Читать книгу Deadham Hard - Lucas Malet - Страница 9

A long, low, rectangular and rather narrow room, supported across the centre—where passage walls had been cut away—by an avenue of dumpy wooden pillars, four on either side, leading to a glass door opening on to the garden. A man's room rather than a woman's, and, judging by appearances, a bachelor's at that.—Eighteenth-century furniture, not ignoble in line, but heavy, wide-seated, designed for the comfort of bulky paunched figures arrayed in long napped waistcoats and full-skirted coats. Tabaret curtains and upholsterings, originally maroon, now dulled by sea damp and bleached by sun-glare to a uniform tone in which colour and pattern were alike obliterated. Handsome copperplate engravings of Pisa and of Rome, and pastel portraits in oval frames; the rest of the whity brown panelled wall space hidden by book-cases. These surmounted by softly shining, pearl-grey Chinese godlings, monsters, philosophers and saints, the shelves below packed with neatly ranged books.

A dusky room, in spite of its rounded, outstanding sash-windows, two on either side the glass door; the air of it holding, in permanent solution, an odour of leather-bound volumes. A place, in short, which, though not inhospitable, imposed itself, its qualities and traditions, to an extent impossible for any save the most thick-skinned and thick-witted wholly to ignore or resist.

Young Tom Verity, having no convenient armour-plating of stupidity, suffered its influence intimately as—looking about him with quick enquiring glances—he followed the man-servant across it between the dumpy pillars. He felt self-conscious and disquieted, as by a smile of silent amusement upon some watchful elderly face. So impressed, indeed, was he that, on reaching the door, he paused, letting the man pass on alone to announce him. He wanted time in which to get over this queer sensation of shyness, before presenting himself to the company assembled, there, in the garden outside.

Yet he was well aware that the prospect out of doors—its amplitude of mellow sunlight and of space, its fair windless calm in which no leaf stirred—was far more attractive than the room in the doorway of which he thus elected to linger.

For the glass-door gave directly on to an extensive lawn, set out, immediately before the house front, with scarlet and crimson geraniums in alternating square and lozenge-shaped beds. Away on the right a couple of grey-stemmed ilex trees—the largest in height and girth Tom had ever seen—cast finely vandyked and platted shadow upon the smooth turf. Beneath them, garden chairs were stationed and a tea-table spread, at which four ladies sat—one, the elder, dressed in crude purple, the other three, though of widely differing ages and aspect, in light coloured summer gowns.

To the left of the lawn, a high plastered wall—masked by hollies, bay, yew, and at the far end by masses of airy, pink-plumed tamarisk—shut off the eastward view. But straight before him all lay open, "clean away to the curve of the world" as he told himself, not without a pull of emotion remembering his impending voyage. For, about sixty yards distant, the lawn ended abruptly in a hard straight line—the land cut off sheer, as it seemed, at the outer edge of a gravelled terrace, upon which two small antiquated cannon were mounted, their rusty muzzles trained over swirling blue-green tide river and yellow-grey, high-cambered sand-bar out to sea.

Between these innocuous engines of destruction, little black cannon balls had been piled into a mimic pyramid, near to which three men stood engaged in desultory conversation. One of them, Tom observed as markedly taller, more commanding and distinguished in bearing, than his companions. Even from here, the whole length of the lawn intervening, his presence, once noted, became of arresting importance, focussing attention as the central interest, the one thing which vitally mattered in this gracious scene—his figure silhouetted, vertically, against those long horizontal lines of river, sand-bar, and far-away delicate junction of opal-tinted sea with opal-tinted sky.

Whereupon Tom became convicted of the agreeable certainty that no disappointment awaited him. His expectations were about to receive generous fulfilment. This visit would prove well worth while. So absorbed, indeed, was he in watching the man whom he supposed—and rightly—to be his host, that he failed to notice one of the ladies rise from the tea-table and advance across the lawn, until her youthful white-clad form was close upon him, threading its way between the glowing geranium beds.

