Читать книгу Third Person Singular - Winifred Ashton - Страница 4

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As he walked along the Pantiles with the spring wind meeting his cheek, the chatter of passers-by and the music of the band meeting his ears, he thought to himself that he was well out of the business. Ouf! the pleasure of fresh air after the heat and half-light of his cousin’s room, after the heat and half-light of his cousin’s emotion! He was well, well out of it!

Yet through, behind, upon the glittering spectacle of society taking the air and the waters, floating between his eyes and the women’s draperies, faces, fans, twinkling high lights on incessantly rustling foliage, sliding clouds up aloft, shadows that ran and paused and shifted like hot blue ghosts in and out among the living shapes, he could still see the room he had quitted ten minutes ago. The three walls of it were still as much before his eyes as if he were sitting in his private box at Covent Garden, as if the memory of the stifling, scorching little scene through which he had passed were an operetta played and sung before him. He could still hear the dark feminine voice, Hariot’s voice.

It was odd how one heard Hariot, felt Hariot, never saw Hariot, when it came to looking back into the memory. Heat raying out of half darkness—that was Hariot: heat borne on a voice like the viola in the orchestra at Covent Garden. He had told her so that day—“Your voice—it’s like a viola, Cousin!” and the viola voice had answered out of the billows of mulberry silk, out of the blur of cheek caught in an ivory vice of supporting fist, had answered with a characteristic question—

“Is it your favourite instrument?”

What an escape! Thank the god (goddess, more likely) who looks after bachelors that he had heard for the last time that dark voice, had evaded for the last time the clutching questions of that greedy voice! Marriage with Cousin Hariot—marriage with the Maiden of Nuremberg! He had seen, as one of the sights of the Grand Tour, such a marriage celebrated, had seen some luckless traitor delivered into the Maiden’s arms. It had been explained to him how ingeniously the Maiden was constructed, with what fervour she pressed her mortal kisses upon a man’s eyes and breast and brain. No chance for him once married to the Maiden—to Hariot the Maiden!

“ ‘Is it your favourite instrument?’ Is it, that is to say, like me? I am your bride and therefore of all instruments it is your favourite, is it not, as I am your favourite, am I not? Of all women, the only woman for you, am I not? Am I not?”

He made up his mind then and there, before that question’s echo had ceased to ring in his mind, that he would not marry Hariot. Contract or no contract, heiress or no heiress, family pressure or no, he would not marry his Cousin Hariot. The delight of having, though only mentally, cut himself free of Hariot and the family, hastened his answer—

“No, Hariot!”

“Not—Jamie?”

She made, with her possessive lingering on it, his very name her possession, and so he had said irritably, to be rid of her questioning—

“I prefer the harp——” with no thought, upon honour, in his mind at the moment of Menella Traill.

“Menella must teach me then,” said the dark voice to that: and so sent his eyes to the window, to the anxious piece of girlhood sitting by the window.

The sun shone in upon Menella Traill, turned her tendrils of hair into a saint’s halo and rosily darkened her cheek, as if it were a branch of spring blossom raised against the sky. A glance, no more, he had given her and none had been returned him from beneath the dropped lids. Yet he had turned back to his cousin a dazzled young man, a young man in revolt.

Why was not Hariot Menella? How easy life would be if Cousin Hariot had been penniless Menella! He liked the way the muslin was folded about her shoulders and pouted over her breast. Hariot was always a restless rustle of silks: her eyes, so black and bright, were a question, a challenge; but muslin, blue ribbon, tendrils of fair hair, dropped lids and a sweet glance asleep behind them, that was Menella’s way. And that was how a woman should look and be. There was nothing to be afraid of in Menella, though you might make her afraid easily and comfort her afterwards. Dear Menella! But Hariot—he would not own to himself that he was afraid of Hariot. Instead, he said to himself that he was not obliged to like her because she was his cousin. He was twenty-one, home from the Grand Tour, heir last month to nothing but his mother’s settlements, heir to-day to an estate that set him free to marry whom he pleased. If his officious elders had known that his two brothers would die unmarried within a week of each other they would have been less ready to betroth him at eighteen to mature Hariot. He had, he’ld admit it, thought himself in love with Cousin Hariot at eighteen; but at twenty-one a man knew more of the world and his own heart. He would not marry her. The families might say and do anything they threatened; but he would not marry the woman who had all but bought him from his greedy parents.

