Читать книгу The Gilded Man - Smyth Clifford - Страница 4

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When, one evening in the late Autumn, David Meudon reached the entrance to Stoneleigh Garden, where Una Leighton awaited him, it was evident something unusual had happened.

“You are late,” she said, as he clasped the slender hand extended to him in welcome.

“I could ride no faster. Comet is lame.”

The tired bay, belying his name, stood dejectedly, one white foreleg slightly bent, as if seeking relief from a weight it was weary of bearing. By the friendly way in which he stretched forth his muzzle to touch the girl’s proffered fingers, Comet was evidently not a stranger to her endearments.

“Poor Comet! Why didn’t you take better care of him?”

“I was too impatient at the start, and that got him into trouble. After that, of course, we had to go slowly. I hated the delay. I hated having to listen to my own thoughts for so long.”

Her gray eyes fixed questioningly upon the bronzed, sharp-featured man, she noted his restless gaze, his riding-whip’s irritable tattoo on polished boot-top as he stood at her side. Then, flinging her arms about his neck, her face, flushed with pleasure and expressive of a mingled tenderness and anxiety, turned expectantly to his.

“David, you are here!” she said impulsively. “You are glad, aren’t you? Say that your thoughts aren’t gloomy any more.”

“What need to say it—Una!”

Silently the two lovers threaded the box-bordered path leading to the great stone mansion beyond, pausing to admire the flowers that still bloomed in a straggling sort of way, or marking the loss of those whose gay colors and delicate fragrance had formed a part of their own joyous companionship a month ago. But this evening, as if reflecting Nature’s autumn mood, there was something of melancholy—restraint, where restraint had never been before—in David’s bearing; while with Una there was an affectionate solicitude that strove to soothe an unspoken trouble.

“You must stay to-night,” she said; “it would be cruel to ride Comet back.”

“But your Uncle—will he care to have me here?”

“What a question! Of course he will.”

“Are you sure? He was in town the other day to see me. Did he tell you?”

“No. But then, Uncle Harold seldom tells what he has been doing.”

“He was in one of his grim moods; cordial enough outwardly; but, inside, I felt a curious sort of malevolence. That’s an ugly word—but it seemed just that.”

“Uncle Harold malevolent! That isn’t very nice of you to say.”

“He asked me if I thought our marriage should take place.”

“And you said——?”

“Nothing.”

“David!”

“I am unworthy of you, Una—I feel it. There are men, you know, who have in their past things that make them unworthy the woman they love. I confess, there are dark shadows, haunting things in my past. I can’t explain them, even to myself. I don’t altogether know what they are—queer as that sounds! But—some day they might come between us. When I rode over just now, I made up my mind to try to tell you. You ought to know——”

“David,” she interrupted, “I don’t want to know. I love you as you are to-day. If you were different in the past, before I knew you, I don’t care to hear about it.”

In spite of his self-depreciation, in the eyes of the world David Meudon would be regarded in every way a worthy suitor for the hand of Una Leighton. Clean of stock, so far as the gifts of blood and social station go, he had inherited besides a fortune that would be considered large even in a nation of millionaires. This inheritance, coming to him through the death of his father and mother in the middle of his college course, had not proved a snare to him. After completing his education, he had traveled extensively, not through an idle curiosity to see the world, but from a wish to perfect himself in certain studies calling for a wider knowledge than could be gathered from books or tutors.

It was during his travels abroad, after he had left his eccentric schoolmate, Raoul Arthur, in India, that David first met Una Leighton, who was spending a winter in England with her uncle. The meeting ripened into an intimacy that survived the distractions of European travel, and drew David, a constant visitor, to the picturesque old mansion, Una’s home, on the outskirts of the little Connecticut village of Rysdale.

There followed those memorable experiences of youth—courtship and betrothal. David loved with all the fervor of a mature passion, a passion that quite overshadowed all his former interests. Love for him was an idyl of dreams and delicious fantasies, a paradise where he and Una delighted in all the harmless exaggerations of poetry and romance. No cloud dimmed their happiness. The brightest kind of future seemed to stretch indefinitely before them.

All the world—the world of Rysdale—knew of their love and discussed it eagerly. Their daylong wanderings together, their absorption in each other, appealed to the sensible farmers and their wives, who watched with tireless interest the development of this romance in their midst. There was something, besides the rumors of his great wealth, in the personality of David that would easily account for this interest. As a result of his long years of solitary travel he had acquired an indefinable air of reserve that was emphasized by features almost Indian in their clean-cut sharpness and immobility. His whole appearance, indeed, was of the kind traditionally suggesting mystery—a mystery that inevitably arouses curiosity in those who come within its influence.

Had Una been a stranger, spending a summer, as so many strangers did, in the little mountain hamlet, her intimacy with David might have passed unheeded. But she belonged very much to the place. Generations ago her ancestors had settled here. At that initial epoch in local history, Stoneleigh was the only building of any importance in or near Rysdale—and from that period to this Stoneleigh had been the home of the Leightons. Before they bought the gray-gabled mansion (St. Maur’s House it was then called) it was occupied by a small congregation of Benedictines, who came from France to establish themselves in this quiet corner of the new world. When the House passed from the monks into the hands of that stout Scotch pioneer, John Leighton, it was a desolate sort of ruin. But its walls were well built, and the thrift of its new owners gradually added the wings and the square, central tower needed for the family comfort.

Leighton was thus one of the oldest names in the neighborhood. The family bearing it had always prospered. Years ago their income, what with careful saving and shrewd investment, was sufficient to let them give up farming. This they did, and settled down to the dignified ease that, in an English community, belongs to the household of a county “squire,” or to a “lord of the manor.”

