Читать книгу Silver Slippers - Temple Bailey - Страница 12

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When Joan had gone, Giles took the silver slippers downstairs.

“These were left to be mended.”

Scripps reached out a hand for them and looked inside. “Fifth Avenue shop and old French buckles. Who brought them?”

“The girl I saw on the rocks.”

“You don’t mean it.”

“I do. It’s a bit queer a thing like that—two meetings in two days.”

Scripps, examining the heel, asked, “How did she do it?”

“She was dancing in the woods. She caught the heel in a root.”

After that the little shoes were set on a shelf, where, shining amid the clumsy footwear they seemed to draw light to themselves and to illumine the dreary day.

“So you’ve seen her again?” Scripps said, as he returned to his bench, “what do you think of her?”

“I’d hate to say.”

“Why?”

“You’d tell me my language was extravagant; that I was a darned poet, or words to that effect. That I was seeing rose-color when I ought to see drab.”

“Is it as bad as that?”

“Worse ...” Giles was smiling. Scripps was not sure he was in earnest. He didn’t want him to be in earnest. Not Giles ... who mustn’t fall in love with anybody.

But there was no time to say more about it, for the door opened and a young woman entered.

“Dilly,” the two men said in a breath, and Giles went with both hands outstretched to meet her. “You were a darling to come.”

“Oh, well, your birthday, my dear.” She set a basket on the table and uncovered it. From it she took a parcel wrapped in a napkin, and a great cake set on a pink plate and protected by waxed paper.

“There,” she said, “what do you think of it?” She whisked the paper from about the cake and showed it, snowy with cocoanut and circled with tiny pink tapers, “thirty-three of them, Giles,” she indicated the candles, “it doesn’t seem possible ...”

“Eight years older than you, Dilly,” her cousin reminded her.

She nodded and smiled at him ... “Thirteen when I was five. What glorious times we had together.”

She stripped off her raincoat, handed it to Giles and flung her little hat to Scripps, who lighted-up and laughing, caught it. Her short fair hair, thus revealed, framed a fresh-cheeked, smiling countenance. Her nose had little golden freckles, and in the gray eyes under the long fair lashes were twinkling lights.

She began to lay the table, deftly, having brought a cloth, and going back and forth to Scripps’ cupboard for the dishes.

“There’s coffee in the thermos bottle,” she enumerated as she bent over her basket, “pickles,” she set a bottle on the table, “olives,” another bottle, “open them, Giles, and then we’re ready.”

Giles drawing out a chair for her, said, “Scripps tells me the baby is better.”

“Yes. I left her with William. And he is scared stiff. He has lived five years in a lighthouse and he’s never been afraid of anything. But baby has him petrified. She’s so helpless and little. He handles her as if she were going to break.”

Dilly was pouring the coffee. “Cream for you, Scripps, and none for Giles. What a pair you are, doing everything differently, yet such friends.”

Scripps flared: “Does drinking my coffee with cream make me different from Giles? We’re absolutely alike in everything except that I won’t accept his philosophy. He believes that everything works together for good. Which is archaic ... rot ...”

Dilly’s eyes met Giles and saw a warning, “Oh, well, we’re not going to quarrel about it on anybody’s birthday, are we? And you haven’t told me how you like the sandwiches.”

“Delicious,” Giles said, “how do you do it, Dilly?”

“Do what?”

“Take care of a house and a baby and a garden and look after that husband of yours ...?”

“Keeping house,” Dilly told him, “in a lighthouse has its advantages—with no neighbors running in, and nothing to interrupt, and William and I get up early ... He helped me make the sandwiches ... buttered ’em and sliced the roast chicken ... He’s to have the wings and legs for his dinner, and I baked a little cake for him ...”

“Lucky William.”

Dilly was complacent. “Yes, he is. And so am I. And so’s the baby ...” she sent her smiling glance to meet their smiles, “And now, will one of you light the candles?”

Scripps did it, touching each pink tip with flame, his white hair and young face illumined by the growing brightness.

“And now,” Dilly prompted, as they gazed upon that rosy effulgence, “make a wish Giles, and if you blow all of them out at once it will come true.”

“What shall I wish?”

“It must be a secret. In your heart.”

“What if I have no heart?”

“Then in your soul.”

“Why should I have any secrets from you and Scripps? I shan’t make a wish. I’ll drink a toast instead.” He raised his glass, “To the silver slippers.”

“What slippers?” Dilly demanded.

“Those on the shelf.”

