Читать книгу The Challenge of Love - Victorian Romance Novel - Страница 11

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Mrs. Threadgold had chosen to be curious as to how this big, lean, brown man spent his evenings in his little bedroom at the top of Prospect House, and, since curiosity is the clockwork that moves many a small mind, Mrs. Threadgold remembered that Wolfe’s shirt cuffs were badly frayed. It would be doing the man a kindness if she went through his linen, and arranged for one of the maids to sew new cuffs on Wolfe’s shirts, and mend any socks that were in need of darning. Mrs. Threadgold accepted herself and her moral solidity with such complete seriousness that nothing that she ever did struck her as being mean and trivial. Self-criticism did not exist for her, nor did she ever catch a glimpse of her own smooth face reflected in the distorting glass of self-scorn. People who have no sense of humour will perpetrate the most astounding impertinences and convulse a whole household over the disappearance of a packet of pins.

Slyness was not part of the adventure. In fact, Mrs. Sophia felt no desire to conceal her exploration of Wolfe’s room.

“Elizabeth, I am going to look through Mr. Wolfe’s linen. I see that some of it is very shabby. We must see if we can do something for it.”

“Yes, ma’am, some of the shirts are all holes.”

“Indeed!”

“Mr. Wolfe has only four, ma’am.”

Mrs. Threadgold may not have realised what she was saying when she remarked, “I must speak to him about it.” She was always “speaking to people,” and the phrase was a habit with her.

She went in and rummaged with true feminine thoroughness, and in the course of her rummaging she discovered Wolfe’s map. Wolfe, like most large-natured men, had little secretiveness; moreover, the lock of his portmanteau was broken. Two well-worn shirts, and a couple of pairs of old socks lay on the bed. Mrs. Sophia stood by the window, holding Wolfe’s map of Navestock that was pinned to a large piece of cardboard and staring at the multi-colored patterns, and the neat records written with a mapping pen. No great ingenuity was required to discover the true meaning of the thing. Mrs. Threadgold had her spectacle case with her. She laid the map on the chest of drawers, put on her glasses, and went through Wolfe’s researches at her leisure.

Dr. Threadgold, when he was not too busy, made a practice in summer of taking a glass of port under the lime tree in the back garden of Prospect House. His wife had her basket chair and her wicker work-table carried out into the shade, and the sunlight would come fluttering through the lime leaves upon these two people who looked so smooth and pleased and placid. The garden was nothing but gravel and grass, with a trellis covered with a vine at one end, and a single bed of geraniums in the centre of the grass plot staring heavenwards like a great red eye. A few laurels filled the corners, and there were a few fruit trees on the walls patterned out like the Tree of Life upon an Assyrian tablet.

In a town one may be made the victim of vulgarity of one’s neighbours, and old Johnson, the wine merchant, who lived in the next house, kept a parrot and three musical daughters. Old Johnson and Mrs. Threadgold did not love each other. It was a case of “That underbred person, the wine merchant,” and “That female next door.” Mr. Johnson’s green parrot was put out into the garden, and amused himself there by twanging the wires of his cage, squalling like a cat, and talking—as Mr. Johnson’s parrot might be expected to talk. Dr. Threadgold, who was “Montague” in the house, and before visitors and servants, became “Monte” in the garden under the shade of the lime. Mr. Johnson’s parrot had picked up the cry. He would bob up and down on his perch, and shout “Monte, Monte,” in imitation of Mrs. Threadgold.

“Monte, Monte.”

Mrs. Sophia was under the lime tree, watching her husband who stood at the study window turning over the pages of a book. They had finished dinner twenty minutes ago, and Wolfe had been called away suddenly to a case of sunstroke in the “Pardons” hay-fields. Mrs. Sophia had called twice to her husband, but apparently he had not heard.

“Montague.”

Dr. Threadgold opened the french window and came out.

“Did you call, dear?”

“I called you twice before.”

“I thought it was that wretched bird of Johnson’s.”

“Montague! Do you mean to say——?”

“No, of course not.”

“Your wine is here.”

“Chuck my chin, chuck my chin,” said a voice over the wall.

Mrs. Threadgold watched her husband cross the grass, his hands behind him, a broad-brimmed hat throwing a shadow across his face. In the course of some twenty years Sophia Threadgold had come to know every hole, cranny, and corner of this little man’s soul, his vanities and foibles, his genial strutting affectations, his sententious timidity, his horror of giving offence. She knew his moods, and the symptoms that characterised them; the remarks he would make upon any particular subject, the way he would jump at any given flick of her tongue. Her affection for him was a queer mingling of motherliness and contempt. She owned him, and padded his amiable flaccidity with the buckram of her rigid selfishness.

