Читать книгу Iron and Smoke - Sheila Kaye-Smith - Страница 14

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It was in the short grey dusk of a November day that Jenny first saw Herringdales. The apple-red of the old house stood out against a background of purple wood—sallow and chestnut under growth which half ringed the Manor on the south, where the ground sloped to the marshes. In front the ground rose steeply to the road, so that, what with the hill in front and the wood behind, there was no view even from this high spot.

Jenny liked the bright red tiles that weathered the house front. They seemed to hold all the light there was in that grey afternoon. But in her heart the whole place struck her as ramshackle and neglected. The garden, the drive seemed wofully poor and small in comparison with Slapewath Grange. Somehow she had never expected the place to look as old as this. Most of the houses she used to visit were newly-erected monuments to industrial triumph, and such old houses as she knew were of the bluff grey Yorkshire stone that shows its age only in mellowness of tint and outline. But here the tiles, whether of roof or wall, waved and crinkled in an alarming manner over their supporting beams. It seemed to her that the whole place was in imminent danger of falling down.

However, she hid her fears, or rather they were all swallowed up in the dominating fear that she might fail to rise to this great occasion of entering Humphrey’s home. She knew that to him it was the climax of their honeymoon. All the way from Battle station, where his carriage—a landau drawn by two huge, bony horses—had met them, he had shown her the pride of her new country. First there had been Ashburnham Woods, which he said had had furnaces at work when Yorkshire was still fighting the Danes, then had come Darwell Hole and the long climb up to Woods Corner.... She felt sorry for the poor horses—these hills were even steeper than the Yorkshire banks. Then had come a steep hill down and another steep hill up, and he was making her look back at old Dallington, clustered on the ridge behind them against a fiery sunset. Three Cups Corner ... Punnett’s Town ... what funny names ... Cade Street—this is where a yeoman called Iden slew Jack Cade the rebel long ago. ... When shall we be in Heathfield?—All this is Heathfield, four miles of street, the little houses strewn along it like apples by the wayside ... roads flowing into it—from Rushlake Green, from Waldron, from Horeham, from Hellingly ... Humphrey says the road is like a river, widening as it gathers stream ... the road is wide now with all the lanes that have flowed into it, and Humphrey says it will grow wider and wider till it reaches Cross-in-Hand where it becomes the great road that crosses all Sussex, by Maresfield and Billingshurst, to the west. Humphrey’s eyes are bright and his voice is full of a queer excitement ... at last they turn down one of the little tributary lanes, which brings them to Herringdales, and then flows on to Rushlake Green.

“Welcome home, Jenny.”

Humphrey kissed her as the carriage stopped. The house door was opened by an elderly butler, rather shabbily dressed, she thought. She looked behind him for more servants, but saw only a loutish youth carrying a tea tray across the hall. Then she remembered that her husband had told her that people did not keep men-servants in the South to the same extent as they did in the North. The servants at Herringdales were mostly women. No doubt this would make housekeeping easier for her.

A very old woman, so it seemed, was coming down the stairs, with a housemaid’s cap on her grey head.

“Here’s Anna come to welcome you,” said Humphrey—“Jenny, this is Anna Luck, who used to be my nurse.”

At Slapewath there was and could have been no such retainer, the children having passed the nursery age before Bastow’s growing fortune made a nursery possible. As she looked at Anna, Jenny did not feel it a loss.

“How do you do,” she said politely, shaking hands.

“Anna will look after you and maid you,” continued her husband. “I don’t think she’ll be as stern with you as she was with me. You’ll probably not need it. I may as well tell you that it annoys her very much to be called Any Luck. I sometimes couldn’t resist the temptation in my youth, but of late my sense of humour has matured.”

Jenny giggled. Her sense of humour was still green—“No Luck, I should call her with that face,” she thought to herself, and felt in spite of Humphrey that she had thought a witty thing.

“Will you come upstairs, my lady?” said Anna Luck.

Jenny followed her up the wide wooden staircase into a bedroom where a new-lit fire fought with a misty and draughty cold. At Slapewath they had “hot water pipes” in all the rooms, and no room allowed like this dim wraiths of fog to crawl in from the garden, making the far corners ghostly and dim.

“Oh, please shut the window,” she cried instinctively.

“It’s shut,” said Anna Luck.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought perhaps the fog—”

“It comes in from the garden. It gets all over the house. Not one of the doors and windows fits,” said Anna Luck with relish.

