Читать книгу The House of Adventure - Warwick Deeping - Страница 11

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So these two went back to the battered old red house with the patches of white plaster still hanging to the walls of its rooms, and the blue February sky showing where its roof should have been. The window of the kitchen looked along the Rue de Picardie and all the broken and jagged outlines of the village, etched with black rafters and the rawness of fractured brick. The snapped spire of the church was the colour of amethyst. White clouds floated above the beeches of the Bois du Renard.

Manon lingered for a moment at this window, her hands clenched, something between pity and anger in her eyes. Beaucourt mattered to the little Frenchwoman in a way that no restless dweller in cities could understand. It had formed the background of her memories, a quiet place where she had made a little song of the day’s work, a place where life had been rich in the emotions that are her religion to a woman. She had been proud of her café, proud of her linen, of her garden. Her happiness had made Beaucourt what no other place in the world could be to her. As the old Frenchman had put it, “The roots of life were deep down under the ruins.”

There were other memories, perhaps, thoughts that left a sour taste in her mouth, but Manon was thinking of the happier days. She had forgotten Brent, forgotten her hunger, as she stood looking out upon the ruins; and Brent waited like a man in the doorway of a church, some sanctuary that he had not the right to enter, feeling her at her prayers, wise enough not to disturb her. Her sadness was like a sweet smell of incense and the soft obscurity of some shrine. She was no mere material woman,—just a pretty, white-skinned, dark-eyed creature, with a beautiful bosom and a soft throat. Manon Latour had a soul, a little white fire burning in her heart. That was what Brent felt about her, the Brent who asked for those dear moments of mystery in a woman, for the flash of that spiritual fineness that can fill the eyes with a mist of tears. He did not want money; he craved for self-expression,—the simple human things, nearness to someone who was a little better than himself.

Manon’s lingering at the gap in the wall that had been a window lasted but a few seconds. She turned to Brent with a soft animation that played like sunlight across the deeps of her seriousness.

“Forgive me, Monsieur Paul.”

He smiled and handed her a box of matches.

“You will find a candle down there, and all that you need. I’m afraid I have not lit the stove.”

Her eyes seemed to question him. “Is it that you are wiser and a little more sensitive than other men? You can hold back.”

She went out into the passage, and Brent took her place at the window, lounging in the sunlight with his hands in his pockets, and recasting the metal of his vision. For a few short hours life had seemed solid and real, centred in that cellar in ruined Beaucourt, a life of quaint adventure, a boyish game played with the elements of existence as the counters. All this had changed with the return of Manon Latour. Brent felt himself adrift—on the edge again of a casual vagabondage. He was surrendering that cellar and all that it contained, food, shelter, even the vague inspiration that had been born in it. He saw himself packing his bag and marching.

“Monsieur.”

He had been so absorbed in these thoughts that he had not heard her re-enter the kitchen. He was struck by her seriousness. She, too, had been thinking.

“How long have you been in Beaucourt?”

“Since yesterday,” said Brent.

She sat down on the box.

“Since yesterday. And in my cellar I find food for many days, a bed, plates, blankets, all that a man would think of—if——”

She paused, looking up at him.

“What I did yesterday will be useful to you to-day.”

He smiled as he spoke.

“There is the beginning of a little home for you, madame. I washed the blankets; they have not been used since I washed them, and they will be dry by to-night. The food was collected by me—in Beaucourt.”

She interrupted him.

“Then—you meant to stay in Beaucourt?”

His face remained turned to the window, and she saw it in profile.

“I had thought of it. Just a whim, you know, the whim of a man who was starting life over again. By the way, the matches and the candles belonged to me. I can leave you two boxes—and if I may take one candle?”

Her eyes were dark with some emotion that Brent did not fathom.

“And where will you go?”

He refused to look at her.

“Oh, anywhere. It does not matter.”

“There is nothing that does not matter. And—you want your breakfast. Shall we have it up here in the sunlight?”

Brent’s chin swung round. He stared.

“Just as you please.”

She got up.

“I must light the stove. Or perhaps you are more clever at it than I am. Supposing I wash those plates. I can find some more boxes and make a table and seats here. And I have a packet of coffee in my bag.”

“Mon Dieu!” said Brent. “Life is good. I’ll go and light that stove.”

He went about the work like a thoroughly practical man, trying to limit the day’s outlook to that one word “breakfast,” and refusing to see anything sentimental in lighting a stove and boiling a saucepan of water.

“Anyhow, I shall start the day with a meal,” he said to himself; “I wonder what she will make of this place when I have gone?”

But Manon—the woman—kept intruding herself upon Brent’s prosaic philosophy.

“Mon ami—I want more water, and there is no bucket.”

Brent went upstairs with the bucket and filled it at the well.

“We ought to have a cistern,” she said when he returned; “it would save so much trouble.”