“Mr. Wolfe has gone out, Monte?”

“Yes. Something wrong in one of the hay-fields.”

“There’s your wine, dear. I want to talk to you about Mr. Wolfe.”

“Oh!”

“Rats, rats, rats!” shouted the green bird on the other side of the red-brick wall.

Mrs. Threadgold trampled straight into her subject without any sensitive hesitation. She had gone to look through Wolfe’s linen for him, and she had discovered more than ragged socks and torn shirts. That map of Wolfe’s had amplified and explained certain broken pieces of gossip that had come to her ears. Like most selfish people, she was very shrewd when she had to deal with anything that affected the little world about her.

“I call it gross disloyalty to you, Monte. A sort of underhand spying, and scandal-mongering on paper.”

Dr. Threadgold had poured out his port, but he forgot to touch the wine, and sat with blank blue eyes set staringly behind his glasses. Mr. Johnson’s parrot was silent, listening with head on one side and an eye cocked cynically in the direction of the lime tree. “What a woman!” The bird stretched one leg with expressive leisureliness, nibbled at his claws with his beak, and then sat up with an air of interested attention.

“But, my dear——”

“You know, Monte, what Mr. Hubbard told you. It is very easy to see what this might lead to. What does the man mean by prying about in Navestock? He must have some object. You don’t pay him to go about to set the whole town by the ears. You must speak to him about that map. It ought to be burned.”

“But, my dear, I can’t say——”

“What can’t you say, Monte?”

“I can’t know that the map exists.”

“I have told you.”

“But, my dear, be reasonable. How can I? Prying about in a man’s room! Why——”

“I did not go there to look for it. It was a coincidence, Montague, and a very fortunate coincidence, and you should have no hesitation of taking advantage of it. Supposing it gets abroad that this assistant of yours has been amusing himself by condemning half the property in the town? He may be a young fool, Montague, but would it do you any good?”

The parrot shouted “Hurrah!” Threadgold gave an irritable jerk of the head.

“Confound that bird!”

“You must speak to Wolfe about this, and absolutely forbid him——”

“My dear, I can’t. I can’t assume——”

“There is nothing to assume. Surely you are not afraid of your own assistant? We had better get rid of him at once if that is the case. I will go and fetch that map and show it you.”

“Sophia, please do nothing of the kind.”

“You ought to see it. I insist upon your seeing it.”

“My dear——”

The parrot twanged the bars of his cage, screamed, and then remarked in an undertone: “She’s a devil—she’s a devil.”

As Dr. Threadgold had said, a sunstroke in the “Pardons” hay-fields had hurried Wolfe away from the dinner table. A sunburnt man, coatless, his blue-check shirt open at the throat, had come running up from the river meadows, his brown face wet with sweat under his broad-brimmed hat. The sky was a clear, sultry blue, and the mulberry trees on the Green might have been carved out of green marble. The air shimmered with heat, and windows were open and blinds drawn. Shadows were sharp and heavy, and the glare of the sun upon the paving stones and cobbles dazzled and tired the eyes.

The Wraith glided sluggishly under the red-brick bridges, water-weeds trailing with a languorous motion, the pollard willows along the bank hanging drowsy and motionless heads. Dust lay thick upon the roads, and whitened the grass, the wild flowers, and the hedges. Blue haze covered Tarling Moor, and the sun was a great, blazing buckler heated to a white heat.

The sunburnt man led Wolfe along a path beside the river. The fields, shorn by the scythe, were a brownish yellow; and the scattered earth, ploughed up in lines and patches by the moles, a pale, dry brown. Westwards, “Pardons” rose as a great mound of green shadows, its twisted chimneys showing above the solemn spires of its cedars. The garden, sloping towards the river, was splashed here and there with colour. “Pardons” was famous for its lawns, sleek, sun-streaked stretches of grass spreading in long curves under the motionless canopies of its trees. The place satisfied the eyes with its calm, cool opulence. Between the dark trunks of the cedars Wolfe saw the fish-ponds glimmering, studded with the green leaves and the white-and-yellow cups of the water-lilies. Beyond the house spread the park, clasped by a red-brick wall that rose and fell with the undulations of the ground. Deer herded there amid the bracken, and about the clumps of beech trees that were like great temples paved with bronze. Some of the old oaks were mere huge, grey shells stretching out a few twisted limbs like monsters defying Time. Ilexes had been planted a hundred years ago, and their leaves glittered when the wind blew. Between the park and the garden ran yew hedges twenty feet high, black as midnight, and as solemn.

