Читать книгу Bracken Turning Brown - Pamela Wynne - Страница 4

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Susan had done a very ridiculous thing indeed when she married Arthur Carpendale. But it is the sort of ridiculous thing that is done every day. One of a large family of girls, with a studious unpractical clergyman for a father, she had fallen in love with another clergyman. As a rule there was not another clergyman about, as the living was too small either to require or to support one. But a man came one day to preach instead of her father, who had gone to a neighbouring parish. Arthur Carpendale was tall and ascetic and well-bred. Well-bred men were rare in that country parish. He had glanced round the table and seen Susan, small and dimpling and much prettier than any of her sisters. He was expecting preferment and had a hundred a year of his own. His courtship was an unparalleled excitement in the Vicar’s household. To have refused him would have been insanity, at least, so it seemed to the rest of the family.

“A hundred a year, why it’s colossal,” exclaimed Susan’s younger sister, Millicent.

“Is it?” said Susan doubtfully.

“Of course; besides there’s the money he’ll get from the living,” chimed in the rest. “He says that he thinks he’s going to get something in the Lake District. Well, imagine that! Living in the Lake District for ever, after this ghastly flat place. You ought to be mad with joy, Susan.”

And so the deed was done. The wedding was quiet and Susan had her two sisters as bridesmaids. The Vicar thought of his dead wife and wished she could have been there to see the first fledgling go out of the nest; and then felt a sort of relief that there would be one less fledgling to feed. And Arthur Carpendale seeing Susan sitting opposite to him in the railway carriage wondered for a brief moment why he had done it, and then forgot his wonder in a greater anxiety as to whether there would be time for a drink at the junction where they had to change trains.

And that was two years ago. Two years that had made Susan older ... older and also much cleverer. No one must know. No one must know of the terror that dogged her by night and by day. No one must know it but Rachel, who had found it out almost at once. Rachel, who sometimes seemed to Susan to have been provided for her by a merciful God. For she had materialised almost as if it had been from nowhere. A married woman with no belongings at all. A husband who had been killed in the war. A mother who had just died and who therefore did not want her any more. A North country-woman who was delighted to settle down among the hills and dales that she loved, and who cooked like a dream.

And who regarded Arthur Carpendale’s failing with complete philosophy. The Rector drank because his father had done the same, said Rachel. “It’s not his fault at all. We must help him,” declared Rachel. “Keep it out of his way if we can. And not let this gossiping valley find it out if we can possibly help it.”

And for nearly two years luck had been with them. On the brief occasions when the Rector had been unable to take duty Rachel had stepped into the breach. The Rector had had a heart attack, poor man, and could not take the service. Rachel had gone down to the tiny church herself and informed the sturdy church-warden of the fact. “It’s all that awful war,” she said, “and the Rector in the trenches, brave man that he is. We’ll have to get a lay reader here, and the sooner the better.”

So a lay reader had been installed. One of the neighbouring farmers who had once been a schoolmaster. The Valley was proud of its lay reader and liked the blue ribbon with the cross on it. The Bishop agreed and wrote a nice letter to the Rector about it. The Rector who had won the Military Cross for his bravery under fire. Susan had only found that out after she was married. “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she looked up at her husband with reverence in her eyes.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Arthur Carpendale. His light eyes had a hunted look in them. How soon would she find out, this wife of his, ten years his junior. How soon would she find out that she had married a man who was a sham and a cheat, and who had no more right to be a clergyman than the man who kept the public house opposite the station? Less right, because he at least was honest. He, Arthur Carpendale, ought to be in a clergy house, wrestling with the twin devils that possessed him; the devil of wanting a wife and of also wanting something to quench the thirst that at intervals took him by the throat and made him feel that he would gladly sell his immortal soul to quench it once and for ever.

But Susan, finding out, was merciful. After the frightful sleepless night that she could never remember without a feeling of physical sickness, she faced her husband, and taking his hand laid it against her heart.

“Will it happen again?” she asked.

“Probably,” said Arthur Carpendale. Haggard and unshaven he wondered if he had the strength of mind to go and drown himself then and there.

“Can’t you help it?”

“I feel as if I can’t,” said the Rector, and then he flung himself down on the unmade bed and sobbed and choked and made dreadful animal sounds of suffering that brought Susan to his side in a passion of pity and love.

