Читать книгу The Invisible Foe - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 4

BOOK I

THE CHILDREN

CHAPTER I

Stephen lay on his stomach, one sharp elbow comfortable in a velvet bed of moss, his chin cupped in his palm, his beautifully shaped head thrown back, his alert face lifted to the sky, his eager eyes following hungrily the flight of a bird.

Hugh, crunched up against the big oak tree, was making a chain of blossoms, and making it awkwardly enough, with many a restless boy-sigh, many a destruction of delicate spring wild flower.

Helen was playing by herself.

Nothing could have been more characteristic of the three children than their occupations of the moment.

Stephen usually was watching birds fly, when he was out of doors, and birds were to be seen. And the only time his uncle Richard had ever laid a hand (except in rare caress or in approbation) on the orphan boy, had been when Stephen, three months after his arrival at Deep Dale, had opened its cage, and lost Helen her pet canary–all because he “wanted to see just how he flies.”

“And I did see, too,” he had told Hugh an hour after his stoically endured caning. “It was worth more than a few smacks. Bet I can fly too, some day. You wait.”

Hugh had said nothing. He was used to Stephen and Stephen’s vivid ambitions. And he was stolid.

Stephen had suffered his slight chastisement proudly–if not quite gladly–but with each faltering fall of his uncle’s cane a seed of bitterness had entered the child’s soul. He never had felt the same to “Uncle Dick” since–which was no small pity, for the orphan boy was love-hungry, and Richard Bransby his best friend.

The small punishment bred deceit but worked no cure. The men in the fowl-yard could have told sad tales of staid hens aggravated to indignant, fluttering flight, and the old gardener of peacocks goaded to rise from their self-glorified strutting and preening to fly stiff and screaming the few spaces which were their farthest. But neither the farm hands nor the gardener told. Why–it is not easy to say. They did not particularly like Stephen–few people did. But they feared him. He mastered their wills. A solitary child, not half so happy as childhood has every right to be, the boy met few he did not influence sharply. His was a masterful nature. Little altogether escaped his subtle dominance.

Stephen was not essentially cruel. His cruelty was corollary and accessory to his passion–a passion for power and for the secrets of aerial skill. He bore the birds no ill-will. He simply was obsessed to see their flight, and to study it, garnering up in his odd, isolated, accretive child’s mind–and heart–every vibrant curve and beat of their wings, every angle and bend of their bodies.

Stephen usually was watching the flight of a bird, or scheming some mechanical imitation of it.

Hugh usually was doing something for wee Helen, doing it with perspiring and sighful awkwardness and for scant thanks–or for none.

Helen usually was playing by herself, and pretending, as now, to be sharing the sport of some playfellow, perfectly tangible to her, but invisible, non-existent to the boys–a form of persistent “make believe” which greatly amused Hugh and as greatly irritated Stephen.

“Don’t pretend like that; it’s a simpleton way of going on,” the older boy called to her now, without moving his head or his eyes.

“It’s nothing of the kind,” the girl replied scornfully. “You’re blind, that’s what’s the matter–blinder’n a bat, both of you.” And she continued to laugh and chat with her “make-believe” playmates.

An elfin child herself, the children of her own delicate myth did seem the more suitable fellows for her dainty frolic than either queer Stephen or stolid, clumsy Hugh.

The little girl was very pretty, a queenly little head heavy with vivid waves of gold-red hair, curved red lips eloquent of the history of centuries of womanhood, wide blue eyes, and the prettiest hands and arms that even feminine babyhood (and English babyhood, Celtic-dashed at that) had ever yet achieved; every pink-tipped finger a miracle, and each soft, beautifully molded elbow, dimpled and dented with witching chinks that simply clamored for kisses–and often got them; a sunny, docile child, yielding but unafraid, quiet and reserved, but hiding under its rose and snow robe of provocatively pretty flesh, a will that never swerved: the strongest will at Deep Dale–and that says everything of it–for both Stephen Pryde, fourteen years old, and his uncle, nearing fifty, had stronger wills than often fall to us weak mortals of drift and vacillation. These two masculine strengths of will lay rough and prominent on the surface and also sank soul-deep. The uncle’s never abated. Circumstances and youth curbed the boy’s, at times–but neither chilled nor softened it. Helen’s will lay deep and still. Her pretty, smiling surface never showed it by so much as a gentle ripple. She kept it as a sort of spiritual “Sunday best” laid away in the lavender and tissue of her secret self. As yet only her old Scotch nurse even suspected its existence and of all her little, subservient world, only that old Scotch nurse neither laughed at Helen’s dream friends–nor scoffed. In her sweet six years of life her father’s will and hers had never clashed. That, when the almost inevitable clash of child and parent, old and young, cautious experience and adventurous inexperience, came, Helen’s should prove the stronger will, and hers the victory, would have seemed absurd and incredible to all who knew them–to every one except the nurse.

Stephen and Hugh, in their different boyish ways, loved the girl-child, and wooed her.

She tolerated them both, patronized, tyrannized, and cared little for either.

Hugh was thick-set and had sweaty hands. Often he bored her.

Stephen’s odd face, already at fourteen corrugated by thought, ambition and strident personality painfully concealed, repelled her–even frightened her a little, a very little; for her cherished life and serene soul gave her little gift of fear.

Their wills clashed daily–but almost always over things about which she cared little or less than little, and did not trouble to be insistent. She yielded over such trifles–out of indifference and almost contemptuous good-nature sheerly. And the boy, “blind” here at least, misread it. But on one point Stephen never could prevail against her. She would neither renounce her invisible playmates nor even concede him that they were indeed “make-believe.”

Her will and Hugh’s never clashed. How could they? He had no will but hers.

Hugh was her slave.

Stephen, loving her as strongly and as hotly, sought to be her master. No conscious presumption this: it was his nature.

Deep Dale was all simmering blue and green to-day–with softening shadows and tones of gray; blue sky, green grass, trees green-leafed, gray-trunked–green paths, gray and green-walled, blue roofed, the early spring flowers (growing among the grasses but sparsely as yet, and being woven, too often broken-necked, into Hugh’s devoted jewelering) too tiny of modest bud and timid bloom to speck but most minutely the picture with lemon, violet or rose. The little girl’s wealth of red hair made the glory and the only emphatic color of the picture. Hugh’s hair was ash brown and dull–Stephen’s darker, growing to black–but as dull. Even the clothes of these three children painted in perfectly with the blue and green of this early May-day, Nature’s spring-song. The lads, not long out of mourning, were dressed in sober gray. Helen’s frocks came from Hanover Square, when they did not come from the Rue de Rivoli, and to-day her little frock of turquoise cashmere was embroidered and sashed with green as soft and tender as the pussy willows and their new baby leafage.

But the sun–a pale gray sun at best all day–was slipping down the sky’s blue skirt. Helen, tiring of her elvish play, or wholesomely hungry for “cambric” tea and buns, slid off the tree trunk, smiled back and waved her hand–to nothing, and turned towards the house. Hugh trotted after her, not sorry to suspend his trying toil, not sorry to approach cake and jam, but carrying his stickily woven tribute with him. But Stephen, enthralled, almost entranced, lay still, his fine chin cupped in his strong hand, his eyes–and his soul–watching a flock of birds flying nestward towards the night.