Then—"You are my cousin, Thomas Verity?" the girl asked, with a grave air of ceremony.

"Yes—and you—you are my cousin Damaris," he answered as he felt clumsily, being taken unaware in more respects than one, and, for all his ready adaptability, being unable to keep a note of surprise out of his voice and glance.

He had known of the existence of this little cousin, having heard—on occasion—vaguely irritated family mention of her birth at a time when the flame of the Mutiny still burned fiercely in the Punjab and in Oudh. To be born under such very accentuated circumstances could, in the eyes of every normal Verity, hardly fail to argue a certain obtrusiveness and absence of good taste. He had heard, moreover, disapproving allusions to the extravagant affection Sir Charles Verity was said to lavish upon this fruit of a somewhat obscure marriage—his only surviving child. But the said family talk, in Tom's case, had gone in at one ear and out at the other—as the talk of the elder generation mostly does, and will, when the younger generation is solidly and wholesomely convinced of the overwhelming importance of its own personal affairs. Consequently, in coming to Deadham Hard, Tom had thought of this little cousin—in as far as it occurred to him to think of her at all—as a child in the schoolroom who, beyond a trifle of good-natured notice at odd moments, would not enter into the count or matter at all. Now, awakening to the fact of her proximity, he awoke to the further fact that, with one exception, she mattered more than anything or anybody else present.

She was, in truth, young—he had been quite right there. Yet, like the room in the doorway of which he still lingered, like the man standing on the terrace walk—to whose tall figure the serene immensities of sea and sky acted as back-cloth and setting—she imposed herself. Whether she was pretty or plain, Tom was just now incapable of judging. He only knew that her eyes were wonderful. He never remembered to have seen such eyes—clear, dark blue-grey with fine shading of eyelash on the lower as well as the upper lid. Unquestionably they surpassed all ordinary standards of prettiness. Were glorious, yet curiously embarrassing; too in their seriousness, their intent impartial scrutiny—under which last, to his lively vexation, the young man felt himself redden.

And this, considering his superiority in age, sex, and acquirements, was not only absurd but unfair somehow. For did not he, as a rule, get on charmingly well with women, gentle and simple, old and young, alike? Had he not an ingratiating, playfully flirtatious way with them in which he trusted? But flirtatiousness, even of the mildest description, would not do here. Instinctively he recognized that. It would not pay at all—in this stage of the acquaintance, at all events. He fell back on civil speeches; and these rather laboured ones, being himself rather discountenanced.

"It is extremely kind of you and Sir Charles to take me on trust like this," he began. "Believe me I am very grateful. Under ordinary circumstances I should never have dreamed of proposing myself. But I am going out to India for the first time—sailing in the Penang the day after to-morrow. And, as I should be so near here at Southampton, it was, I own, a great temptation to ask if I might come for a night. I felt—my father felt—what a privilege it would be for me, a really tremendous piece of luck, to meet Sir Charles before I started. Such a rare and memorable send off for me, you know!"

"We were very glad you should propose yourself," Damaris answered, still with her grave air of ceremony.

"Awfully good of you, I'm sure," the young man murmured.—No, she didn't stare. He could not honestly call it staring. It was too calm, too impersonal, too reserved for that. She looked, with a view to arriving at conclusions regarding him. And he didn't enjoy the process—not in the least.

"My father is still interested in everything connected with India," she went on. "He will like to talk to you. We have people with us this afternoon whom he could not very well leave, or he would have driven into Marychurch himself to fetch you. Dr. McCabe, who we knew at Bhutpur long ago, came over unexpectedly from Stourmouth this morning; and my Aunt Harriet Cowden telegraphed that she and Uncle Augustus would bring Aunt Felicia, who is staying with them at Paulton Lacy, here to tea.—But, of course, you know them quite well—Uncle Augustus, I mean, and my aunts."

