Читать книгу Testimonies - Patrick O’Brian - Страница 10

It is with design that I have not spoken about her yet. At first I saw little of her, and apart from thinking that it was strange and pleasant that there should be such a beautiful woman at the farm, I did not take much notice.

It was in the spring and the summer that it began. I was settled and established in Hafod and I was going out much more; young Vaughan had begun my education as a countryman and I was often on the mountain with him. In the evenings I went down, sometimes, to ask him about things that I had seen in the day.

It was then, in those quiet evenings at the farm, that I began to look at her with particular attention: it was not because of any sudden emotion but because of something that I could not quite understand. She had, more than anybody I had ever seen, the appearance of an amiable young woman, kind and dutiful; and yet day after day I saw the old lady, Emyr’s mother, carrying the pig-swill, scrubbing the floor, drawing the water: sometimes she would have both hands full while the young people were doing nothing. Their standards were different, I knew that: on a mountain farm everybody works – it is hard labour for life. But still this seemed to me to be wrong. There were other less tangible things and I began to wonder whether Bronwen, though lovely to see, were not hard and insensitive; spoilt. A really beautiful face is so rare that one cannot always see beyond it. She certainly tended to be less indulgent than other country-women with her child, an unattractive little boy called Gerallt. There seemed to be a contradiction there: I had no pretensions as a physiognomist, but I was unwilling to believe that I could be as mistaken as that. I am sure that what one calls a good-looking face is the outward expression of a kind and generous spirit: that is why one calls it good. It is the product of experience, as simple as recognizing the fruit by its skin: the appearance that one learns to associate with ripeness is a good appearance. If a peach were at its best when it was as rotten as a medlar, one would soon find a dark, wrinkled peach good-looking. I could have sworn that the goodness in Bronwen’s face, the goodness that was there together with her beauty, could not exist with the hardness that appeared in her conduct to old Mrs Vaughan and, sometimes, to her husband. I thought about it a good deal.