Читать книгу The Green Goddess - Louise Jordan Miln - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Out on the ocean Lucilla Crespin missed her father more than he, alone now in the vicarage, missed her. He had been bereaved too often to feel overwhelming or insupportable shock from bereavement, and he was at home with his house, his books, his garden, his people, his usual work and his usual pastimes, with his church and his churchyard—and, above all, at home with himself.

Lucilla was scarcely at home yet with her new self—that was the chief difference—and she was out on the new, unbeaten paths now, crossing the wide world, alone on the ocean, alone for the rest of the long years to come with a stranger—a devoted and perfectly charming stranger, who loved her amazingly, and whom she loved excitingly—but a stranger. She had felt so closely acquainted with her lover, even before he had spoken his love, but she found that she felt oddly and shyly unacquainted with her husband. It was fascinating, the queer strangeness she felt, and it made the smallest, ordinary, everyday things wonderful, almost hairbreadth-escape adventure—changing her shoes, fastening a blouse, winding her watch, washing her hands. But it was a strangeness. Antony was wonderfully good to her, beautifully considerate. She found something new to like in him every day, and discovered, almost as often, some unexpected trait or attainment to admire. She told him so shyly one evening, and he laughed with his face against hers.

“‘’Tis not a year or two shows us a man,’” he told her teasingly.

And, “So I begin to suspect,” his wife retorted.

She was very happy. The ocean and the sky above it did not seem large enough to hold her happiness; and, as for her own heart, it ached sometimes with the throb and the crowding of her hew joy. But she missed her father sorely, and each mile farther from England she missed him the more.

The boat was full of Anglo-Indians, of course, a few going out for the first time to take up new appointments, boys with their first commissions, men exchanging into Indian regiments, civil servants; but for the most, service folk and civil servants returning from leave. Lucilla noticed that they grumbled a deal at the heat and the “grind” they were going back to, but it seemed to her as she listened, keenly interested in even stray words that might tell her something of the new world in which she was going to live, that their grumbling was more a convention than a sincerity, and that they one and all were looking forward to India as what one happy-faced subaltern frankly called it, “a jolly good spree—what.” There were two or three globe-trotters aboard, an isolated and cold-shouldered missionary, and three or four business men. But these scarcely tinged the gathering, for none of them in the least penetrated into the “service” fold. It was almost a secret society the “service” people formed, she found; and certainly a jealously kept and guarded caste, and the army people sat on the higher seats.

If Mrs. Crespin was proud of her good-looking, soldierly husband, Captain Crespin was openly vain of his tall, handsome, girlish wife. And because he was vain of her he genially encouraged the acquaintance that soon buzzed about her.

The women admired her frocks, and the men admired her eyes and the way she walked, and both women and men liked her for her fresh girlishness. And, if some of the women envied her it, not one of them did it cattishly; and several, already sallowed from long Indian years, pitied her too, knowing that what India had done to their skins it probably would do to hers. And it takes a very sour woman, and a woman a little bad at core, to feel unkindness towards a bride.

Lucilla Crespin looked younger than her twenty years, and, tall as she was, securely as she carried herself, girlishness was her most instantly and insistently obvious point. Many a country priest’s motherless daughter—especially an only daughter—looks and seems very much older than her years. But in no sense had Mrs. Crespin ever been “her father’s curate,” or the villagers’ “mother.” Parochial administration and fad-philanthropy had never attracted her, and she had firmly left them alone. They had not sat too heavily on Philip Reynolds himself, and had shadowed the Vicar but little, and had shadowed the vicarage life and Lucilla not at all. He was always readier with half-crowns than with soup or jellies, and he prayed for his flock more than he fussed it.

