Читать книгу The Challenge of Love - Victorian Romance Novel - Страница 10

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Wolfe was in a mood of deep disgust as he rode out towards Herongate to pay a last visit to the shepherd who had been ill in his cottage on Tarling Moor. Certain things that had happened in Navestock during the week had made Wolfe ask himself what was the use of attempting to better the state of such a town. Some of the people whom he had tried to help had turned and snapped at him. He had contrived to make himself more enemies because of his frankness in dealing with facts.

There was the case of Mrs. Lucy Gollop, who took in babies to nurse at twopence a day. Wolfe was called to her cottage to find five infants half-dead from overdoses of opium. Mrs. Gollop was in tears, and none the better for too much gin.

“Oh, dear, doctor, I can’t think what’s come to the poor little souls. They won’t wake up, sir, they won’t wake up.”

“What have you been dosing them with?”

“They were so fretful-like, and the neighbours be that nasty. The poor dears do scream——”

Wolfe looked grimly at the clay-faced, blue-lipped infants, each lying in a deal box stuffed with rags that served as a cradle.

“Show me the bottle.”

Mrs. Gollop, in a large, loose frenzy, brought him the gin bottle by mistake.

“Not that!”

“Oh doctor, don’t be cross wi’ me.”

The overflowing creature snivelled about the room.

“ ’Ere ’tis. Palfrey’s cordial.”

“I thought as much. Where did you get that?”

“At Mr. Hubbard’s, doctor.”

“I see.”

Then had followed ministrations upon the part of Wolfe to the narcotised infants in the deal boxes, a process that had entailed energetic rescue work in the mixed atmosphere of Mrs. Gollop’s cottage. A neighbour had been sent running to Burrell’s the chemist’s, in High Street. Wolfe, minus coat and waistcoat, had put a foot through a rotten board in the floor and discovered other rottenness to disgust him. Later had come the adjournment to Mr. Hubbard’s general shop, and the asking of direct and impertinent questions.

Mr. Hubbard was a good little man with a religion and no morals. He had one of those big, round, hairless faces, mild as a full moon, and very solemn. He blundered along cheerfully in the path that his predecessors had followed, selling groceries, hardware, clothing, and drugs. The cheerful innocence with which he handled these things was characteristic of the man and his surroundings. That bottles containing tinctures of nux vomica and senna stood next to each other in a dark corner gave him no qualms of alarm. He kept kegs of plaster of Paris and white arsenic next to each other in his store-room. Old women stood under bladders of lard, bundles of brushes, and hanging clusters of pails and coal-scuttles, and bought packets of Glauber-salts and rhubarb powder, and bottles with gaudy labels that contained—Heaven knows what.

Wolfe had shown Mr. Hubbard the bottle of cordial, and Mr. Hubbard had blinked at him across the counter. His white apron cut his white waistcoat in two, and above the dividing line protruded pencils, a cheese scoop, an order book, and a red-leather spectacle case.

“I suppose you sell a good deal of this?”

“We do, sir, we do. It is very popular.”

“Do you know what it contains?”

Mr. Hubbard had asserted that it was not his business to know such things.

Wolfe had enlightened him.

“Treacle, infusion of sassafras, and opium.”

Furthermore, Wolfe had made certain statements that had left pink wrath upon Mr. Hubbard’s face. Perhaps Wolfe was unfortunate in his methods of expression, but elderly men in Mr. Hubbard’s position do not care to be told that they cannot escape responsibility by pretending to be ignorant.

Later in the day Mr. Hubbard had toddled up to Prospect House, a respectable citizen, with a still more respectable grievance.

“To be spoken to, sir, like that, sir, in my own shop, sir! I’m not an analytical chemist, sir, but I am a conscientious man, sir, and I’ve been here thirty years.”

Dr. Threadgold and Mr. Hubbard had mingled sympathy and indignation. Nor would Wolfe have felt old Threadgold’s scolding so much had not the woman Gollop arrived that evening and accused Wolfe of hinting “that she had poisoned the poor babes.” There had been a further scene with Threadgold, and Wolfe had gone to his bedroom in great disgust.

Over Tarling Moor a thunderstorm was passing, with the blue blur of a clearing shower trailing over the distant uplands. Lightning still flickered about Beacon Hill, and the thunder rumbled southwards, with the sound as of an army retreating under the cover of its smoking guns. Great streams of sunlight came splashing upon the world out of a vivid west. There was moisture everywhere, on the trees, the grass, the roses over the cottage doors, on the wet tiles and the glistening thatch. Pools in the road shone like shields of gold, thrown away in the thunderflight. The warm, wet earth streamed perfumes.

It was under the beech trees beyond Beacon Hill that Wolfe overtook Jess Mascall, a bag of books in her hand, her mouse-grey skirt and bodice splashed by the rain. The sunlight came under the brim of her straw hat and made her face very white and clear. It was a pleasure to see her feet go to and fro under the short grey skirt, for she was so slim and straight from the hips downwards that she could run like a boy. The beech leaves shook their rain drops into her hair, and the blurred sunlight played about her face.

As she turned and looked up at Wolfe under the beechwood shade the white line of her chin and throat were the curves of romance and daring.