Brent was conscious of a shock of surprise. She seemed to be thinking in twos, while he was carefully limiting the future to one. But then—Brent knew very little about women. He had not learnt to divide the sex into its two groups, the woman who can be bought, and the woman who cannot. The woman who can be bought had always thought Brent a fool, because he had made a mystery where no mystery existed. Brent was an incorrigible romanticist, and your material woman detests romance. She suffers it in novels, but finds the thing a damnable nuisance when it comes gesturing and dreaming and getting itself mixed up with the very obvious furniture of her very obvious little life. The woman who could not be bought understood Brent at once. She was ready to trust him—but that did not help Brent to understand Manon Latour.

Manon had contrived a table and two seats in the kitchen, and had spread a clean handkerchief with a pink border to give a touch of feminine refinement to the deal box that formed the table. That handkerchief fascinated Brent. He stood staring at it while she was down below making the coffee. He supposed that she had taken that bit of pink and white stuff out of her bag. It was one of those little touches of colour, of imagination, that are like the opening of a flower, or the voice of a bird when the leaves are still in bud upon the trees.

Then he heard her calling him. She had one of those pleasant, animated French voices, soft and expressive, a voice that was made to chatter happily about a house.

“Mon ami—will you help?”

He met her on the stairs.

“The candle is burning out, and I do not know where to find another. Besides—they are so expensive; we must use more daylight. Be careful—it is very hot.”

She gave him the pewter coffee-pot, and was ready to follow with the rest of the meal. And she had a surprise for Brent—a little pat of fresh butter laid out on a rice-paper serviette.

“Allons!”

They sat down at the table, with the blue sky for a roof. The day was warm, a day that heartened the world with a breath of the spring, and the coffee was fragrant, exquisite. Brent spread some of the fresh butter on a biscuit, and looked vaguely sad.

“It is very pleasant here,” he said.

Manon was cutting herself a slice of bully beef.

“What children we are! And a child is the most inquisitive thing in the world.”

He gave her a sudden, yet shy look.

“Are you inquisitive?”

“Well, of course. But I do not catechize a friend.”

Brent gulped a mouthful of hot coffee, put the cup down, and stared at the pink and white handkerchief in the middle of the table.

“I would like to think I was that.”

She understood his hesitation and kept silent. Brent was still staring, the fingers of his right hand holding the cup.

“I am supposed to be dead,” he said with a kind of unwilling abruptness.

Manon put a slice of corned beef upon his plate.

“A good man has reasons.”

He raised his eyes to hers.

“A good man?—Well—perhaps! You see—I made a mess of life over there in England. I do not mean to go back.”

Manon’s eyes held his.

“You wish to become a Frenchman?”

Brent smiled one of those human and half-whimsical smiles.

“Perhaps—I want to make a fresh start. I’m not the sort of man who makes money; I’m too easy-going. I have always liked the things that you can’t buy.”

“I know what you mean,” said Manon. “One can’t buy happiness, can one?”

Brent’s eyes lit up.

“Now—how did you find that out?”

“I don’t think I ever found it out, mon ami. It’s the sort of thing I always knew. I suppose my mother gave it me. And yet, half the world never finds it out, and dies grumbling.”

Brent looked at her as though he had discovered a miracle.

“Extraordinary!—I always knew it—somehow, but the people I happened to live with did not believe in that sort of foolishness. I suppose my wife was an unhappy woman; she was always wanting something she had not got and she was always wanting the wrong thing—something that meant money. Well, of course, it fell on me.”

She gave him a look that was like a sympathetic caress.

“What a fool! And so——?”

“I smashed. Then, of course, she hated me. I was a failure—according to her ideas. If I had had a little pity, I might have got up again; but I did not get any pity. A man does like to have his head stroked, you know. Then the war came, and I got away.”

He drank his coffee and Manon refilled his cup.

“How did you manage it?” she asked.

“Manage what?”

“To be dead.”

He looked a little embarrassed, and then he told her.

“When my friend was killed down there in the orchard, I had an idea, an inspiration. He had no wife or children, no one who cared. So I buried myself in his grave, and took his name. It was so simple. I wanted to disappear, and to begin life over again.”

She was silent for a while, and her eyes seemed to be looking at a picture—a picture of this Englishman’s life. Her silence troubled Brent. He began to fidget.

“Perhaps it was a coward’s trick,” he suggested; “what do you think?”

“It is not easy to judge.”

Manon sat very still—realizing that he was in earnest.

“So you have turned Frenchman?”

He gave her a shy look.

“I managed to buy these clothes in Belgium, and then I disappeared. Paul Brent died a year ago, and if they look for Tom Beckett, my friend, well—they will never find him. If necessary, I am a Frenchman who is a little touched in the head. I have forgotten things. All my people are lost or dead; that happened in some village—early in the war. I’m just Paul—a vagabond. If people ask too many questions I just smile and shrug my shoulders.”

“But—all that—will lead to nothing,” she said gravely; “a dog’s life. I think you had some other purpose in your mind—and you are hiding it from me.”

“I have shown you the vagabond, madame, and a vagabond has no rights, no claims upon anybody.”

“Mon ami,” she said, “many men would say that you were a fool to trust a woman. You shall not regret it. When I look at these ruins I feel that the lives of all of us will have to begin over again.”