Читать книгу Proud Lady - Neith Boyce - Страница 3

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Across the ringing of the church bells came the whistle of the train. Mary Lavinia, standing in the doorway, watched her mother go down the walk to the gate. Mrs. Lowell's broad back, clad in black silk, her black bonnet stiffly trimmed with purple pansies, bristled with anger. She opened the gate and slammed it behind her. The wooden sidewalk echoed her heavy tread. She went down the street out of sight, without looking back.

The slow melancholy bells were still sounding, but now they stopped. Mrs. Lowell would be late to church. Mary listened, holding her breath. She heard the noise of the train. Now it whistled again, at the crossing, now it was coming into town—white puffs of smoke rose over the trees. The engine-bell clanked, and the shrill sound of escaping steam signalled its stopping.

Mary listened, but there was no cheering, though a number of people had gone to the depot to welcome the little knot of returning soldiers. She remembered the day, three years before, when the company raised in the town had marched to the train—there was plenty of cheering then. Now perhaps half a dozen of those men were coming back. The war was over, but the rest of them had been left on southern battle-fields.

Mary stood looking out at the light brilliant green of the trees in the yard. It was very quiet all around her. The house always seemed quiet when her mother was out of it, and now there was a lull after the storm. But she was breathing quickly, intent, listening, shivering a little in her light print dress. The spring sunlight had little warmth, the air was sharp, with a damp sweetness. In the silence, she heard the rustling of a paper and the sound of a slight cough, behind a closed door. Her father was there, in his office. He would have gone to meet the train, she knew, but that these were his office-hours. But she couldn't have gone—and neither could she go to church, however angry her mother might be. A light flush rose in her cheeks, as she stood expectant.

She was beautiful—tall, slender, but with broad shoulders and a straight proud way of holding herself. Her thick hair, of bright auburn, with a natural small ripple, parted in the middle, was drawn down over her ears into a heavy knot. She was dazzlingly fair, with a few freckles on her high cheek-bones, with large clear grey eyes, with scarlet, finely-cut lips. She looked mature for her twenty years and yet completely virginal, untouched, unmoved. But her face expressed very little of what she might be thinking or feeling. It was like a calm mask—there was not a line in it, there was no record to be read.

Footsteps began to echo down the wooden walk, and voices. She went into the house and shut the door. In the office she heard a chair pushed back, and as she did not want to speak to her father just then, she walked quickly and lightly out through the big bright kitchen into the garden at the back of the house, slipping on as she went a blue coat that she had taken from the hall.

The garden was long and narrow, bounded by rail fences along which was set close together lilac bushes and other flowering shrubs of twenty years' growth. It was carefully laid out, in neat squares or oblongs, separated by rows of currant and gooseberry bushes or by grass-paths. The fresh turned earth in the beds looked dark and rich. All the bushes and shrubs were covered with light-green leaves. Bordering the central path were two narrow beds of tulips, narcissus, jonquils, flowering in thick bands of colour. At the end of the garden was a small orchard of apple, cherry and peach trees, some of them in bloom. In summer there was shade and seclusion here, but now there was no place to hide. Mary stopped a moment, looking back at the house, then opened a gate and in a panic fled out into the pasture. She was well aware that she ought to be in the house, that the minister was coming to dinner, that the roast would probably burn, but above all that some one was coming for her, that they would be calling her any moment; so she hurried on, up a slight rise of ground, over the top of it, and there she was out of sight.

The pasture stretched all about her, dotted with cattle nibbling the short green grass. Below, the ground fell suddenly, and there was a large pond. It was very deep, with a treacherous mud bottom near the shores. Willows encircled it, and on the farther side marshes blended it with the land. The water had a colour of its own, almost always dark—now it was a dull blue, deeper than the light April sky. Beyond it on every side was the prairie, flat, unbroken to the skyline. Trees, fields, houses, scattered over it, seemed insignificant, did not interrupt its monotony. It rolled away in long low wavering lines, endless and sombre, like a dark sea.

A faint call from the direction of the house—that was her father's gentle voice. Then a shout, lusty and clear—her name, shouted out over the hill for the whole town to hear! Mary started, a confused cloud of feelings made her heart beat heavily. But she stood still. In another moment a man appeared at the top of the rise and came plunging down toward her. In his blue uniform—cap tilted over one eye—just the same! He caught her in his arms and kissed her, laughing, repeating her name over and over, and kissed her again and again. Mary did not return his kisses, but bowed her head to the storm. Released at last from the tight clasp against his breast, but still held by his hands on her shoulders, she looked at him, and he at her—their eyes were on a level. But his eyes were full of an intoxication of joy, excited, almost blinded, though they seemed to be searching her face keenly, from brow to lips. Mary's eyes were clear. She saw the sword-cut on his left cheek, a thin red scar—that was new to her. She saw that he was thinner and the brown of his face was paler—he had been wounded and in hospital since she had seen him. She saw what had always repelled her—what she thought of vaguely as weakness, in his mouth and chin. But then she saw too the crisp black hair brushed back from his square forehead, the black eyebrows, sharp beautiful curves—and the long narrow blue eyes—and these she loved, she did not know why, but they had some strange appeal to her, something foreign, come from far away. She never could look at those eyes without tenderness. Now she put up her hands on his shoulders and bent toward him, and tenderness glowed like a light through the mask. At that moment she did not look cold.

He could not say anything except, "Oh, Mary! Mary!" And Mary did not speak either, but only smiled. They sat down together on a stone in the pasture. The young soldier held her hands in his clasp, his arm around her, as though he could never let her go again. His heart was overflowing. He held her clasped against him and stared at the dull-blue water. This was like a dream. Many a time, on the bivouac, on the march when he dozed from fatigue in his saddle, he had dreamed vividly of Mary, he had felt her near him as now. He half expected to wake and hear again the tramp of marching men, the jingle of the chains of his battery behind him. The present, the future, were a dream, he was living in the past. He had thought of Mary when the shell burst among his guns. "This is death," he had thought too, wounded in the hip by a fragment of shell, deluged with blood from the man killed beside him. He had taken the place of the gunner and served his gun. That was at the Wilderness. Yes, he had held them back, and brought off his whole battery. "Distinguished gallantry." ...

He sighed, and touched Mary's bright hair with his lips, and was surprised that she did not vanish. Was it true, that life was over, "Daredevil Carlin" was no more, his occupation gone? Then he must begin the world at twenty-five, with empty hands. He turned and looked at the woman beside him. It was hard to realize that now his life would be with her, that what he had so longed for was his.