Читать книгу Exile - Warwick Deeping - Страница 7

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Miss Lord also was sorting her impressions. She sat very straight in one of the high-backed chairs, and the white and narrow hands in her lap might have been unravelling the skein of a new situation.

Her impression was that she was going to like this new girl. Billy had a freshness, just that breezy April wholesomeness that Tindaro lacked. She was England come south.

But Miss Lord’s blue eyes were hard. She was recalling past vicissitudes, and the vagaries of the various young women who had come out from England, to assist in running the English library and tea-shop at Tindaro, and who—in varying degrees—had ceased to be English. Miss Lord had had good cause to remember some of them. Unpleasant incidents! You could never quite be sure how Tindaro would affect people from the north, and how they would behave, or whether they would behave at all. There had been poor little Molly Blake, for instance, who had seen too much of the moon, and had been found dead at the bottom of a cliff. An indescribable and horrid mess! And Betty Backhouse, a dark, full-blooded creature who had had a child by a man from one of the mountain villages, and who had gone native and was living somewhere in the hills in a state of romantic squalor.

Miss Lord knew that Tindaro was not England. It was Italian, Mediterranean, old Greek. It was as though the legend and voice of Circe still lingered here. It had beauty, and there was poison under its tongue, and a perfume that was exotic. It languished; it was lazy; it bred goats and played upon the pipe, and between the blue sea and the blue sky it basked in the heat. Certain things ceased to matter, things that might matter in England or in Boston. A sluggish, satisfied sensuousness became the mood of the hour. Everything was a little tarnished, a little over-ripe, a little sinister. Roses were soon overblown. Men from the north were apt to drink too much, and to be careless about shaving.

Yes, bathing ceased to be a ritual, but Miss Lord took a cold bath every morning. It was the beginning of the day’s self-discipline.

And this new girl?

She heard Billy coming down the stairs, and suddenly she stood up with the decisive air of a woman of affairs about to face a public meeting. All her memories of Tindaro were like so many attentive and challenging faces. Should she tell the girl——?

And then Billy came into the room looking so refreshing and firm-fleshed and capable that Miss Lord, the woman who knew, refrained from unfurling the red flag. Why create a suggestive situation? Why spill wine over such obviously clean linen?

She smiled a little thin smile.

“I hope you will be comfortable in your room.”

Billy’s eyes were bright.

“I opened the shutters just for a moment. It must be lovely—the view.”

Miss Lord heard Maria coming with the tray.

“Yes, very beautiful. Tindaro is supposed to be unique. I expect you are hungry.”

“Very.”