Читать книгу Mad Barbara - Warwick Deeping - Страница 4

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“Listen!”

She touched his shoulder suddenly, and their eyes met in a questioning stare, the eyes of two people who have some secret to be guarded.

“I heard some one in the gallery.”

“A coach stopped in the yard two minutes ago.”

“It is Barbara come home. The girl moves about like a ghost.”

They drew aside from each other; my lord, bland, buxom, imposing, in periwig, and black coat broidered with gold; my lady, plump, luscious, yet a little furtive about the eyes, her flowered gown in green and blue pleated into a hundred folds over her camlet petticoat. She wore her dark hair low upon her neck, with a rose over the left ear, and a mass of exquisite lace upon her bosom.

Lord Stephen Gore cleared his throat, and began speaking with discreet distinctness on some wholly impersonal topic. The pair were decorously distant when the door of the great parlor opened, the man standing at the window, as though watching the people passing in the street beneath; the woman seated, almost primly, in a high-backed chair, a book in her lap, mild apathy upon her face.

My lord at the window turned on his heel abruptly, as though he had just become aware of the presence of a third person in the room. He was a man of poise, of genial aplomb, one of those complacent gods who are never out of countenance or at loss for a trick of the tongue.

The girl’s eyes seemed to sweep from one to the other with a momentary gleam of distrust. She still wore her mourning, a gown of plain black velvet with a circle of lace at the throat. The expression on her face was one of tired nonchalance. But for that evanescent gleam of the eyes she might have passed as a bloodless and languid girl whose vitality lacked the stimulus of perfect health.

My lord met her with a bow that expressed unnecessary condescension. He had reached an age when it is possible to be fatherly, and even officious in a frank, twinkling, stately fashion.

“And how is my Proserpine? Still in the pensive droops? And yet Mr. Herrick preaches the gathering of roses!”

He put forward a chair for her with the tolerance of an amiable gentleman of the world. She took it without thanking him, her cold, colorless face masking an instinctive repulsion, an impatience that his urbanity seemed fated to inspire.

The lord and the lady exchanged glances. It was as though the girl had brought a frost with her into the midst of June. Her silence and her almost sullen apathy embarrassed them. It was like being in the presence of a statue that had eyes and ears but no tongue.

Anne Purcell clapped her book to, and jerked it aside on to an oak table.

“Where did you drive—in the park?”

“Drive?”

“Good lack! girl, are you torpid? I could swear you have not noticed the color of a gown or the set of a hat. One might as well send out a mummy.”

She glanced unconcernedly at the buckles on my lord’s shoes.

“The park? Yes. A great business there, to see—and to be seen. Enough dust to stifle one; and too many people.”

The words were the perfunctory words of one who would rather have remained silent. Her face seemed vacant and expressionless. My lord drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, and regarded her with philosophic pity.

“Eheu, holy Gemini, dust and ashes—at two-and-twenty!”

He nodded his head benignantly, yet with a cynical curving of the mouth, while the plump, well-complexioned mother studied her bantling with irritable contempt. There was some inherent antipathy between these two. Their attitude was one of vague distrust, as though the sun and the moon found themselves in miraculous juxtaposition at mid-day.

“You had better go to bed, girl; you look tired enough.”

She met her mother’s hard, inquisitive stare, and seemed to stiffen at it with a sensitive hatred of being watched.

“No, I am not tired.”

“Fiddlesticks!”

My lord held up a bland white hand ruffled in Mechlin, immaculate to the finger-tips.

“Let her alone, Anne. These feather moods need a south wind.”

His lofty compunction repelled her more than her mother’s brusque contempt. The atmosphere of the room seemed overburdened with a sensuous flavor. The very roses suggested a rank and vivid worldliness, a fulsomeness of the flesh gotten of meat and wine.

She rose, pushing back her chair, with a languid drooping of the lids.

“Tell Jael to have supper sent to my room. Shall you be late to-night?”

Her face was turned toward her mother, as though the gentleman in the periwig were a mere negligible shadow.

“Go to bed, child, and don’t trouble your head about healthy people. Nell is at The King’s to-night. I wish you could catch some of the wench’s devil.”

“Oh—the Drury Lane woman! I have seen her at her window in her night-dress shouting at Moll Davis in the next house. She looked something of a drab with her hair done up in papers. Do the candles make such a difference?”