He, not Lucilla, had been the housekeeper. He had a flair for housekeeping, and she had not. He engaged the servants, arranged the menus as a rule, paid the bills and planned hospitalities. Lucilla had had an ample allowance—Reynolds liked things well done, and he perfectly knew that that required money—but she never exceeded, rarely spent, all of it, and more often than not consulted her father about the color and material of a new frock. The result had justified her—if it had not altogether fitted her for the selection of her own wardrobe which lay before her now. It was thanks chiefly to the Reverend Philip Reynolds that the women on the big P. and O. so admired young Mrs. Crespin’s gowns. He had taken far more interest in Lucilla’s trousseau than she had—and it had cost him a great deal of money. Little as she knew of money, the bills for that trousseau would have appalled Lucilla, if she ever had seen them; but they had warmed the Vicar’s heart like good wine, and he wrote the checks with a glowing face, and with a complacent flourish at the end of his scholarly signature. There would not be a great deal to leave his girl at his death, but he had no wish that they should have a very great deal; and Antony had enough. And Helen’s modest inheritance was secure for Lucilla.

All this had kept Lucilla Reynolds very young. She had had few tasks, and no burdens. She never had gone to school. She had had expensive and highly efficient governesses—the best that large salaries, great care, and the Vicar’s good sense and fine taste could procure: estimable women who also were charming. But none of them had lived at the vicarage. Lured from London and Paris, one of the conditions of their engagement always had been that they should find for themselves or allow Mr. Reynolds to find for them apartments at a reasonable distance from the vicarage, but by no means close to its gates. Their holidays had been long, and their teaching hours rather short. They had had no sinecure—the Vicar knew the value of money, and always insisted upon getting the value of his—but none of Lucilla Reynolds’ governesses had been overworked. And none of them had been encouraged to “mother” the girl, and certainly none of them had had any reason to regard as the most remote possibility a translation from governess to step-mother. They had been handsomely paid to teach, and so wisely had they been chosen that they had done it handsomely. They had loved the girl too; and she had liked them all, but she had loved none of them. Lucilla Crespin had felt love but twice: love for her father, and love for the soldier who was taking her with him to India now. And she scarcely had had a girl friend. If this last had narrowed her, it too had preserved her. It had made her a poor hand at some sorts of “small talk,” but it had kept her mind fresh and undiscolored.

Philip Reynolds had “formed” his girl himself, he and the books he had shared with her and the environment he had given her. And her actual “education” he had officered even more than any of her paid teachers had. Had their wills ever clashed or their tastes jarred, such constant companionship might have rasped the girl. But their wills had been one, and their tastes had too. Best of all, for her welfare, she never had been able to feel for her father less than absolute respect. And she had always had to be proud of him. She had never found her home life dull, for the father had been a perfect playmate. It was small wonder that she, whose girlhood had been so guarded, but never stagnant, and had been so companioned—so rarely companioned—was younger than her years—and seemed even younger than she was. It was no wonder at all that she missed her father. She missed him terribly.

There were a number of men and several women on board whom Captain Crespin had known in India, had met in the hills, at Calcutta and in leaves in Kashmir; but none of his regiment, or of his own station in the Punjab. But at Malta two brother officers, returning from a shorter leave than his, joined the ship. As a matter of course they “chummed up” with the Crespins and Crespin with them.

They had heard of his marriage, and were not a little anxious to know just what manner of girl was coming “on to their strength.” There were only four women in the regiment—that is, actually in the station—just now, and in the small station there was no other regiment, and no social life whatever beyond what the regiment made for itself. Where the women were so few it was distinctly important what manner of women they were: how much to be liked, how far congenial and helpful. Two of the ladies already with the regimental colors were dearly loved by every man in it; two were not. The new Mrs. Crespin would make the preponderance for social comfort or discomfort. Which? Bruce and Crossland wondered. They didn’t say so to each other, of course. India’s a gossipy place—Anglo-India—and in the Punjabi dearth even the soldier-men “talk” over their tobacco. But only the “bounders” ever discuss the women folk of brother officers, and there are very few bounders commissioned into the British army, and the few that are are rather apt to drift out: they are apt to find that there is not comfortable room for them in their regiment.