Harold Leighton, the present owner of Stoneleigh, was more of a recluse than any of his predecessors. To the gossips of Rysdale, indeed, who knew something of the history of the place, it seemed as if the cowl of the monkish founder of the House had fallen upon the shoulders of this gray-haired old man. He was looked upon as a student of unprofitable matters, lacking in the canny enterprise distinguishing the Leightons before him, and that had built up the family fortunes. By some he was liked; by others—and these were in the majority—the satirical smile, the cool reserve, the assumption of superiority with which he met the social advances of his neighbors, were set down as indications of a character to be watched with suspicion, and that were certainly not of the right Rysdale stamp.

Una, however, was different. The villagers did not regard her with the hostility that they had for her uncle. Orphaned at an early age, she had easily captured and held the affection of those who knew her. The tawny-haired girl, bubbling over with friendly prattle, her gray eyes—bluer then, as with the sky-tint of a clear dawn—sparkling with youthful enthusiasms, had a host of comrades and admirers long before she reached her teens. With equal grace and favor this radiant little creature accepted the tribute of farmer and farm-hand, and when it came to playmates was decidedly more at ease with the village maidens than with the decorous young ladies who were occasionally brought to Stoneleigh on a visit of state from the city. As Una grew older, this choice of associates, unchecked and even encouraged by her uncle and Elizabeth Quayle, the worthy but not over-astute matron who looked after Leighton’s household, had its drawbacks. The girl’s beauty, which was of no ordinary kind, inevitably touched with its flame victims who were not socially intended for this kind of conflagration. Una sometimes shared in their subsequent misery; but she was unable to lighten their woes in the only way they could be lightened. And when she discovered that the refusal of their offers usually meant the breaking up of a treasured friendship, she had been known to weep bitterly and form all kinds of self-denying resolutions for the future.

The climax to her griefs in this respect, a climax partly responsible for her flight to Europe, came through the weakness (so his indignant aunt called it) of the district schoolmaster, Andrew Parmelee. Andrew was a solitary dreamer, a friendless, inoffensive sort of person, absorbed in books, oblivious to the world around him. Learning, such wisps and strays of it as lodged in his mind as a result of his omnivorous reading, he was quite incapable of imparting. The use of the ferule, also, was an enigma to him. Hence, there were those unkind enough to whisper that the Rysdale school, under his management, was not what it should be. But every one liked him, in a tolerant sort of way; and with Una he was in particular favor. Andrew didn’t know this, at least for some time. When he did find it out, that is, when, quite by accident, as it seemed, Una tripped into his school one day to pay him a visit, it had quite a disastrous effect on him. Before that, women, in general and in particular, were utterly unknown to him, creatures to be shunned, to be feared. He was familiar, of course, with the eccentricities of his aunt, Hepzibah Armitage. She looked after his wardrobe, fed him, warned him of the various pitfalls of youth, stopped his spending the money allowed him by the village trustees on the ancient histories for which he had an insatiable appetite. She ruled with a rod of iron, and the rod wasn’t always pleasant. But for all that, he felt that life without Aunt Hepzibah, although it might give him one mad, rapturous day of freedom, was too bewildering, too dangerous to contemplate as a steady form of existence. Aunt Hepzibah was an institution; she was not a woman. He had heard of men falling in love with women. Such an accident, involving his Aunt Hepzibah, was unthinkable—unless, indeed, something like the conquest of the Scythians by the Amazons, of which he had read in his Herodotus, should be repeated in Rysdale.

As for the girls in Andrew’s school, it was impossible to think of them except as so many varieties of human tyranny. They were more perplexing, as a rule, certainly more unmanageable, than the boys. This was due to the languishing friendships which they tried to contract with him, and which they mirthfully abandoned just so soon as he began to take them seriously. In fact, there was nothing in Andrew’s fancied or actual experience so terrible—not even Aunt Hepzibah or the Amazons of Herodotus—as the schoolgirl just old enough to plan and carry out this kind of campaign against him. Instances are on record, indeed, in which, convinced that some overgrown girl was in rebellion, he had dismissed his school on the plea of a hastily imagined holiday, and fled to the woods.

Una, however, in the full bloom of her eighteen years had not been one of Andrew’s pupils, and thus had not tormented him in this particular manner. Hence, when she stood at the schoolhouse door, one fine morning, asking if she might attend one of his classes, he suspected nothing. Overcome by her murmured assurance of interest, he made room on his little platform for her and for her two friends from the city, never dreaming that these demure young ladies were not really so absorbed in the joys of learning as they appeared to be.

Memorable for him was the next half hour, during which he plunged his pupils through an incoherent lesson in history, vividly conscious all the while of the three pairs of eyes that were fastened upon him. When the ordeal was over, and he succeeded in bowing his visitors out of the schoolhouse, he had the blissful consciousness that he, Andrew Parmelee, schoolmaster of Rysdale, had been bidden to Stoneleigh whenever he chose to visit that historic mansion.

Aunt Hepzibah, as was to be expected from her perverse disposition, opposed the acceptance of this invitation. But Andrew for once went his own way. Within a month after Una’s visit to the school he called at Stoneleigh, where he was received with a cordiality that quite dumbfounded him. There was a brief but miserable period of diffidence and terror, extending over several subsequent visits; after which Andrew found that it was really possible to talk to this wonderful, gray-eyed creature as he had never dared talk to any one before. In fact, Una listened to him—to his little ambitions, his beliefs, his petty trials—with a kindly sympathy that was quite the most perfect thing he had ever imagined.

Then came the end to his romance. It was inevitable, of course. He wanted her to do more than simply listen to him—and that was just the one thing more that she could not do. It was all very tragic to both of them. Andrew was broken-hearted, full of heroics about fidelity, eternity, death. And Una—it was her first experience in human sorrow, and she was genuinely shocked and repentant.