Читать книгу Seven for a Secret - Mary Webb - Страница 6

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A sharp young moon sidled up over the dark eastern shoulder of the moor, entangled herself in the black manes of the pines which swayed a little in the rising night wind, slipped through them like a fish through a torn net, and swam free in a large grey sky which was beginning to tingle, between the woolly clouds, with a phosphorescence of faint starlight. In the last meadow that sloped up, rough and tussocky, to the splendid curve of moorland, Robert found the sheep, uneasy beneath a dubious heaven. They lay with their dim raddled bodies outlined by crisp, frosty, faintly luminous grass. The presage of lambing-time was already in their eyes.

‘Coom then!’ said Robert. ‘Coom then!’

They rose with a faery crackling of herbage, and prepared to go whither he should lead them. But as he turned towards home, a voice, sharp and silvery as the young moon, cutting the deep boding silence like a sickle, cried from the other side of the bare hazel hedge:

‘Bide for me, ’oot, Bob?’

He turned, unsurprised and unhurried.

‘What ails you, Gillian, child, nutting in November? Dunna you know the owd rhyme?’

‘Say it!’

‘Nut in November,

Gather doom.

There’s none will remember

Your tomb.’

‘You made it,’ she cried.

He laughed shyly.

‘What for do you go to think that-a-way?’

‘I dunna think. I know. You made it, somewheer in that black tously head of yourn. I do believe you’ve got a cupboard there, like Mrs. Makepeace keeps the jam in, and you keep the tales and songs and what-nots with little tickets on ’em, and fetch ’em when you want ’em.’

She jumped down from the hedge-bank, and two dead rabbits in her hand swung across her apron and dabbled it with blood.

‘I’se reckon,’ said Robert, surveying her with amused eyes, ‘as you’m a little storm in teacup, and no mistake. What’s come o’er you to ketch the conies? You’re like nought but a little brown coney yourself.’

She threw the conies on the grass, flung back her plaits, set her hands on her slim hips, and said: ‘I’ve got to catch ’em. I’m bound to get money for lessons in the music. You know that.’

‘What for’s it taken you to want the music?’

‘I mun sing, and play a golden harp like the big man played at the Eisteddfod.’

‘What then?’

‘Then I’ll buy a piece of crimson scarlet stuff and make me a dress, and put the harp in the cyart along of A’nt Fanteague, and go into the world and play to folks and make ’em cry.’

‘What for cry?’

‘Cos folk dunna like to cry at a randy. Even at the Revivals they only cry when the preachers shout mortal loud and the texts come pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, and knock ’em silly. If you can make ’em cry when they’d liefer not, you know as you’ve got power over ’em.’

‘You’m a queer chyild.’

‘Where did you get that song you learnt me yesterday?’

‘Foot of the rainbow.’

‘Did you make it?’

‘Did I make the moon?’

‘If you wunna tell, you wunna. You’re pig-headed, Bob Rideout.’

‘I’m as I was made.’

‘I’m sorry for you: but I’ll sing the song.

‘I took my little harp in hand,

I wandered up and down the land,

Up and down a many years.

But howsoever far I’d roam,

I couldna find the smiles or tears

Of whome.

And every quiet evenfall

I’d hear a call,

Like creatures crying in their pain,

“Come whome again!” ’

‘Not so bad,’ said Robert. ‘Only you dunna make it coaxing enough at the end.’

‘I dunna want to. I want to startle folk. I want to sing till the bells fall down. I want to draw the tears out of their eyes and the money out of their pockets.’

‘Money?’

‘Ah! Bags of it. I canna be a great lady without money.’

‘What ails you, to want to be a lady?’

‘I want a sparkling band round my head, and sparkling slippers on my feet, and a gown that goes “hush! hush!” like growing grass, and them saying, “There’s Gillian Lovekin!” in a whisper.’

‘Much good may it do ye!’

‘And young fellows coming, and me having rare raps with ’em, and this one saying: “Marry me, Gillian Lovekin!” and that one saying: “I love you sore, Miss Juliana!” and me saying: “Be off with ye!” ’

‘So you wouldna marry ’em?’

