Читать книгу Bracken Turning Brown - Pamela Wynne - Страница 12

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After breakfast, which was a nice one, the girls separated. Susan had got an awfully good servant, decided Millicent, and one who could make coffee properly, which was unusual. The coffee had come in in a tall brown coffee-pot, and there had been loads of boiling hot milk in a wide-lipped earthenware jug to go with it. There had also been porridge, and cream in another earthenware jug, and bacon and eggs in a fireproof china dish. The Rector had sat at the head of the table, but he had eaten almost in silence. The impression was that he was hardly there, decided Millicent, eating heartily herself and talking to her sister at the same time. And yet while she talked her keen young mind was active. She had appeared not to be taking much notice of the suggestion that they should take paying guests, but in reality she was thinking of very little else. They would do it, and she would stay until it was all in working order. Sir Pelham Brooke should be the first paying guest, and the money that Aunt Dorothy had provided should go in buying the sort of things that one had to have if one had visitors in one’s house. Things like nice hot-water cans and perhaps a cover or two to go over them, and some pretty china for early tea. She would take in his early tea, decided Millicent, feeling a prickling of excited rapture running down the backs of her slender legs.

But the point was which room should he have. Susan had gone into the kitchen to give the orders for the day, so Millicent decided to explore. She stood on the rather bleak landing and got quite clear in her head which were the rooms that she had already seen. Two she had not; one next to the bathroom and one at the top of three old oak stairs. She would try the one at the top of the old oak stairs first: she went up them, feeling an odd excitement. And the minute she opened the door of this room she knew that this was the room for Sir Pelham Brooke if the exquisite joy of his coming ever materialised. One of the Rectors must have built it for a nursery, decided Millicent. For it was long and rather low and had beautiful, built-in cupboards along one wall of it. The window had a wide seat to it, and the view from the window was divine. You could see the waterfall at the head of the valley, and the upper path that wound away round the shoulder of Great Crag. Just below the window was a tiny beck, that, having supplied an old stone water trough outside the kitchen, went tumbling away down through the trees to the larger stream that ran along at the foot of the meadows.

And now what sort of a fireplace? Millicent was walking up to it. Old-fashioned, like a little basket with bars. Not on the floor at all, but raised up. But convenient, decided Millicent, taking it in. You could keep things warm on those hobs. And then she stood in the middle of the floor and stared at the furniture. The bed ... she walked over to it and felt it. A queer bed, low and wide and heaped with blankets. But a box spring. ‘Poor wretch,’ the words came bubbling up in Millicent’s brain as she turned away from it. But how could one sleep in the same bed with someone who drank? You couldn’t. Susan had had it shoved here; anything, anywhere so that she didn’t have to remember it. And now, what about the chest of drawers? Millicent, entirely business-like, walked over to that. A beauty, the drawers of it slipped like silk. Men hated it if drawers stuck. They kicked them and made marks. Arthur had chosen his furniture well, decided Millicent, standing still and making calculations. A new eiderdown for the bed, because it was only the middle of April and awfully cold. A very large brass box for coal so that a great deal could be brought up at a time. Another rather smaller one for logs, because they weren’t so heavy to haul about. And now to suggest it all to Susan, thought Millicent, opening the door again and closing it carefully behind her.

And half an hour later she had done it. The orders for the day over, Susan was ready to do anything that Millicent liked. Millicent, standing at the front door taking in long breaths of the exquisite mountain air, said that she would like to go to the post. That she had finished her letter to her father and that she would like to post it.

“Then we’ll go,” said Susan, surprised at the feeling of excitement that had seized on her at the thought of going to the post with Millicent. It was so odd to feel like that again. To lose the rather chill sensation of flatness and disappointment and a sort of abiding dread of something horrible that usually hung over her.

“Shall we need hats?”

