’t believe that people with pale faces may be ghosts as likely as not” (she glanced mockingly at Harvey), “yet I confess that I had a fit of nerves, or a presentiment of evil, or whatever you may call it, that I can’t account for, and when I got to the steepest place I was terrified; I was only too glad to run up to the moor as quickly as I could.”

“You could not have run uphill if you were faint,” said Knighton.

“It was when I stopped for a bit that I felt faint.”

“Do you mean me to understand that this terror came upon you without your seeing or hearing anything to cause it?” Knighton asked this sternly.

There was just an instant’s pause. Then Alice answered evasively, “Yes, that is what I wish you to understand.”

When the men were gone, the two women within the house went to their sleeping-rooms.

Amy Ross, upon shutting her own door, fell into a little reverie before her toilet-glass. She was afraid of Knighton—that is, she thought he disapproved of her, and she always feared disapproval; but she decided that she liked the newcomer. She began to think what this and that expression on his face had meant. After a little reflection, she could have given an account of all his inward thoughts and feelings during the evening. Then she remembered how very happy he and Alice would probably be together; the remembrance saddened her, and naturally, because there was no place for herself in the vision. There are few of us who are unselfish enough to enjoy festivities of heart from which our hearts are shut out. Then she recollected that she would for the present have the interesting occupation of guiding the course of true love in the right channel; that, as she loved to be of use, put heart into her again.

When Alice Bolitho entered her bedroom she did not linger in pensive meditation; she did what she had to do with ordinary rapidity, and that was to go to bed. The room was chilly, for one thing (Amy had a fire, but she had none); for another, she longed to have the candle out; she hated the very sight of herself that evening. Yet when her head was pillowed in the darkness she did not for a long time even think of sleep.

With hands clasped under her thick tresses, and head that lay outwardly quiet upon the hands, and eyes wide open to the darkness, the girl lay looking into the situation in which she found herself.

It was hard, hard indeed, that among all the women of her class in peaceful England, who passed their lives in unruffled security, she should have been one of the very few to be molested by a violent hand. She was sure that statistics would show that the chances against any real danger on a country road were so great that to have seriously listened to her curious preliminary fears would have been quite foolish, yet the event had proved most miserable.

Miserable in this,—that the adventure, short and barren of such horrors as any imagination might conjure up, had, just by its reality, struck down her strength, physical and moral, with such an easy blow; and in this also, that the trap which had been laid for her was a worn-out, rusty thing. It seemed to her excited brain as if many of the pages of romance were soiled with vows of help and concealment weakly taken under the compulsion of fear.

It was a most amazing thing that two criminals, or, rather, one dying criminal and his protector, should have taken refuge in so quiet a neighborhood, and should claim from her, the only woman of substance near, that she should feed them and keep their secret till death came for the younger man. More extraordinary did this seem because she now believed that the thin aged creature who had extorted this promise from her was a man of gentle birth and life, and not more mad than every man may be in his direst extremity.

It was plainly not for the good of society that this man or any other should be able to rely upon a promise compelled by force. It was not the best thing for the community in which she lived that such desperate characters should remain hidden there. It was worse for the men themselves, one aged, the other dying, to suffer want and exposure than to be placed in some prison hospital. It was plainly a most disagreeable course for herself, to keep such a secret, to prevaricate and evade the questions of her best friends, and to afford the constant help to these men that would be necessary.

As well as Alice could spell out the dictate of common sense, it bade her notify the authorities, in the person of Mr. Knighton, that men were starving in one of the cottages on the moor, but was there not a stronger command than this?

One consideration, as it appeared to Alice, was stronger, and that was the intensely disagreeable feeling of dishonor that over-came her when she had actually essayed to take the course that wisdom indicated. Out of cowardice she had given a promise, and given it in words of which the very remembrance sapped all her self-respect; she had vowed, and she had deliberately repeated the vow, and now to break it seemed such a low and bad thing to do that she must be sure that there was harm in keeping it before she broke it.

Alice Bolitho looked into the darkness, and as clear to her mind as it had been to her eyes some hours before when she had made a visit in the dusk, rose the picture of the interior of a broken cottage, of a young man in the last stages of wasting disease, and of the old man, weak with the reaction from his fierce assault, trembling with the palsy of starvation. These men could not injure others, she thought; the harm would be to themselves, and the counterbalancing good the old man looked for was a matter of circumstances and beliefs of which she knew nothing. “Well,” she sighed, “that is his responsibility.” And the harm would be to herself. She felt that for her cowardice she deserved discomfort, and she plainly chose the least discomfort in keeping her word rather than in breaking it.

This was the way the thoughts of Alice Bolitho ran on the evening of the day on which she had first seen her suitor. Once she thought of him. “Oh, I wish,” she said to herself, “that I could tell him all about it; he looks as if he would be kind, but of course he couldn’t take the responsibility of keeping the thing quiet.” After a moment she added, “Neither could Mr. Knighton.”