The field under the park wall was fragrant with tossed and sun-scorched hay. Only half of it had been mown, the fresh swathes lying at the purple edge of the uncut grass. Men had thrown down their scythes, women their rakes and forks. They had huddled themselves in a group under the boughs of an oak that grew close to the park wall, the pink-and-white sun-bonnets of the women mixed with the hats of the men. A crowd never seems to think. It is a mere amorphous mass, an amœba-like thing that flows, and emits jelly-like protrusions when stimulated by curiosity, sympathy, and fear.

Wolfe pushed through.

“Get back, please, get back.”

The circle enlarged itself like a smoke ring, with irregular undulations. At the foot of the tree they had laid a man on a couple of smocks and rolled up another under his head. His face was dead-white with a queer glistening whiteness, his body flaccid, his eyes closed. He was unconscious, and breathing very feebly. A woman in a blue-print bodice and a white apron was kneeling beside him, and mopping his face with a wet rag.

The haymakers stared at Wolfe, but Wolfe looked only at the man. He bent down, and put a hand inside his shirt.

“When did it happen?”

The woman with the wet rag answered him through her blubberings.

“Not an hour past, doctor.”

“After a meal, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And plenty of drink?”

She looked at him with humid eyes pleading pitifully in a wrinkled, ugly face.

“ ’E be’n’t dying, doctor?”

Wolfe was silent, feeling the beat of the man’s heart.

“Oh, don’t say it be death, sir. He was such a lusty chap. He was laughing over ’is beer.”

“I’m sorry. But he’s bad.”

The woman began to sob, the strings of her sunbonnet twitching upon her shoulders.

Wolfe was raising the man’s lids when a voice came from somewhere, a deep, languid, mellow voice, and if colour can be ascribed to voices, the colour of gold under trees at twilight. The country folk moved aside. The woman in the blue bodice sat up and wiped her eyes with the wet rag.

“Who is it?”

“Tom Bett, ma’am.”

“A sunstroke.”

“Dr. Threadgold’s man be here.”

Wolfe, half turning, saw a woman in a white dress moving from the open sunlight into the shade of the oak. She seemed to glide rather than to walk in the cloud-like expanse of her crinoline. She was a very tall woman, and a mass of auburn hair surrounded a face that was white and smooth as ivory. This hair of hers was the colour of copper in certain lights; in others—all dusted over with reddish gold; and though her face was so smooth and white, the red mouth streaked it with a colour that was almost the colour of blood. Her eyes, dark and large, were filled with an expression as of inexpressible ennui that drowned the light in them, and made them resemble the eyes of one who suffered.

Wolfe rose. He knew by instinct that this woman was the mistress of “Pardons,” owner of a third of Navestock town, mother of that rough-riding youngster whom he had pulled up once in Bridge Street. Mrs. Brandon moved across the grass under the shade of the oak. She was still young, not more than thirty, but her face lacked all animation, the proud, bored, dead face of a woman who no longer enjoyed anything. She looked at the unconscious man and the weeping woman as though she were staring at some picture crowded amid a thousand others into the gallery of life. She had grown tired of looking at pictures. Her eyes said as much.

“Is it a bad case?”

“I am afraid so.”

“Give any orders that you wish. He can be taken up to any of my cottages.”

“Thank you.”

Wolfe called some of the men and told them to fetch a hurdle or a door and a sheet wrung out in cold water. Happening to turn again towards Mrs. Brandon, he found her eyes fixed on him with a vague and careless curiosity.

Wolfe was struck by one of those flashes of surprise that strike across the clear calm of a strong man’s consciousness. He felt suddenly and unaccountably embarrassed, like a raw youth in a drawing-room. He looked at her and realised that she was a woman to whom he had nothing at all to say.

His abrupt uneasiness betrayed itself in a certain brusquerie.

“I may send to the house for anything I want?”

“Please do.”

“I suppose there is not such a thing as ice to be had?”

“No, I suppose not.”

She turned away to speak to the woman in the blue bodice and white apron, and Wolfe bent over the unconscious man. Yet he could not prevent himself from listening to the beautifully casual voice of the woman in white. She spoke as a statue might be expected to speak, coldly, perfectly, yet without sympathy. Wolfe felt a strange mingling of repulsion and interest. He found himself wondering whether this woman who had so fair a face and body had always carried a half-dead soul.

When he rose again, Mrs. Brandon had moved away, and her hair gleamed in the sunlight. The white figure showed up in isolation against the shorn grass. The sunlight seemed to fall away from it as though there was nothing that the golden arms could clasp.

The men came back with a hurdle covered with horse-cloths, and one of them carried a wet sheet. The summer day, that had stood slothfully still in the presence of the great lady, moved on again into action. Wolfe drew a deep breath of relief. Here was something to fight for, the life of a man.