She turned and looked at them. “Whose are they?”

He rose and brought them over, showed her the tag. “Joan Dudley.”

“Never heard of her.”

“She’s at the hotel. A schoolteacher out for a holiday.”

“If she is a schoolteacher she has squandered a month’s salary on these shoes.”

“So Scripps says.”

Dilly’s voice was wistful, “How wonderful it must be to wear slippers like that, and the gowns to go with them. Yet you say she’s a schoolteacher.”

“So she told me. But there’s a rich aunt, who probably pays for luxuries. Miss Dudley motored down with her.”

“I wonder if I’d dare try them on?”

“Why not?”

Dilly’s feet were small, and the silver shoes fitted perfectly. “I feel like Cinderella,” she said, delightedly, “at the ball,” she essayed a few dancing steps, humming a tune, “Come on Giles ...”

He danced with her, until suddenly she stopped ... and said with a sort of quick decision, “The ball is over. And my William doesn’t dance ... Take back your slippers, Scripps. They’re too ... disturbing.”

Giles was aware that beneath the light words was some emotion not seen on the surface. But he said nothing, at the moment, and presently they were all laughing together as Giles blew out the gutted candles, and Dilly cut the cake.

When, however, Giles carried Dilly’s basket back to the boat, he asked a straight question. “Happy, little Dilly?”

“Yes. What made you ask that?”

“Because when you stopped dancing there was something ... as if you were wishing for pleasures you didn’t have, Dilly?”

She smiled up at him, “Everybody yearns now and then for—the fleshpots. And sometimes I’m fed up a bit on solitudes. But there’s always William and the baby ... and the great light ... and love ...”

It was bravely said, and beautifully. He laid his hand on her shoulder and looked down at her, “What a dear child you are ...”

“Not a child any longer, Giles. I’m the mother of a baby.”

“But always a child at heart.”

As he helped her into the boat, she asked, “How are things going on the Island?”

“No better.”

“If you could only get away for a bit.”

“I can’t leave Scripps alone to bear it.”

“Oh, you deserve a halo.”

“My dear child, it is Scripps who deserves the halo.”

As he untied the rope he said:

“More rain. But you’re such a little duck you won’t mind.”

“You taught me to swim ...” she reminded him. The motor began its “plop, plop,” and Dilly, standing up, steered expertly. “Good-bye,” she called over her shoulder.

Giles watched her until she was a mere speck on the gray surface of the harbor. Such a brave soul, little Dilly, living there in the lighthouse at the end of the sandy peninsula with William and the baby. Her grandfather and Giles’ had been brothers, sons of a sturdy English merchant who had settled in Salem. Giles’ grandfather had studied law and had loved his books; the other son, Mark, had been a rover and a ne’er-do-well. Thus it had happened, as it often happened on that rocky coast, that one branch of the family had advanced in wealth and influence, and the other had gone back. Young Giles and Dilly had been the best of friends. But Giles had had private schools and college, while Dilly as she came along had taken education as she could get it in Granitehead and she had been in the same classes as William Tucker, whom she had married. William was fine and upstanding, but now and then young Giles had sighed to think of the waste of Dilly’s charms.

He said something of the kind to Scripps when he returned to the shop. “Sometimes I think if she had not married William and could have seen the world ...”

“You and I have seen the world,” said Scripps, “and what good has it done us?”

Giles Armiger had that to think about when he returned to his books. There were few customers for the rain continued, and below stairs in his shop, Scripps tapped and sewed, and old Peter slept and waked to preen his feathers and slept again.

It was almost six when the two men went down to the float and stepped into the gray boat with the bright brasses. They had a longer way to go than Dilly. They swept around the lighthouse and into the open sea. Then a mile along the coast, and a low island lifted its head. They steered towards it, and as they came up to the landing a man came to meet them. José, a Portuguese, was man of all work, and Margarida, his wife, looked after the house. The house as they approached it showed as a long low structure built to conform to the outline of the rocks so that it seemed almost a part of them with its shingles silvered by the weather. There were vines growing over it—wisteria, which roofed it with lavender in the spring, and roses with their pink in June. Just now the riot of color was in the garden in which bloomed all the old-fashioned flowers which are at their gayest in midsummer. Even the pouring rain could not deaden their brilliance. It seemed rather to intensify it as it washed down on larkspur and four-o’clocks, lady slipper and phlox.