“Hallo!”

Her absolute healthiness, and a certain adventurous audacity in her eyes rallied him.

“Miss Plimley has packed you off early to-day.”

“Oh, has she! I have just been putting old Plimley in her place.”

She smiled up at him, her eyes glittering over some vivid adventure, some feminine onset that had been carried through to victory.

“What, have you had a battle?”

“Rather!”

“With Miss Plimley—the Miss Plimley?”

“I never was afraid of the old crow.”

“Oh, come now!”

Wolfe dismounted and walked beside her under the beech trees. He knew that Jess Mascall went three days a week to Miss Plimley’s establishment for young ladies at High Elms, and that Bob Munday drove down to meet her with the pony cart. Miss Plimley had been “finishing” Jess, though it appeared from what she told him that Jess had finished Miss Plimley. Jess’s French was quaint and impulsively original, and a certain gift for caricature had put an end to her drawing lessons, though no one ever discovered who drew the famous sketch that was found pinned on the blackboard, a sketch that had represented Miss Plimley, in bridal attire, dragging the Rev. Charlie Clipperton to the altar at the end of a string. Miss Plimley had never urged an investigation. She was a dapper and decisive little woman, with a nose whose bones looked as though they were wearing through the skin. Wolfe knew her very slightly. He could imagine her giving music lessons, rapping her pupils’ knuckles, and counting “one—two—three,” the words snapping out like notes from a guitar. Jess and Miss Plimley in conflict would be something epic.

“You had a difference of opinion?”

Jess lifted her chin and laughed.

“I have dismissed Miss Plimley.”

“Dismissed her! Bravo.”

“Plimley’s a snob. You should see her with those Dudeny girls. Pah! she was rude to me to-day. I’ve been waiting for her for a long while. We have a reading class, you know; wretched stuff—Macaulay and Cowper, and all that. She put me on to read to-day, and we fell out over a word.”

“One little word!”

“It was like this. Mother always says ‘crownation’ for coronation. It’s her way, and it’s as good as any other way. So I read ‘crownation,’ just to see what Plimley would say.

“ ‘Cor-o-na-tion, Miss Mascall; only vulgar people say crownation.’ ”

“That made me cross, because Mother says it, and she isn’t vulgar.

“I said, ‘My mother calls it crownation.’ ”

“She said, ‘No person of education pronounces the word so.’ ”

Wolfe’s eyes glimmered.

“That was tactless. And you?”

“I got up, and put my books away, and I said, ‘Miss Plimley, my mother is not a person, and she pays your fees.’ ”

“Then there was that thunderstorm.”

“Plimley splittered. Do you know people who splitter? She said, ‘Miss Jessica Mascall—’ but I got in first.”

“One from the shoulder?”

“I said, ‘Miss Plimley, I have no further need of your services. Good afternoon.’ ”

“I say, that was good!”

“Wasn’t it! I haven’t felt so well this year.”

She looked it, too, with a gleam of audacity in her eyes, fine frank eyes that made some of her more sentimental school-fellows foresee for her all manner of romances. Little Rose Steyning, who scribbled verses in old sermon books of her father’s, would hold to Jess and make love to her. “Jess has such wonderful eyes.” And they were the more wonderful because Jess Mascall made no cunning use of them.

She broke out into impetuous confidences.

“Old people are always talking to young people about manners, but why should we say nothing when old people are rude to us? Does being very old make us important, and able to say the nastiest thing that we please? I like to take people like I take dogs and horses. I’m not afraid of them, and that’s everything.”

Wolfe looked at her thoughtfully.

“Most of us—when we grow up—are so shy and so afraid of staring too hard at someone else’s crooked legs that we play a game of peep-bo round corners.”

“You don’t.”

“Thank you!”

“I shouldn’t think you were ever afraid of anything. That’s why I like you.”

Wolfe winced inwardly, as a man should when he is a keen and honest critic of self.

“Men are afraid of things that you have never thought of.”

“What things?”

“Losing money or losing work; offending people who are useful; getting themselves laughed at or hated.”

“But if I felt myself in the right?”

“Well?”

“I’d never give in, never.”

“By George, I don’t believe you would.”

He looked at her with a kind of awe, the awe of a man for something that is terribly and beautifully sincere. In the old tales of chivalry strong men knelt and took some young girl as their Lady of Honour. Wolfe understood the human significance of the spirit of chivalry. It was the bowing down of the man before cleanliness, beauty, and truth.

“Then you wouldn’t think much of a fellow who met a savage dog in a lane, and slunk round by another way?”

Her eyes met Wolfe’s.

“No, I shouldn’t.”

“No; that’s right.”

They had passed from under the beech trees, and down the wet, sunlit road came Bob Munday in the Moor Farm pony-cart. The boy had a way of staring wonderingly at Jess. He would have jumped into the great duck pond if she had so much as hinted that it would please her.

“Hallo, here’s Bob. I must be riding on, or I shall not be back by surgery hours.”

He looked down at her gravely.

“Do you know, you have done me a great deal of good.”

“I?”

“Yes, you.”

And Wolfe rode on with the wave of the hat, and a heart that felt warmer and less cynical.