‘No danger! I want to hear the folk clapping me and joining in the chorus like at the Eisteddfod—and my heart going pit-a-pat, and my face all red, knowing they’d cry when I made ’em, and laugh when I made ’em, and they’d remember Gillian Lovekin to their death day.’

‘Lord save us! You’re going to learn ’em summat seemingly, Jill. You’re summat cruel when you’re set on a thing. Curst, I call it.’

‘And when I went to sleep, nights, and couldna bear to forget I was me for ten hours—and when I went to sleep for good and all—then I wouldna take it to heart so much, seeing as they’d remember me for ever and ever.’

She drew up her slim body, which had the peculiar wandlike beauty given by a narrow back, sloping shoulders and slender hips. The scar on her forehead shone silver and relentless in the moonlight. The sheep stirred about her like uneasy souls, and the rabbits lying at her feet might have been a sacrifice to some woodland goddess.

Robert looked at her, straight and attentively, for the first time in his life. Since his coming to the Gwlfas twelve years ago, he had taken her for granted. Now he saw her. His dark and dreamy eyes, so well warded by their lashes, his brooding forehead and his mouth, that was large and beautiful, the lips being laid together with a poise that partly concealed their firmness, all seemed to absorb her.

In just the same way he drank in the beauty of the countryside, the strange, lovely shapes of trees and rocks.

While she stood there and thought of her future as she had planned it, she slipped into his being like a raindrop into the heart of a deep flower. Neither of them knew what was happening, any more than the sheep knew whence came the unease that always troubled them before snow.

Robert was as simple, as unselfconscious as a child, without a child’s egotism. He saw the landscape, not Robert Rideout in the landscape. He saw the sheep, not Robert Rideout as the kindly shepherd in the midst of the sheep. Mountains did not make him think of himself climbing. He did not, as nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of every thousand do, instinctively look at himself when he came to a pond. There was nothing of Narcissus in his soul. He seldom wanted to imitate birds, but rather to listen more intently. So now he saw Gillian with the inward eye, heard her with inward hearing, drank her into his soul, but never thought of himself in relation to her. He saw her slender waist without his arm about it, her mouth unkissed. His eyes lingered on shoulder and breast almost as men’s eyes dwell on a Madonna, and to him the full-length portrait of Gillian was exactly as she herself saw it—alone, self-wrapped, self-complete.

Perhaps he was dreamy. Perhaps he developed late. His father had been just the same, only without Robert’s poetry. He had not married Abigail till he was forty-five, though he had met her in his thirtieth year. Abigail had begun by laughing at him. But through those fifteen years she heard the deepening passion in his voice, until his least word could set her in a flutter.

Gillian was not sufficiently interested in Robert even to laugh at him. She had seen, in her childish fashion, the vision desired by all humanity—the vision of a secure small nest of immortality built in the crumbling walls of time. She wanted to go on being herself even when she was dissolved in nothingness. She wanted to make men and women hear her, love her, rue her. In the dove-grey, cooing silence of the farm, any mental absorption gained double force. So, while Simon purred, and Isaiah Lovekin made up his accounts, and Robert chopped wood outside, and Jonathan went through the vicissitudes of his day, Gillian built up this dream, in which she was always in the foreground, bathed in light, and masses of vague faces filled the background. When Mrs. Fanteague came from Silverton bringing news of the world and a great feeling of gentility, her dream became so vivid that it kept her awake at night.

Robert, with a long sigh, relinquished her as a bee leaves a flower. And like a flower, self-poised but fragile, she seemed to shudder a little in her recovery.

He turned to lead the sheep home, and they followed him with crisply pattering feet.

Gillian picked up the rabbits with one of her supple falcon swoops. Disturbed by Robert’s unusual manner, she found relief in singing, and as she wandered after the sheep in the moonlight, watching her shadow with impersonal curiosity, she chanted to a tune of her own in a high treble that re-echoed against the bluff of moor:

‘I saw seven magpies in a tree,

One for you and six for me.

One for sorrow,

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy,

Five for silver,

Six for gold—’

And down in the hollow by the low-voiced brook, Robert, in his rich, quiet voice, finished the song:

‘And seven for a secret

That’s never been told!’