Crossland and Bruce had never so much as hinted to each other their hope and their fear as to how far Crespin’s wife might sweeten or bitter their next few years. But both knew that (and what) both were hoping and fearing somewhat acutely.

The sun was setting over Valetta as the great P. and O. swung and throbbed back to her course. Malta lay rose and gold in the sunset, the Church of St John looked gold inlaid with pink and amber, the old auberges where the Knights once kept their palaced state sparkled red and gold in the heat of the sun’s dying radiance, and the exquisite high-walled little gardens looked chips of garnet, emerald and topaz, and even the carob-trees and prickly pears in the sparcer bare and rocky valleys were jeweled and gay in the waning splendor. Back of and over the city of Valetta, with its queer, steep, twisted streets and its picturesque and magnificent buildings—more flowers, more great and varied architecture, and more human beings and homes are packed into Malta’s teeming ninety-five square miles than are in the same space anywhere else—hung the sunset’s gorgeous curtain of ever-changing amethyst and gold, crimson and rose and apple-green and fire-shot lemon, and here in front of the island at her feet the great blue ocean rippled and spread like a tremulous carpet woven of blue and green gems.

And this was the background against which, when they came on to the deck, after hastily changing for dinner, Bruce and Crossland first saw their regiment’s latest recruit—Captain Crespin’s girl-wife.

The Crespins too already were dressed to dine, and she, in her soft frock of delicate blue, with touches here and there of vivid green velvet, which the Vicar had proudly pronounced “most happy,” an inch of silvery gray fur at its fluted hem, a great bunch of saffron and lemon roses, that Crespin had bought her in Valetta’s fragrant flower market, in her hands, and a rose—one of the deep ones—at her breast, and loosely over her hair the shawl of black Maltese lace that Antony too had bought as they wandered about the old, once Phœnician town of the Hospitalers, looked for all her palpably English tea-rose face not unlike some exquisite Maltese.

They were standing by the rail, watching the sunset city—the Crespins—but Antony was more particularly watching her, his face turned a little towards the deck, and he saw his brother officers, and hailed them.

When he introduced them to “my wife,” Bruce, forgetting it was for her to grant it, if she chose, not for him to ask it, impulsively held out his hand—after all she was one of them now—and Lucilla instantly and cordially gave him hers; and when he let it go, not too quickly, she held it out with a pretty friendly gesture, half girlish, half matronly to Dr. Crossland, and said to them both, “How jolly! I thought I should have to wait until we got to Sumnee before I knew any of you. This is ever so much nicer.” And her big blue eyes, deep and clear as sapphires, but softer under their curled fringe of long dark lashes, said shyly, “Please like me.”

“By Jove, Mrs. Crespin”—she was not very used yet to being called so, and she flushed deliciously, and a dimple trembled at one corner of her bow-shaped red mouth—“By Jove, it is ripping of you to say so,” Bruce stammered delightedly. And Crossland looked what Bruce had said.

They saw without looking the relief in each other’s faces.

Crespin saw it too, and laughed aloud.

“What is it?” Lucilla demanded.

“Ask them,” Antony chuckled, and sauntered off, leaving the three alone.

“What was Tony laughing at?” the girl persisted.

Dr. Crossland smiled sagely, but shook his head decidedly.

“I’ll tell you some day, if I dare, Mrs. Crespin,” Bruce promised her. “Wouldn’t dare tell you now, don’t you know. My hat, I’m glad we’ve hopped on to your boat—no end a tamasha we’ll have getting out to our 306-in-the-shade paradise. I say, don’t you let Crespin give us the slip in Calcutta, will you?”

“Why did he laugh? What was funny? Do tell me.”

But neither man would do that.

But they each fell very industriously to making particularly good friends with Antony Crespin’s wife.

And that night in the stateroom they shared each made a cryptic remark, one to his hair-brush, one to the shoe he kicked off.

“Thank the Lord!” Tom Bruce told his shoe audibly.

George Crossland, under his breath said to his brush, frowning at it, “Poor girl!”