“No,” said Susan. “It’s good for our hair and helps to keep mine curly. Mine begins to go straight if I don’t curl it up sometimes. I hate having to put curlers in, even those sort of stick ones with tin caps to them that you get on a card at Woolworth’s. There’s something squalid about a curler,” concluded Susan, suddenly wrinkling up her top lip so that her row of little even teeth showed.

“I agree with you,” said Millicent. “I’ve got my letter in my pocket, so let’s go now. We’ve each got on jerseys so we don’t need coats, do we?”

“No,” said Susan again. “But I’ll get a basket because Rachel wants some apples, and ours are nearly done.” She took one down from a row of pegs fixed close to the front door, and the two girls walked down the little garden path. A path made of round stones that slid and made little rattling noises under their feet. The way to the post office lay along a narrow lane with high hedges on either side of it. Across a bridge with old stone walls on either side of that, too. Below the bridge a little tumbling, bubbling stream, the moss on the rocks of it long and waving like mermaids’ hair in the clear water.

“It’s divinely beautiful,” said Millicent suddenly, not knowing quite how to begin about Sir Pelham Brooke and the idea of having him as a paying guest at the Rectory. Because, in her own mind, Millicent had already absolutely decided that this was what was going to happen. He would come and settle in there and they would have the most perfect excursions and madly exciting shopping expeditions and frantic fun about things like cooking while Rachel was out. And that she, Millicent, would wait on him, always with that delicious thrill trickling down her spine because he was so entrancing. She would write and suggest it to him when she returned the glove, because then he would have to reply anyhow. But the first thing was to suggest it to Susan. And the thing was to do it at once. So with her head held high in the pale spring sunshine and the scent of young green things stealing fragrant about her, Millicent proceeded to tell her sister all about Sir Pelham Brooke and of how she had met him in the train. And that how as he had been ordered to take a year’s rest and do nothing, the place for him to do it was the Rectory.

“Which Rectory?” said Susan, feeling rather dazed. Millicent had travelled practically all the way to Keswick with a man whom she did not know at all! But what would their father say? “Which Rectory?” she repeated the words, and, as she said them, a blackbird, hidden in the soft green leaves of a hazel tree overhanging the stream, broke into a liquid bubble of song.

“Your Rectory, of course,” said Millicent briskly. “You told me this morning that you had thought of taking P.G.’s because the bathwater was so beautifully hot. Well, there you are, a sublime P.G. all ready made. The most perfect voice; a divine way of looking at you, and, I should say, heaps of money.”

“Millicent!”

“Why not?”

“It’s out of the question,” said Susan unsteadily.

“But why?”

“Because it is,” said Susan. And here the lane made a little twist. A tiny wooden gate with a loop of wire over one post to keep it closed. A soft grassy path between high waving fronds of pale green bracken. Susan stood still as she replaced the wire.

“But why?” persisted Millicent. And her young eyes were intent on her sister. Susan had got to tell her then and there that Arthur drank and get it over, decided Millicent. Otherwise they could do nothing at all about anything.

“A man like that wouldn’t fit in at the Rectory,” said Susan, and her grey eyes seemed to slide away from her sister’s and stay hidden somewhere.

“But why not?”

“Because he wouldn’t,” said Susan stubbornly. Her bare hand on her stick was trembling and damp.

“But why not?”

“Don’t ask me, I tell you,” said Susan hoarsely, and for a moment she hated her sister. She knew Millicent ... knew her persistence. She had seen her get her way with it at home with her father. A determined refusal and Millicent simply pegging away until she——“Don’t ask me,” she said again.

“All right,” said Millicent cheerfully. “I won’t ask you because I know. And I’m going to tell you I know, because if I don’t it’ll always be between us and that’s so stupid. Arthur drinks,” said Millicent, and she stood there looking young and solid between the fragile stalks of palest green. “And you mind most frightfully ... much more than you need, because most men do something.”

“How did you know?”

