Читать книгу Caroline Terrace - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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With unexpected graciousness Mrs. Pankridge had given Miss Luce permission to play upon the drawing-room piano, and as Victoria was receiving her first lessons upon that instrument, no reasonable soul could refuse a music mistress the chance to keep her own fingers facile. Clarissa had not heard Miss Luce play upon the piano. She herself could pound out a polka with crude and crashing emphasis.

The balcony windows were open, Clarissa at a tea-party with the children, Mr. Pankridge taking saddle exercise. Isabella closed the door of that very garish room, sat down at the piano, and laid tentative hands upon the keyboard. For a minute or two she strummed, head back, white throat showing, waiting upon the music’s mood. It came to her and with passion and tenderness.

Miss Luce played Chopin, the Nocturne in B, and then the Ballade in A Flat. She was lost in it, and the romantic pathos of the great Pole’s music. Time and place were forgotten, and if she played brilliantly she did so without vain self-consciousness.

A gentleman had stopped to listen, the tawny-haired lad of the Waldteufel waltz. Another gentleman joined him, Captain Hector Bullard. Sir Montague Merriman, happening along, made the listening party a trio.

‘Saints alive!’ said the tawny-haired young man, whose name was George Travers. ‘Who would have thought the Pankridge lady could perform like this?’

Captain Bullard silenced him with an upraised hand, and there was a caustic murmur from Sir Montague.

‘She can’t. It must be the governess.’

Major Miller appeared on the balcony of No. 15, and two ladies on that of the Bumpus apartment house. Isabella had her audience, and knew it not.

Then—a pause and the same waltz by Waldteufel. Mr. Travers’s shoulders swayed gently to the rhythm, but he was not thinking of Miss Caroline Lardner. The girl at the piano had a face that you could waltz with, a dreamy face, eyes half-closed behind dark, drooping lashes. Captain Bullard followed the rhythm with a red forefinger. On the balcony of No. 15 Major Miller’s wen responded to the music.

This was the scene—pure opera—which revealed itself to Clarissa Pankridge returning from her tea-party with two smug and sullen children. They had behaved atrociously, fought each other over a slice of cake, and had had their ears boxed by an indignant mother. Albert and Victoria had failed to produce a good impression in the Beaucourt drawing-room, the very drawing-room whose elegance Clarissa had wished to propitiate.

Mrs. Pankridge’s eyes set themselves in a blue stare. What were these gentlemen doing attached to her garden railings? And then she heard the music, and its rich abandonment, and exultant lilt. Miss Luce at the piano, and Caroline Terrace surprised and appreciative. Mrs. Pankridge, gripping a child with each hand, marched haughtily to the door of No. 12A. The gentlemen hatted her, and she gave them a glare and a nod.

The children were hustled into the dining-room, and Clarissa climbed the stairs. The gentlemen below heard the music die away abruptly. Mrs. Pankridge was speaking. The keyboard lid closed with a bang.

‘Miss Luce, you will put the children to bed. They have behaved disgracefully. I must say that your tuition seems lamentably lacking in—results.’

Isabella’s fingers had just missed being caught by the closing lid.

She rose, all the music gone from her, and moved towards the door.

‘And—Miss Luce.’

‘Yes, madam?’

‘In the future you will not play so noisily, and you will close the windows. You disturb the neighbours. And no waltzes, please. Mozart or Handel.’

Canon Turnbull rode down to the bridge at the bottom of Holywell Hill. In the old days there had been a ford here, and Canon Turnbull might have posed for Sir Isumbras at the ford, but the monks of Holywell had built a bridge across the brook in the days before the Dissolution. The road dipped into the shadows of old trees, climbed and pointed like a white finger at a world that was all blue and gold. Harvest weather, and harvest fields, tawny wheat and azure sky, and Canon Turnbull, who lived as a countryman among countrymen, found the world good on this August morning.

Here and there great hedge-elms pocketed the scene with shadows. The grass verges had been scythed; ditches were clean, and hedges in good order. England was still England here, a farmer’s country, conserving the good earth and the fruits thereof, rich in handicrafts and country skill. Canon Turnbull, who came from the north, had seen the new world of machines, Lancashire mills, and had loathed them. Like Cobbett he preferred a horse of flesh and bone and blood to clanking Rockets and Puffing Billies.

Passing a coppice he came to a field where reapers were at work, smocks laid aside under a hedge, with a dog and a great stone jar of beer. Brown, sun-burnt arms swung the scythes. One or two of the younger men were stripped to the waist, their breeches belted about their loins. The reapers were working towards the roadside hedge, and the Canon stopped his horse, and raised his hat to the men. He knew them all by name.

‘Morning, Tom; morning, Elijah; morning, Sam. You have the luck of the weather.’

Their sun-tanned faces were friendly, for the burly rector was one of them. He could swing a scythe, and carry a sack of corn under each arm. He had christened some of them, married others, buried their dear dead. And this was a Neath property, and not a workhouse slave farm. There had been no rick-burning here, for James Neath was a modernist in his human philosophy, and paid his men a living wage, and had built new cottages. The case of the Dorset martyrs had shocked him, yet compassion should eschew patronage.

‘It looks like a good yield, Elijah.’

‘Eighteen to the acre, I reckon, sir.’

Old Elijah, walking towards the hedge, drew the stone from his belt, and set a new edge on his scythe.

‘How is your wife?’

‘Middlin’, sir. She had the ague again, hot and cold shivers.’

‘Has the doctor seen her?’

‘Sure he has. He’s a good man is the doctor.’