"Do I not know them!" Tom replied with meaning; while, humour getting the upper hand thanks to certain memories, he smiled at her.

And, even at this early period in his career, it must be conceded that Tom Verity's smile was an asset to be reckoned with. Mischievous to the verge of impudence; but confidential, too, most disarmingly friendly—a really vastly engaging smile, which, having once beheld, most persons found themselves more than ready to behold often again.

Under its persuasive influence Damaris' gravity relaxed. She lowered her eyes, and the soft warm colour deepened in her cheeks.

Her steady gaze removed, the young man breathed more freely. He congratulated himself. Intercourse was in act of becoming normal and easy. So far it had been quite absurdly hind-leggy—and for him, him, to be forced into being hind-leggy by a girl of barely eighteen! Now he prepared to trot gaily, comfortably, off on all fours, when she spoke, bringing him up to the perpendicular again with a start.

"I love Aunt Felicia very dearly," she announced, as though in protest against some implied and subtle disloyalty.

"But don't we all love Cousin Felicia?" he returned, promptly, eager to maintain his advantage. "Isn't she kindness incarnate, Christian charity personified? As for me, I simply dote on her; and with reason, for ever since those remote ages in which I wore scratchy pinafores and horrid little white socks, she has systematically and pertinaciously spoiled me whenever she stayed at Canton Magna.—Oh! she is an institution. No family should be without her. When I was small she gave me chocolates, tin soldiers, pop-guns warranted to endanger my brothers' and sisters' eyesight. And now, in a thousand ways, conscious and unconscious," he laughed quietly, naughtily, the words running over each other in the rapidity of his speech—"she gives me such a blessed good conceit of myself!"

And Damaris Verity, caught by the wave of his light-heartedness and inherent desire to please, softened again, her serious eyes alight for the moment with answering laughter. Whereupon Tom crossed the threshold and stood close beside her upon the grass in the brooding sunshine, the beds of scarlet and crimson geraniums ranging away on glowing perspective to left and right. He glanced at the three ladies seated beneath the giant ilexes, and back at his companion. He felt absurdly keen further to excite her friendliness and dispel her gravity.

"Only one must admit cousin Harriet is quite another story," he went on softly, saucily. "Any conceit our dear Felicia rubs in to you, Harriet most effectually rubs out. Isn't it so? I am as a worm, a positive worm before her—can only 'tremble and obey' like the historic lady in the glee. She flattens me. I haven't an ounce of kick left in me. And then why, oh why, tell me, Damaris, does she invariably and persistently clothe herself in violet ink?"

"It is her colour," the girl said, her eyes still laughing, her lips discreetly set.

"But why, in heaven's name, should she have a colour?" he demanded. "For identification, as I have a red and white stripe painted on my steamer baggage? Really that isn't necessary. Can you imagine losing cousin Harriet? Augustus Cowden mislaying her, for example; and only recovering her with joyful cries—we take those for granted in his case, of course—at sight of the violet ink? Not a bit of it. You know as well as I do identification marks can't ever be required to secure her return, because under no conceivable circumstances could she ever be lost. She is there, dear lady, lock, stock, and barrel, right there all the time. So her raiment of violet amounts to a purely gratuitous advertisement of a permanently self-evident fact.—And such a shade too, such a positively excruciating shade!"

But here a movement upon the terrace served, indirectly, to put a term to his patter. For Sir Charles Verity, raising his voice slightly in passing emphasis, turned and moved slowly towards the little company gathered at the tea-table. His two companions followed, the shorter of them apparently making answer, the words echoing clearly in genial richness of affirmation across the intervening space—"And so it was, General, am I not recalling the incident myself? Indeed you're entirely right."

"Come," Damaris said, with a certain brevity as of command.

"And feel a worm?"

"No—come and speak to my father."

"Ah! I shall feel a worm there too," the young man returned, an engaging candour in his smiling countenance; "and with far better reason, unless I am greatly mistaken."