She looked listlessly over her shoulder at my lord, her lassitude giving her an air of tired vacuity. And the smile he gave her might have been the smile he would have given to a credulous child.

“We are all moths, coz, when the candles are lit. Which is a riddle that you need not be bothered with.”

Her going relieved the two worldlings from an uncongenial feeling of oppression, and yet some uneasiness of spirit remained to trouble both. Miss Barbara had chilled the room for them with her wraithlike and sinister sickliness. The sleek self-content of the well-fed animal had been disturbed by impressions and by thoughts that neither cared to analyze. My Lord of Gore stood at the window, stroking his periwig with some such dissatisfaction on his face as he might have betrayed at the first hint that he was growing old.

“The girl looks ill.”

Madam made a moue.

“Oh—that is nothing; she is always the color of sour cream. Lord, but I think I hate the child; she drags things into my mind that make me miserable.”

The angles of the man’s mouth twitched slightly.

“By the plague, Nan, why let yourself be overshadowed?”

“Why—indeed! We might understand that, you and I.”

He turned to her sharply with a gleam of impatience in his eyes.

“Why not be rid of the little blight?”

“Yes, no doubt—and how? Are you ingenious enough to suggest a method?”

“Get her married.”

“Lord! And who would have her?”

“She is something of a bargain—in movables. There are plenty of debtors and fools.”

“The persuading would lie elsewhere. The girl has a sort of sullen stubbornness that is worse than temper.”

Stephen Gore shook his periwig with the action of an impatient horse shaking its mane.

“I suppose these mopes were put on with her mourning. The girl wants the merry devil in her rousing. Jove, Nan, but she’s your child; there must be blood somewhere.”

Anne Purcell picked up a fan, spread it with an impatient whisk of the hand, and glanced uneasily at the closed door. She started up brusquely, crossed the room, flung the door open suddenly, and looked down the long gallery as though to prove that they were not being spied upon. Then she returned to her tapestried chair.

“Well, have you any plan?”

My lord licked his upper lip, a sly smile spreading over his healthy face.

“Will she go out with you?”

“Sometimes. To the old, dull houses where they wear starched aprons and have the servants in to prayers.”

“And judge of godliness by the length of the jowl. Poor people! No—that is not the elixir, the juice of crab-apples. Take her to the Mancini, that witch who turns dross into sunshine. The woman would wake the merry devil in a Quaker. She has old Rowley kissing her very slippers.”

“Hortense?”

“Who else, Nan? It is life, blood, mischief that the girl needs.”

My lady’s eyes flashed up at him mistrustfully for the moment. He caught the look and the significance thereof, and laughed.

“Oh, she is not my fortune, Nan! I am too old a moth for that candle. The woman is like a conduit of red wine let loose in the garden of White Hall. She makes all but the abstemious—drunk. And the marvel is that she is just as magical with women, is Hortense. Ask my Lord Sussex how he likes the transfiguration of his wife.”

“Castlemaine’s stupid brat!”

“Little whey face all turned into dimples, roguery, and mischief. She twinkles round the Mancini like a little Mercury with feathers at her heels. I will speak with Hortense; she has some sort of sisterly good-will to me, and a kind of pride in making sulky people merry. She’ll set the girl’s blood spinning, or I’m a fool.”

Anne Purcell leaned back in her chair as though tired.

“Anything to get rid of that sour face. But it’s her mawkishness, her squeamy, ‘pray-with-me-or-I-shall-die’ look, that makes me doubtful.”

The gentleman nodded understandingly.

“Leave that to Hortense. The Italian has a veneer of softness; she is not like a Nell Gwyn. It is a question of subtleties. Nell would swear the girl into a fit in three minutes. The Mancini has a trick of seeming a saint—when necessary. If the Italian makes no romp out of her, then I will dub her nothing but a petticoated Hamlet.”

My lady stretched her arms with a gesture of impatient ennui.

“Well we can try. Let us forget the ghost to-night. I feel I must laugh, or I shall have wrinkles round my mouth.”

“Nell shall do that for you. You will come in my coach?”

“And the proprieties?”

He laughed with the true sardonic gayety of the Restoration.

“Sister Kate shall see to them. Though she is stone deaf she likes to see the dresses and the candles. There is one mistake that Mr. Milton made in that he did not tell us that the devil is deaf in one ear.”