Elijah thrust the stone back into its sheath, spat on his hands and slouched back to the line of reapers, and the Canon rode on with a wave of the hand.

He had a sick parishioner to visit at Folly Farm, and Folly Farm was not Neath. The bald, red-brick house had sullen eyes, and so had the faces of two men whom the Canon met in the farm lane. They touched their hats to him, but without smiles. Potatoes and pig-meal were their portion, and their poor souls were sour in them. The Canon found his parishioner in bed, a lean, sallow, melancholy woman whose pale lips were covered with grey spittle. She too, as a miser’s wife, had known a world without laughing foolishness, and to such a creature it was not easy to bring comfort.

Canon Turnbull did his best. He had left his horse by the paddock gate, with the bridle over a post, and as he passed down the path of a neglected garden he met Cragg the farmer. The name fitted him, and Mr. Cragg’s world was without flowers.

‘Well, Simeon, harvest in?’

The farmer gave him a leery look. No damn parsons were welcomed here.

‘What d’yer think? Men without guts—these days.’

Which was hardly courteous, but characteristic, and the Canon could be candid—with courtesy.

‘I remember a saying about workmen and tools, Simeon. The same saying may apply to men.’

The mean and hairy face grunted at him, and the grunt might have been translated into ‘You mind your own bloody business.’

‘Think it over, Simeon. Sermons in men and stones. Good bacon and beer in a man’s belly may be helpful.’ And Canon Turnbull passed on.

His next visit was to the Priory, a grey fantasy of a house with high gables and goblin chimneys, and windows peering at you from strange places. The great stew-ponds gleamed. Elms trailed a high frieze against the eastern sky. The Priory was a house of famous gardens, walled, formal, wild, and was as rich and productive as in its monkish days. A great tithe-barn spread a vast tiled roof to the sun.

Now Canon Turnbull had come to the Priory, not to administer comfort or counsel, but to inspect a new apple tree which James Neath had raised many years ago from an apple pip. It was now a grown tree, and bearing fruit for the first time, and James Neath was as excited about it as though he had produced a lovely daughter, but as the Canon came to the low wall of the garden he saw an unexpected sight. A gardener was pushing a queer, clattering machine across a lawn, with his master and two other men looking on. It was one of the first mowing machines that were to replace the swinging scythe.

One of the gardeners came to hold the Canon’s horse, and Turnbull joined the group upon the lawn. James Neath Esq. was one of those oldish men with a boyish face, fresh-coloured, ardent, eager in its outlines, with quick eyes and a generous mouth. In his young days he had been a noted athlete, and had walked his thirty miles in a day.

‘Well, rector, what do you think of it?’

Canon Turnbull was seeing more than a machine.

‘H’m, useful, I suppose. Leave a pattern on the grass.’

‘Patterns change,’ said his friend, with a twinkle.

The Canon nodded.

‘Cuts closer than a scythe—and any fool can use it.’

‘Tut-tut, Tom here will feel offended!’

‘I think not. I know Tom’s scything.’

The gardener grinned.

‘There be this to be said, sir. One can set a fool to it and save a wise man’s time.’

The rector could not counter this saying. That the crop of fools was and would always be abundant could not be denied, and even much education might turn fools into fact-crammed prigs. Meanwhile the new apple tree was the thing of the moment, and he and James Neath and Tom the head-gardener went off to the orchard to inspect it.

‘Christened yet, James?’

‘I might delegate that duty to you.’

The tree was waiting for them in a sheltered corner, a shapely tree with good broad leaves and polished bark. It carried a score or more of apples, pippin shaped and in colour primrose yellow, but on the sunny side some of the fruit was showing a lovely carmine flush.

Canon Turnbull surveyed it and smiled.

‘Pretty creature. It is going to blush like a girl. When will she be ripe?’

‘Should be—October.’

‘Dessert?’

‘Yes.’

‘If the flavour is as good as its colour you will have raised a beauty.’

James Neath touched one of the apples.

‘Well, what about the ceremony, my friend?’

‘Baptism! Let’s think. H’m. Rose Pippin, no. Why not Essex Sweeting?’

Tom smacked a thigh.

‘That’s a good christening, sir, if she’ll be sweet.’ His master laughed.

‘Well, my dear, hypothetically we’ll christen you by that name. Tom was always a cautious fellow.’

Wandering back and round the grey house they saw another visitor dismounting, the Rev. Nicholas Parbury, known at the Priory as Old Nick. James Neath and the Canon exchanged glances.

‘Guess the ulterior motive, rector.’

‘Is that quite—Christian?’

‘My partridges, and a share in the shooting next month.’

‘Possibly.’

‘I should say probably.’

Mr. Parbury joined them, after a curious look at the lawn-mower.

‘What-what? First specimen I’ve seen. Morning. Turnbull,’ and he took snuff.

James Neath eyed the powdered waistcoat, for though Mr. Parbury might be a good shot, he was a sloven. Also, there was a South End saying that when you got Mr. Parbury into the pulpit not even the Devil could get him out of it. And he talked much as he preached, round and round, and to and fro, and up the stairs and down the stairs, but never into my lady’s chamber. He was off now, but with a purpose concealed in circuitous verbiage; he talked of this, and he talked of that, with red-nosed animation, and no eyes for the boredom of his listeners. But, at last, the secret was out.

‘Ha—well—that’s what I said to him. Verbum sap.,’ and he took snuff, sneezed, and came to the point. ‘Well, well, how are birds, sir?’

James Neath gave the Canon a puckish look.

‘Plenty of promise, Parbury. I’ll send you a brace or two. I know you like ’em.’

Mr. Parbury blew his nose and looked huffed.