Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 29

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Mrs. Burt had been playing the piano. She had ceased playing, and was sitting on the music-stool with that air of abstraction which her husband knew so well. Probably, no one else knew it. Burt called it her “Fourth dimensional look,” but his teasing was gentle, and concealed a quiet seriousness, for when she sat like that, as though listening to the shivering of ghostly violins, he felt her strange feyness. She was a rather remarkable little person, with a face like a flower, two very large and expressive grey-black eyes, and copper-coloured hair that was just beginning to go grey. Her face was unlined. She could sit very still like a bird on a bough, listening and looking.

It was Sunday and it was raining, and when it rained in Tindaro the sky let down a grey curtain. Stella Burt’s eyes looked at the rain as though she both saw it and did not see it. Two cypresses bent their tops with the wind. A shutter creaked.

Stella Burt rose suddenly from the music-stool. She went out into the hall, and crossing it, opened the door of her husband’s consulting-room. Beyond it lay his den where he kept his treasures, those cases of antiques dug from the classic soil, pottery and glass and odd bits of marble, and rusted iron, and beads and implements of bronze, coins, figurines, tesseræ, bones. The inner door was open, and Stella Burt could see her husband’s broad back and solid black head. He was sitting at his desk with pieces of pottery spread out before him. It was one of those secret, joyful occasions when he contrived to be shut up with all that dead past.

Stella Burt stood and looked at him. She loved him very dearly; she had every right to love him so. He had given up so much for her sake, a career, children. He had exiled himself in order that she might live. They were very happy together, happy as very few people are happy.

“Jack.”

She spoke very softly.

“Hallo.”

“Nearly four o’clock. Do you think the girl will come?”

Burt looked out of his window at the rain.

“She’s not the sort to mind that. You’ve seen her.”

Stella Burt moved up behind her husband’s chair. She saw the pieces of red Samian vase laid out on a sheet of white paper. Her eyes looked very black. Her right hand came to rest on Burt’s shoulders.

“Do you remember that day like this just about three years ago?”

“Rain?”

“And something else. It’s been haunting me.”

Burt drew her on to the arm of his chair.

“Poor little Molly Blake?”

“Yes.”

Assuredly he remembered that wet and windy day. Would he ever forget it, and that broken body at the foot of a cliff, its poor face all blood and earth.

“A bad business.”

She held the lapels of his coat, and he felt her arms quiver.

“I always felt, Jack—that we ought to have stopped it, but we didn’t. Sometimes it haunts me. And that man is still here.”

“Slade?”

“Well—it was Slade. I had a feeling about that.”

“Perhaps Slade has, too.”

“Do you think so? I don’t. He always makes me think of those little clever boys with no moral sense who pull the wings off butterflies and torture cats—just to see how the thing looks.”

Burt placed a big hand over one of hers.

“Well, perhaps. One strikes that sort of man, occasionally, a kind of super-monkey, damned clever, but with no social feeling. A mocker. But what’s troubling you?”

“Molly Blake.”

“My dear!”

“I’ve felt her—sometimes—in Tindaro.”

“You are too sensitive.”

“I can’t help it, Jack. It’s the way I am made. And I feel all those other people, poor wretches, and then I see Slade with that little stick of his like the keeper of a menagerie poking up the animals in their cages.”

“He lends them money, or gives it.”

She was looking at the rain, and her eyes were wide.

“Molly Blake. And this other girl.”

“I don’t think you need worry. She’s not that kind.”

“I feel I ought to tell her.”

“I shouldn’t. She doesn’t belong to the Café Ceres ménage.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, judge for yourself. I bet you she’ll trudge up through this rain. Hardy.”

“Yes, English. You are always quoting race, Jack. It is a superstition of yours.”

“Not quite a superstition. Breed—white. I happen to know that Billy sends money home to her mother. And by English I mean that mass of decent people with habits of honesty and truth-telling and kindness. It’s bed-rock.”

“But it’s human.”

“Quite. But not human as a Greek, or a Gyppie, or a nigger is human. And there’s the bell.”

His wife slipped off the arm of his chair, and looked at him rather like a bird, and then she kissed him just above the left eyebrow.

“You dear solid thing. I hope the child’s not dreadfully wet.”

Certainly Billy was wet, but her wetness was superficial. Her umbrella had to be left outside in the loggia, and her rose-coloured mackintosh hung up in the vestibule, where it dripped on the tiled floor. She smiled. She looked at Stella Burt with the air of a sturdy, comely child whose inclination is towards the instant kissing of certain chosen people. “I want to kiss the pretty lady.”

Burt stood regarding them both with eyes so strangely kind in that fierce and ugly face.

“Well, why not?”

And Billy did it, and Stella Burt blushed.

“I’m glad you had the courage to come.”

“Oh, I wanted to.”

“What better reason!”

Burt’s boar’s tusks were amused and benignant.

They went in to tea, and there were scones and English jam, and Billy gave a shake of the head as though the rain and the wind were still in her hair.

“I do think it’s great of you to ask me up here, and by myself, too.”

She had counted the cups. She sat down by Stella. She looked at Stella Burt with a kind of fascinated frankness, and Burt was amused. These young things, the wholesome ones, always fell to his wife, and he would stand by and observe the devotion. A very proper position for a married man who did not resent the maleness of him being left very much in the shade. He enjoyed the humanities. He had no children, but sometimes when he came into contact with some of the modern young women, rude, sour, red-lipped, insufferably casual, he did not regret the absence of children. He looked at his wife and was glad.

After tea he lit a pipe, and left them alone together for half an hour, and when he returned Stella was telling Billy’s hand, and their heads were very close together.

Billy looked up at the doctor.

“O, she’s wonderful. It’s really extraordinary.”

Burt agreed.

“Yes, she is rather wonderful.”