“By the look of him,” said Millicent easily. “And by the way you’ve kept everything to do with your life so deadly quiet. It’s not natural for you to do that, you were always the one at home who rather blurted things out. And that’s partly why I came; to find out. I didn’t breathe it to Daddy—what I thought, I mean, and I certainly shan’t now.”

“Millicent!”

“Don’t take it like that, darling,” said Millicent suddenly, and with a little rush she caught Susan close to her. Millicent was frightened now, because her sister’s sobs were agonised and strangling.

“It’s been so frightful,” gasped Susan. She bowed herself over the pale oak gatepost as her tears tore her.

“But now I know, it’s better,” pleaded Millicent.

“It’s the shame of it ... a clergyman.”

“Clergymen are only human beings after all,” said Millicent wisely. “And probably he’s having most of his punishment now because he must loathe doing it so. He looks as if he loathed it. I never saw a man look more wretched,” concluded Millicent seriously.

“What shall I do if other people find out?” choked Susan. But now she was calmer. Oh, the relief of being able to share her hideous secret with someone. And to share it with someone like Millicent, who took it almost as a matter of course.

“They won’t,” said Millicent cheerfully. “Although if you ask me I should say that a certain amount of people do know already; especially in this valley. And that they don’t care because he’s so awfully good to them. You often told me about the way he spends all his time racing round after them: miles up these lonely valleys at any time of the day or night if they’re ill——Well, that is being like Christ,” said Millicent cheerfully. “And that’s the thing that matters, and the villagers know it. They’d much rather have a man like that than a man who sat all day in his study, writing, or a man who simply lived having services to which nobody goes.”

“Yes, but drink,” shuddered Susan, and her swollen eyes were tragic.

“Yes, I agree that it isn’t what one would choose,” conceded Millicent. “But, as I say, one can’t have everything. He might be making love to the girls in his confirmation class. Clergymen do, and so do Roman Catholic priests,” said Millicent sagely. “And it’s much easier for them because of the Confessional.”

“Don’t, Millicent!”

“Well, I always think it’s so stupid to pretend things aren’t when they are,” said Millicent wisely. “But you always were rather like that, rather exalting things.”

“Oh, dear!” Susan was laughing shakily.

“Well, and now you feel better, don’t you?” ventured Millicent. She stood there a solid little figure. “Let’s have Sir Pelham Brooke, Susan. It’s just what we want—both of us. Something exciting; something to wake us up. Something to give us that lovely trembling feeling that something frightfully nice is going to happen. Don’t you know; you get it before you wake up with it.”

“I’ve forgotten it,” said Susan tremulously. She began to walk along the narrow grassy path. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I know it would be fun and all that. But it would work out all right? I mean that having people in your house who pay is different to having people just to stay. Rachel wouldn’t mind, she was keen on our having someone—she thought it would divert my mind ... she knows ... of course. Also, of course, the money would be very useful. But when it actually happened—— And Arthur mightn’t like it. I should have to ask him first, of course,” unconsciously Susan quickened her steps.

“We’ll ask him at dinner to-night,” said Millicent triumphantly. “Or supper or whatever you call it. And, you see, he won’t mind. He might even like it. He might feel that it would be a sort of reason why he can’t ... you know,” Millicent took a little step and squeezed her sister’s thin arm.

“Oh, Millicent, he can’t help it,” said Susan heavily. But in a passion of gratitude for her younger sister’s tender comprehension she turned on the narrow path and faced her.

“You’re a brick,” she said. “There’s no one like one’s own family, I knew it all the time only I felt I couldn’t ... Promise me you’ll never breathe it, Mill?”

“I promise,” said Millicent solidly. Was it only yesterday morning that she had sat opposite her fat young sister at the breakfast table? What was it that Joan said? ‘That valley’s entrancing; there’s a girl at school who’s been there. She was there last year and stayed in one of the farmhouses there and the Vicar drinks ...’ Of course ... everyone must know. Well, supposing they did ... Millicent, suddenly feeling very grown-up and responsible, leaned forward and kissed her elder sister on her soft cheek.