The outer door of the house led into the living room, which was faintly illumined by a fire on the hearth and by its shine on dark old woods and on the rich blue of two huge Chinese vases, by the red of lacquer and the gold of all the small heathen gods in a cabinet inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In the dining room beyond was the glimmer of glass and silver, with two tall unlighted candles, white as ghosts amid the gloom.

Entering this house, Giles and Scripps went at once upstairs. When an hour later they came down they had bathed and changed. In the dining room the candles were lighted and the table set for formal service. The two men stood until a girl in evening dress arrived. She was dark with a pale skin, and her dress had a golden glow like that of the midsummer flowers outside.

She went straight up to Giles. “Why are you so late?” she demanded.

“Are we late?”

“Yes. I watched ... I wanted to talk to you. About Margarida. She baked a cake and was putting candles on it when I caught her at it. She said it was your birthday. But it isn’t. Your birthday is in April. Don’t you remember? There was always dogwood.”

He drew out her chair for her. “Was I born in April, Scripps?”

Scripps said, promptly. “Of course. Fancy a man forgetting when he was born, Amélie.”

She paid no attention to him. “You must speak to Margarida, Giles. She was very obstinate. I just happened to go in the kitchen. And I made her take the candles off.”

When they had finished their canapés and Margarida brought the soup, Amélie said, “I was right, Margarida, his birthday is in April.”

Margarida, placing a soup plate, kept a frozen silence.

“You hear, Margarida?”

“Yes, I hear.”

“How did you make such a mistake?”

“I am old ... the old forget ...”

“Well, then, you may serve the cake for dessert, but there must be no candles.”

When the cake appeared the two men ate and said nothing of that other cake which they had eaten at noon. Nor did they speak of Dilly. They talked of the rain and of books and of things that were in the evening paper which they had brought over with them in the boat.

After dinner, the men smoked, and Amélie played for them. A little later Scripps read aloud. Amélie listened for a time, then demanded, “Why don’t you read to me, Giles?” She was impatient and impolite.

Scripps looked up from his book and said, passionately, “Doesn’t my voice mean anything to you?”

“What should it mean?” Amélie had risen and stood looking down at him. “You are always saying things like that. And I wish you weren’t here. I want to be alone—with Giles ...” She turned away from him. “I’m going to bed. I hate the rain. When I’m asleep I forget it ...”

After she had gone, Scripps said, “Giles ... how can I ever stand it?”

His friend laid a hand on his shoulder, “Hereafter I’ll do the reading.”

“But I thought that Aucassin and Nicolette—years ago we read it together.”

“I know,” the grip of Giles’ hand was comforting.

When Scripps went finally upstairs for the night, Giles made his way to the kitchen. José sat before the glowing kitchen stove with his feet on the shelf of it. Margarida was kneading bread, the elastic dough puffing between her strong fingers.

“What happened,” Giles asked, “about the cake?”

Margarida’s hand, sticky with dough, went up in the air. “I was such an old fool. I wanted you to know I had not forgotten. So I baked the cake and was going to bring it to you and Mr. Stephen tonight after she was in bed. And then she came through the kitchen. And I was caught.”

“You couldn’t help it, of course.”

“What I hate,” Margarida was vehement, “was that I was made to tell lies. Which is a sin on my soul ...”

“May you never have a worse one, Margarida.”

He talked after that to José about the garden and the chance of more bad weather. José and his wife had been on the place before Giles’ mother had died. It had been the summer residence of the Armigers in her time. But since the war Giles had lived in it all the year around, and there was his friend Scripps to share it, and Amélie ...

But tonight Giles refused to think of Amélie. He went back to the living room and hunted for a book. It was a little book with green and gold binding and yellowed pages.

He turned the pages and read:

“The ladies of St. James’s,

Go swinging to the play,

Their footmen run before them,

With a ‘stand by! Clear the way’!

But Phyllida, my Phyllida,

She takes her buckled shoon,

When she goes out a-courtin’,

Beneath the harvest moon.”

He turned another page:

“The ladies of St. James’s,

They’re painted to the eyes.

Their white it stays forever,

Their red it never dies.

But Phyllida, my Phyllida,

Her color comes and goes.

It trembles to a lily,

It wavers to a rose...”

He stood there, reading, beneath the light of the standing lamp. He had hunted for the poem because it made him think of the girl of the silver slippers ... her color comes and goes ... it trembles to a lily... it wavers to a rose ...!

And he wanted to think of her. As he had seen her high on the rock with her white wings bearing her up—as he had seen her in his dim shop bending over the old letter—as he saw her in imagination, dancing in the wood!