The house certainly felt cold. Accustomed as she was to a strong contrast between the temperature indoors and the outer air, Jenny would have some difficulty in getting used to their approximation. She had expected to feel warmer in the South, but she had never in her life felt so cold as this. Cold and darkness were the two dominant impressions of that first night. After dinner she sat by the drawing-room fire while Humphrey read reports and circulars under the lamp. The lamp! There was another strangeness. She missed the cheerful glare and hissing of the gas as much as she missed the cheerful warmth and gurgle of the hot water pipes.

She was cold and she was bored. She longed for the time to come when she could reasonably go upstairs. Suddenly Humphrey looked at her.

“You’re tired, Jen. You’d better get off to bed. I’m sorry to be so unentertaining tonight, but all these things have piled up while I’ve been away.”

She was glad to go, though there was something disappointing in ending her first evening like this. Either there should have been a party to celebrate their return, or else, and much better, they should have spent the hours in making love. This preoccupied, aloof Humphrey was almost a stranger, though she had had glimpses of him before.

Upstairs the mist lay like a film over the room. It seemed as ridiculous to fight it with candles as to fight the cold with the wood-fire that burned in the old-fashioned fireplace, where most of the heat went up the chimney. Jenny undressed quickly and crept for warmth into the four-post bed. But she could not go to sleep. The old house seemed full of noises, crackings, scuttlings, little creeps and whispers. She did not feel that it was haunted, but more as if it, the place itself, was a ghost, a memory of old times, and that it was whispering to her in the night, telling her old things about itself which she could not understand.

In the firelight the bed made a huge shadow on the wall. She had never slept before in an old-fashioned bed, and she found its vastness and darkness a little terrifying. It was hung with looped curtains of Jacobean stuff, and on the top of each post was a knob of plumes—it seemed like a hearse, and its shadow upon the wall was the shadow of a funeral....

Jenny shut her eyes and tried to comfort herself. When Humphrey came she would not feel strange or afraid any more. He would take her in his arms and give her his warmth. Her consciousness of his fellowship would be with her in sleep, and she would not wake till the room was light with morning.

Soothed by her thoughts, she slept, to wake, as it seemed, hours later startled, cold, suffocating with some nightmare she could not remember. She put out her hand and found emptiness. Humphrey had not come to bed. Where was he? It must be long past midnight ... the small hours ... she sat up panting, her eyes searching the black pool of the night. But she would not stay any longer up here alone listening, while the old house whispered to her. She must go and find Humphrey. Perhaps he was not there. Perhaps the house had spirited him away. Forgotten quakings of her childhood, when she had lain in bed upstairs, terrified lest her parents should have gone out and left her, returned now, and without waiting to grope for a wrapper, she ran out of the room on her bare feet, down the corridor to the stairs.

The hall was in darkness, and for a moment panic nearly choked her. Then suddenly she saw a thin line of light under a door. She stumbled towards it, and the next moment found herself in the drawing room, with Humphrey sitting as she had left him, poring over documents under the lamp.

“Jenny! My dearest! What on earth’s the matter?”

“Oh, I’m so frightened!” she moaned. “I’m so frightened!”

He took her in his arms, and set her on his knee before the fire, which was nearly out.

“You’re frozen cold. My darling child, what have you been doing to yourself?”

“I couldn’t think where you were.”

“But it’s not late ... what! Oh, I see ... it’s half past twelve—I’d no idea the hour had struck. Poor little wife! Did she think her husband had forgotten her?”

“I never thought you’d stay up so late—and on our first night too.”

“Half past twelve isn’t so very late, and I’ve the hell of a lot to see to, just because it is our first night.”

After all, he thought to himself, he had deliberately renounced his study and sat with her in the drawing-room. He’d have been much more comfortable working at his own writing-table.

But she was too pitiful for him to feel impatient with her.

“You poor little chicken. I must take you straight upstairs and put you to bed again.”

“You’ll come too... !”

“Yes, I’ll come too, and you shan’t be frightened any more.”

“I expect it’s my not being used to an old house.”

“Old houses are better than new.”

He cleared his littered papers off the table and turned down the lamp. Then he bent over her, and his arms swooped, gathering her up against the strong wall of his chest.

“You aren’t afraid of the dark now?”

He seemed to know his way blind about his house. Old houses are better than new. In the hall was a pale starlight, and it was enough to guide him to the staircase. The stairs cried out as he carried her up them, but she no longer feared their voice. Borne in those strong arms she felt once more a bride, and the voice of the bride answered the voice of the house, telling it new things about herself, which it could not understand.