Читать книгу While Rivers Run - Maurice Walsh - Страница 13

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Margaret Brands, sitting and musing in a basket-chair before the smouldering peats, heard the crunch of the many feet on the gravel and was quickly on her own. Her uncle looked in at her from the porch and grinned reassuringly. “More visitors, Margaret,” he told her.—“Come away in, gentlemen.”

The broad Anglo-Scot and the long Irishman followed him into the cosy room, and the dog, Fruachan, sat down in the doorway.

“How is the patient, Margaret?”

“Asleep.”

“Good, that! Mr Webster and Mr Long—his friends from the Drum. I found them at the Urdog looking for him.—Gentlemen, my niece, Margaret Brands.”

Don Webster bowed, short and stiff, and was acknowledged just as stiffly. Paddy Joe Long, his tweed hat crumpled against his hip, looked at her out of his two eyes, for she was well worth looking at. Slim and fine she was, and carried herself like a thoroughbred. The American apron over the white, flower-stencilled, short dress was housewifely becoming, and silken ankles rose shapely out of small strapped shoes. He came across to her and reached a frank hand, and his long sardonic face smiled with a queer sadness. “Margaret Brands!” he repeated whimsically. “It is a good name. I mind, once, reading of a Margaret Brandt and weeping with her.”

The blue of her eyes gathered light and a smile for him. “I know,” she murmured. “Her hair was ‘an apple of gold in a net-work of silver.’ ”

“She had no luck there either—who had no luck ever. Copper is the precious metal in hair.”

“Easy to see you are Irish, Mr Long,” said Aelec.—“Will ye sit, gentlemen? Mr MacIan might be waking up soon, and I think he’ll be the one to let us know—before that I would not care to disturb him.”

These four people seated round the room estimated each other each in his or her own way. Don Webster, in a hard chair near the window, a man self-centred by years of life in the Orient, his strong tropic-tanned face and dark eyes clouded by a constitutional sombreness, was out of his element, and yet completely indifferent. He saw only a crofter and a more or less cultivated niece, and was too obsessed by recent events to be even condescending. Uncle and niece were well aware of this attitude. Possibly the niece resented it, but in a rather amused way; her life amongst artists had liberated her from the thraldom of class, and her mind was too much alive to be much affected by prejudices. The uncle mused detachedly over it, for he was one of the few wise ones who, having achieved a philosophy, seldom ignored any man, but would ignore princes, given occasion. The Irishman, Patrick Joseph Stanislaus Long, like a few—rare and few—of his nation, had no class-consciousness at all. He accepted all men as he found them, and so all men were inclined to lift him a little above their own level. He was at home anywhere, and very completely at home sitting on the high-back couch in this kitchen-living-room. He contemplated the smooth wise face of Aelec Brands with satisfaction, and the good looks of Margaret with appreciation, and already had a working notion of their mentalities. And yet, behind his openness and his ease was a secret core that no man or woman might reach. His face was typically an Irish face—long, lean, strongly carved, sometimes strangely sad, sometimes whimsically sardonic, with wide close mouth and cheeks lined by taking thought. Uncle and niece liked him instinctively, and felt that little queer thread of race that nothing can ever quite break.