But with Susan love went hand in hand with reverence and after two years it was very nearly dead. The Rector did his work well and the people in the valley were devoted to him. The men chuckled over their pipes as they talked of the way in which the two women at the Rectory thought that no one in the valley knew of ‘passon’s’ weakness.

“Heart attack!” it was old Thomas of the forge speaking, and the lines round his deep-set eyes were all crinkled up.

“Yes, it’s a rare joke. But all the same I like him,” returned young Morley, who managed the garage close to the old disused mill. “Met him last night in all that rain going up to see young Fison, who caught his hand in the saw at Pinders. Might have had to have it off if he hadn’t been lucky. Rector was soaked to the skin, and I bet he sat there for half an hour or so before he went home and changed. And that Rectory’s as cold as a tomb, so I hear. Postman says so anyhow,” and then Morley relapsed into a profound silence as he sat and thought of the Rector’s pale thin face emerging like a ghost of a face from the high shabby collar of the ancient trenchcoat.

But to Susan the terror that dogged her life had strangled love at birth. She had married Arthur Carpendale because she had thought that it was the best thing to do, and also that it was grand to be married. Also she could look up to him; he was well-bred and understood how to speak to people like waiters, and took a taxi without apparently thinking about it. It was gorgeous to have someone to hold your elbow when you crossed the road, too. Marriage was fun, thought Susan, dimpling and smiling at her husband across the little round table in the hotel at Scarborough, where they had spent their brief honeymoon. For Arthur Carpendale had not wanted to drink during his honeymoon. He had been diverted, and engulfed in other things. It had not been until the end of the first three weeks of their life at the Rectory that Susan had found it out.

And life from that moment onwards had assumed a different aspect altogether. If it had not been for her servant, Susan often thought that she would have done away with herself. She could not stand it, she said it over and over again to herself aloud. Raging up and down the floor of her bedroom she would say it. Because it wasn’t only the thing herself, it was the fear of what it might mean. Sitting on the high hard seat in front of the harmonium she would wonder what she would do if she saw her husband stumble as he came out of the vestry. If he knelt down to say the usual silent prayer and didn’t get up again. If he said something wrong and then laughed that stupid secret laugh that made her blood turn cold. If he got up into the pulpit and then fell over sideways and someone had to help him out again; with her nerves stretched to snapping point Susan would sit in front of the harmonium, praying wild incoherent prayers that none of the awful things that she couldn’t help imagining would come to pass.

And so far they had not come to pass. But an imaginative person very often suffers more in anticipation than in the actual happening of the thing he dreads. So that after two years of it Susan had got much thinner. Fortunately she was a good sleeper, and very early on in their married life they had ceased to occupy the same room.

“I don’t feel that it is right,” with tormented eyes the Rector had stared at his wife, and she had looked clearly back at him in reply. The same thought that had tortured her had tortured him. If they had a child, to carry on the Shadow. An innocent child that might grow to find itself accurséd ... with a prayer of thankfulness she set about getting the smaller bedroom ready.

And the Rector had got thinner too. He led a strange life for a young man, spending hours in his study and going long desperate walks and climbs. When anyone was ill in the Valley he spent all his available time at their bedside. His parishioners clung to him although Susan did not realise it. And if she was beginning to realise it a little she felt that it was only because they did not know. The moment they did know they would despise him, as she, in a sick terror at the discovery, had found out that she despised him. But the parishioners had known for a long time and did not think a whit the less of him for it. Old Thomas had found it out first. Coming back from Keswick market one day he had seen someone lying by the side of the road.

“Dang, if it ain’t t’parson,” he had exclaimed, and getting down from his seat he had hauled the slim man up from the ground and hoisted him somehow into his covered cart. And then he had whipped up his fat horse and bundled him along the narrow lane that led to the Rectory. And there he and Rachel had put him to bed, for mercifully Susan had been out.

“That’s his heart again,” said Rachel bending over the bed so that Thomas should not come near enough, to smell the revealing smell of whisky.

“That’s right,” said old Thomas accommodatingly, and he stumped down the stairs and drove off to the little white farmhouse close up against the opposite hill.

But from that moment onward the fiction of the Rector’s weak heart died a natural death. No one believed it any more, although oddly enough Rachel and Susan never found it out.