Читать книгу Hare and Tortoise - Pierre Coalfleet - Страница 5

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If it was the natural fate of a tenderfoot that Sundown should have been lame from a rope-burn that afternoon and that his understudy should be a horse that had not been ridden since the previous summer, it was carelessness on the part of Keble Eveley that allowed the visitor to climb the perpendicular trail to the ridge in a loosely cinched saddle. In any case, when Windrom, in trying to avoid scraping a left kneecap on one pine tree, caught his right stirrup in the half fallen dead branch of another, the horse, reflecting the nervousness of his rider, began to rear in a manner that endangered his foothold on the steep slope, and almost before Keble knew that something was amiss behind him, a sudden forward motion of the horse, accompanied by a slipping motion of the saddle, threw his friend against a vicious rock which marked a bend in the trail.

Keble turned and dismounted anxiously when Windrom failed to rise. The body lay against the rock, the left arm doubled under it. Keble lifted his victim upon his own horse and after great difficulty brought him to the cottage, where an astonishingly calm Louise vetoed most of his suggestions, installed the patient as comfortably as possible in bed, and commanded her husband to get in communication with the Valley.

Despite the halting telephonic system, the twenty miles of bad road, the prevalence of spring ailments throughout the Valley requiring the virtual ubiquitousness of the little French doctor, it was not many hours before he arrived to relieve their flagging spirits. For his son-in-law’s naïve wonderment at Louise’s efficiency, Dr. Bruneau had only an indulgent smile. “But why shouldn’t she know what to do?” he exclaimed. “Is her father not a doctor, and was her mother not a nurse?”

When the broken ribs had been set, Louise remained in the sick-room, and the two men were smoking before the fire downstairs. The situation had put the doctor in a reminiscential humor. His daughter grown up and married, in the rôle of nurse, set in train memories of the epidemic that had swept through the Valley when Louise was nine years old. Her mother had insisted on helping, had gone out night and day nursing and administering.

“And I was so busy tending the others that she went almost before I knew she was ill.... Until that day, Death had been only my professional enemy.... It was an excellent woman, very pratique. Louis is pratique, too, but au fond romantic. That she holds from me. I’m not pratique. I don’t collect my bills. But out here, at least, the priests don’t get what I should have, as they did in Quebec. Down there they take from the poor people whatever there is, and nothing is left to pay the bills of a heretic médecin. The priests thought that was fair, since the médecin gave them nothing for their embroideries and their holy smells!

“Here at least one is not molested,—if one were permitted to enjoy one’s freedom! All my life I have wanted to sit by my fire and read, one after the other, every book discouraged by Rome.... But always when I get out my pipe and take down Renan or Voltaire there is a call: little Johnny has a fit, come quick; Madame Chose is having a baby,—Cré Mâtin: Madame who has had already twelve! If the baby lives they thank God; if he dies they blame me. And that’s life....

“All one can do in this low world, my son, is work, without asking why. We are like clocks that Nature has wound up to keep time for her, and it’s enough that Nature knows what we are registering. The people who are always trying to read the hour on their own dials keep damn poor time. Witness my excellent sister. Denise burns expensive candles for her drôle of a husband, that rusé Mareuil who marched his socialists up the hill to give him a fine showing, then, unlike the King of France, stayed on the hill and let them march down by themselves when they had served his ambition, and got himself assassinated for his treachery. And his devout widow, after fumbling her beads in the parlor, goes into the pantry to count the gingersnaps for fear the hired girl has taken some home to her family. Denise is too spiritual to be a good human clock, and too full of wheels to be of any use to eternity. It’s a funny world, va!”

When Dr. Bruneau had gone, Keble reflected that it was indeed a funny world. Not the least ludicrous feature of it being that he, the product of many generations of almost automatic gentility, should have happened to make himself the son-in-law of a garrulous, fantastic, kind-hearted, plebeianly shrewd, Bohemian country physician, who, more like his sister than he knew, was too spiritual to be successful in his profession, and too close to the earth to be a valid sage,—a man of the people, of the soil from which Louise had come forth as the fine flower.

He recalled with a faint smile the pretexts he used to devise for dropping into the doctor’s little house on his long ski-journeys to the Valley: a fancied ailment, the desire to borrow a book or offer a gift of whisky from a recently-arrived supply. He recalled his reluctant leave-takings and the very black, mocking eyes, tantalizing lips, and jaunty curls of the girl who accompanied him to the door. He recalled the shock of his sense of fitness on realizing during the spring the significance of his visits; his abrupt pilgrimage to the family fold in England to repair his perspective; the desolating sense of absence; the sudden cablegram; and her proud, challenging reply. It had been brought to him just before dinner, and he could yet feel the thrill that had passed through him as he entered the dining-room formulating his revolutionary announcement.

He recalled with a little twinge the scared expression that had come over his mother’s face, the hurt and supercilious protest voiced by his sister, the strained congratulations offered by Girlie Windrom, Walter’s sister, who had been visiting them, and the ominous silence from the paternal end of the table. A few days later his father had seen him off to Southampton, with the final comment: “Till the soil by all means, my boy. I can understand a farmer. We’ve all farmed. But we’ve never gone so far afield for our wives.”

Then, with a more sympathetic impulse his father had said, “Your mother and I had rather set our hearts on Girlie Windrom for you. One of these days you will have to assume responsibilities as head of the family, whether it bores you or not, and it is not wholly reassuring to know that our name will be handed on to nephews of a French-Canadian traitor.” Keble had reflected that Louise could scarcely be held to account for her aunt’s marriage to a man who had brilliantly satirized some of his father’s most pompous Imperialistic speeches, but he had seen that nothing would be gained by pointing this out.

He could almost wish he had had a brother who might have satisfied the family by marrying Girlie, understudying his father in the ranks of the diehards, and going through all the other motions appropriate to the heir of a statesman, a landlord, and a viscount.