Читать книгу Doomsday (Historical Novel) - Warwick Deeping - Страница 18

There were other ministrations at "Green Shutters" where two old people lay propped up in bed, with all the sitting-room cushions brought into use because the number of the Viner pillows were limited. They coughed separately and they coughed in chorus, poor old Hesketh very red in the face, and Mrs. Charlotte all fluffed up like a sick bird. They were very much worried about each other.

"I'm afraid I shall keep you awake, dear."

"I shall do that myself, my love. You are the one to be pitied."

"I could not sleep—anyway—Hesketh. I should be sitting up with you. It must have been that wretched 'bridge' party. The Vachetts had terrible colds."

And Mary was cumbered with much serving. She had a fire to light in the old people's bedroom, and Dr. Ransford had given her instructions to keep it up, and they were to have their medicine during the night, and some warm milk if they fancied it. She was in no mood for bed or the prospect it offered her of emerging from the warmth of it every two hours to put coals on the fire or to pour out medicine. An arm-chair in front of the sitting-room fire seemed to her a more practical and comfortable proposition, for she had a book to read, if she chose to read it. Moreover, bed might have proved too persuasive, and her duties have sunk submerged beneath a healthy young woman's need of sleep.

Mary belonged to a generation that values comfort, and though she had had no chance of experiencing the complete flavour of it, her sensitive nostrils could quiver over the imagined perfume. Her parents' ideas upon comfort were utterly different from her own, and to express her ideal of it she arranged the two arm-chairs in front of the fire, and curling up in one of them, disposed of her legs and feet in the other. She had brought her pillow down from her bedroom, and collected her novel, and two or three copies of the weekly illustrated magazines lent her by Winnifred Twist. A box of chocolates would have completed the illusion.

For it was an illusion. She had just snuggled down and opened the Bystander when she heard the rapping of her father's stick on the floor of the room above. She was wanted. She had to get out of her two chairs and go upstairs where a night-light was burning, throwing the shadows of two heads upon the wall. The room had a flat, warm, stuffy smell.

"Mary, dear, your father feels so sick."

"Get me—a basin," said her father, with the anxious and earthy face of a man urgently in need of it.

She was just in time. She steadied the basin for him, and when the paroxysm was over and he crouched there panting, she supported his poor old head against her bosom. How deplorably thin the back of his neck looked. She too was feeling overwhelmed by a sense of nausea, and the stuffy heat of the room. But how beastly of her! Though somehow—she could not help it.

Her mother was twittering.

"You had better empty the basin."

Of course she would have to empty the basin when her father felt secure without it.

"Can you manage now, daddy?"

Captain Viner's head was back on the pillow.

"Yes, my dear, thank you. But I think I will have it on a chair."

She carried the basin away, emptied it, washed it, and returning, placed it on a chair beside the bed. Was there anything else she could do for them? No, not for the moment. They were grateful to her, nicely appreciative.

"Sorry to give you all this trouble, child."

"O,—that's all right, daddy."

She patted his old hand with its blue veins and shiny and mottled skin, and closed the door gently, and descended the stairs with a dreary sense of having done her duty. Pity? O, yes—she felt all three of them were to be pitied, but then—the other two had lived their lives, and she saw no possible chance of living hers. The dutiful and loving daughter! Why could not she be that, and not the grudging, restless, squeamish creature that she was, yearning for things to happen—so long as they happened to her? Were there any dutiful daughters, ministering angels who found complete and wholehearted satisfaction in surrendering to others? She wondered. She could not help wondering, because her own flesh rebelled so fiercely. She hated poverty and housework, and coal fires, and the smell of dishcloths, and the greasy water in which you had washed up, and the reek of boiled cabbage, and the eternal dusting, and the washing of soiled clothes. Always, her sensitive gorge was rising, and her fastidious and eager spirit shrinking from the things she had to touch.

"What an egotist I am," she thought and pulled the two arm-chairs apart, and sat down in one of them, shoulders rounded, her arms wrapped round her knees. Her little illusion of a transient basking before the fire had gone. She felt like a cat with a wet fur.

Irritably she picked up one of the illustrated papers and turned over its pages.

How tantalizing! She found herself regarding pictures of the fortunate world parading and playing tennis where the sun shone and the sea was blue. Ah, that blue sea! She could imagine it, and the orange trees in fruit and flower, and the mimosa and the olives and the palms. A world of flowers and of sunlight, and of colour, and of spacious, golden hours. Things must happen down there. Sister Clare had passed a gorgeous three weeks at Monte Carlo. She had written letters, and sent them vivid picture-postcards in which sea and sky were two splashes of blue.

She threw the magazine aside, and sank back into the chair. Her mouth looked thin, and she bit restlessly at her lower lip. She was Cinderella, the new Cinderella, peevish and pale, with brown eyes that asked questions.

Presently, she fell asleep. She had not meant to fall asleep; it just happened. And she slept the rest of the night there, to be wakened by a sound which she took to be the clamour of her alarum clock. In bed? Not a bit of it. A greyness was stealing in, and the fire was out, and she heard the grandfather clock striking the half hour.

She jumped up. It was the back door bell that she had heard, and she found the red-nosed boy there, a young Blossom, with the milk can.

"You're late," she said crossly.

"Know I be. Muster Furze was up all night lambin'."

"What's that got to do with it?" she asked.

The boy stared at this ignorant and unreasonable creature.

"'E were late with the milkin', o' course."

She felt snubbed. So—he—had been up all night. And she wondered whether he felt as cross as she did.