Читать книгу Little Hearts - Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall - Страница 5

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Mr. Sampson was wandering about his house in the small hours of the morning; he found himself unable to sleep, having indeed no bed to sleep in.

He carried a lanthorn in his hand, which he swung dolefully, and he moved with caution in his stockinged feet. Yet the old boards, muffled as they were with dust and rot, found voice to creak complainingly. His restlessness of soul drove him into rooms he had not entered for years—black hollows of imprisoned air. There was the big front room where his mother had died—nothing left in it but the gaunt four-poster, above which a few rags of rosed chintz fluttered at his entering. The windows were as blind with ivy as the windows of some harem of memories; only here and there the moonlight pierced it, and lay on the floor as white as rose leaves—petals of pity. At the end of the corridor was another large room, his cousin’s, who had died also when very young, and while Michael was still a child. The small estate had come to him, but never so much as a silver shilling with it. Michael wondered how it would have been if that unknown cousin had lived. He entered this room softly, with a sense of breaking in on someone’s privacy; for of all the rooms in the house, this one alone was furnished and intact as the young owner had left it. The commissariat, mysteriously managed by Malachi, had year by year demanded the sacrifice of a chair here, a sideboard there... Mr. Sampson never made inquiries. But nothing had gone from this room, and Mr. Sampson, though he rarely entered it, was somehow aware that Malachi dusted it every day.

He turned the dim light on the walls. They were stained with rain. A half-burned candle stood on a table; it was much nibbled by mice, but the power that guards little things, while breaking hearts and worlds, had kept it there for twenty years. A sheathed sword lay on the table; a chair, half-turned, stood by it. Michael Sampson looked long at the chair—so long that at last it seemed to be filled by some friendly shadow—supposedly the cousin—who happened to appear in a claret-coloured coat, with his dark hair unpowdered, and who looked round with a welcoming smile... Mr. Sampson lowered the lanthorn and said, “Refrain, if you can, from being entirely a fool.” As he closed the door he said for the two-hundredth time in the past few hours, “I wonder why I did it...”

At the door of his own room he paused with purpose. But Malachi, sitting in the doorway and mending stockings, showed not the least inclination to move.

“You had better go to bed, Malachi.”

“No, I thank you, sir.”

“You had better go,” persisted Mr. Sampson, in a grinding whisper.

“Why?”

“Why?” Mr. Sampson reddened in a gust of irritation, caused by the necessity of quarrelling with his man in a whisper. “Why? You’re a fool, fellow. How can we both go to bed when there is only one bed? And besides, I am awake.”

“So be I,” Malachi pointed out.

“Malachi...”

“Now, what be you about, sir?” Malachi eyed his master grimly. “I’ve business, come morning. You can take on then, if you’re so set on it. You go and sleep, instead of wandering and roving and peeping. Above that, you disturve him.”

“I do not,” hissed Mr. Sampson.

“You does. You’re like all your kind, you walk heavy from the knees—carrying so much weight o’ bookishness about with you.”

“Malachi, I insist.”

“Insist away.” Malachi moved his chair to intercept an undignified impulse on the part of his master to peep over his shoulder. “You’re not to go disturving of him when he’s sleeping so beautiful. Don’t you worrit. Your uncle, they thought he was dead with a dent in his brain like a bad apple; he slep’ the clock round and called for ‘ysters. And this un’ll be the same. That kind’s terrible hard to kill. I’ll lay,” finished Malachi, with a vicious snap of his eyes, “that he don’t walk heavy from the knees when he’s about...”

Mr. Sampson turned away, smiling, with that sense of humour which became him as a shield. But when he came back he was grave. “Malachi,” he said gently, “I have been thinking of many things this night, I do not know why—things of which we never speak. But now it is in my mind to ask you why you despise me so. Is it because of my past father, or of my present poverty?”

Malachi raised his old face, worn thin and red as a leaf. He was silent while the mean dip flickered and the stillness of the rotting house stood round them.

“Is it for my poverty?”

Something blazed in the old eyes. “By God, no. But because you’re content with it...”

Mr. Sampson went downstairs without a word. He greatly desired his philosophy book, but failed to find it until he took the lanthorn and explored the garden. He found it then, somewhat the worse for a too close contact with the Real, and took it unto himself jealously. A few chill stars and the late moon watched him, and the hollows beneath them were empty of everything but a little lost wind that seemed houseless as a lost bird. He returned indoors, and was minded, at three o’clock of the morning, to write on Peace.

“Peace,” he wrote by the light of the smoky lanthorn set on the table, and splashing passionately in the ink, “is one of the few Fardels wherewith the follower of Poverty may ease his Travels on the Highroad that leadeth at last to Heaven. Youth, Love—these be too Burdensome for that Road, as if a man set to climb mountains should carry upon his back the Compass of a Star or the Weight of a Sea. But Peace, being of slight Compass, no larger indeed than a man’s Heart, will go well in any Scrip or Wallet, and will not prove in the least Burdensome to any ordinary Capacity. It is best carried in the Pack called Contentment, so that this be well mended and in good Repair. For if there be a hole in the Corner of that heavenly Poke, Bag, Sack, Scrip, or Wallet, then will Peace escape because of its small Size and the thinness of its Humour, and the poor Traveller will have much Ado to find it again...”

He stopped, having a strong suspicion that he was writing nonsense. The lanthorn light flickered, casting waves of dull gold over a face usually colourless, and worn, in spite of its youth, as if the mould that formed it had been used too many times.

“As for Love,” wrote the philosopher, and stopped, scenting violets. It was fitting; for he was one of those few men to whom the misused word called one image and one only—a girl with a torn stocking, sitting on a wall and eating little knobs of sugar wrapped up in violet petals. The fragrance, however, did not come from the vision, but from a riding-coat of claret cloth hung over the back of his chair. He turned and fingered it, shyly almost as a girl might have done. He was young. He was lonely. And the coat, hung comradely on his chair, seemed to speak of some intimacy he had never known.

He took the coat on his knee. It was of a fine fashion, but had seen hard wear. Through one cuff was a small round hole, scorched at the edges; on one shoulder a clean cut, neatly mended. He found some things in the pockets after a hesitating exploration. They were, to be precise, six chestnuts, a handful of corn in a screw of paper, some twine, a coil of wire, two links of a silver chain, a rusty key, a little worn manuscript book dealing with the whole art and practice of farriery, and an indeterminate squash that may have been blackberries.

He laid these things on the table and looked at them. They told him much and nothing, but he was content to wait. He was used to sit of evenings and feel himself shrink and grow old as the empty silence of the moulding rooms closed round him with the dark. Now those hollow rooms, where the mice lived and the rain ran, were filled with a fine echo of adventure, and all because a stunned stranger was asleep in his bed upstairs. Here was something that would not fit in any philosophy. His pen, thrown down, had made a great blot after “Love.” He did not take it up again. Malachi, stealing through the room a little before dawn, found his master asleep, his head on the book and the coat still across his knees.