Then her voice had recalled him from his thoughts—

“Shall I, Jamie?”

“Shall you what, Madam?”

“Learn the harp for you?”

“Madam——”

“Hariot, Jamie!”

“There it is, Madam—well then, Hariot—Cousin Hariot. It’s that we are cousins.”

“What of it?”

“Cousins, Cousin Hariot! And you must know that I had a master, a doctor of medicine, a most learned man—I met him at Florence——”

“Ah,” she said, “it should have been Mantua.” The tall Spanish leather screen shut off the light: he could not see her clearly; but it seemed to him that she was laughing.

“Mantua, Cousin?”

“Quacks have been common there, Jamie, since Romeo’s day.”

“Quack? He was my friend. And in his view—for I told him of my—of our—that is to say, I made him acquainted with my affairs—I talked of you——”

“To the apothecary?”

“He was physician to the Duke.”

“And to Romeo. Continue, Romeo!”

He scowled at her.

“My name’s Jamie. And I say, Cousin Hariot, that—that—that he bid me look about me. And I have. There’s young Milchester, he was odd enough at school, and now he’s kept to his rooms and thinks himself Cæsar and plays with hobby-horses. Pitiful! And his sister—they had her in a strait-jacket before she was married: and though they call her in her senses you know yourself she’s the talk of the town. And, do you see, their father and mother were—as we are, Hariot! And there’s the horrid tale of the Duke’s eldest—and—and the long and the short of it is, Cousin Hariot, that cousins should like each other as sisters and brothers do—shouldn’t marry.”

He had shot his bolt at last, and in the relief of having done it, waited with tolerable composure for the dusty commotion of its striking home. He even felt a certain curiosity, for he had never yet encountered his Cousin Hariot’s wrath. She had been a stranger to him since their early childhood, save for the holiday month of their betrothal; but the family temper was a legend. Well, now he had braved it and felt the better. Let her say what she pleased. She was only a woman, a mere plain Miss, seven years older than he, and his cousin. Let her rage!

But there was no noise. There was to be, it seemed, no unpleasantness. There had been the faintest rustle of silk, the slightest catch of breath in surprise or what you please, as she raised herself on her elbow on the day-bed: and the red camellia she had been twirling in her free hand fell among the ashes of the hearth beside her, as she said in the rough husky tone of a viola string clumsily twanged—

“Menella!”

“Madam?”

“You may go out, Menella! You may go to tea with your sister, Menella! Go—do you hear me!”

He watched Menella vanish from the room like a candle flame ceasing in a swoop of tempest. He wanted to go after her, to comfort apprehensive Menella.

“Now, Jamie!”

Her voice had stopped him on an actual movement of escape, and he faced her as she rose, raging with himself that he for all his inner sense of grown manhood shaking off its minority, should still be outwardly afflicted by his schooldays’ trick of stammer and blush.

“Now, Jamie!”

She had come directly to him, the dark creature, her two hands pressed to her temples as if she were holding her thoughts steady in her brain. Her glossy, pitch-black hair, dressed high as all women wore it, yet unpowdered as no woman wore it, made her unseemly in his eyes. Her hair was beautiful, but so were Menella’s tresses, more beautiful. For if you have to choose between day and night, day to any sane man is more beautiful. Yet even Menella dimmed her glory with powder, confined it with blue ribbons and tucked in a rose or two. Menella conformed. If Menella were walking now at his side between the trees and the colonnade, her little heels tapping on the smooth tiles, men would gaze and women would glance; but if Hariot were alongside, men would gaze and gape and follow, and the ladies would lift their eyebrows. This unadorned Hariot was more like the Greek witch Medea that he had seen painted black on a red bowl, at Naples, than an English gentlewoman. See how she had walked towards him, hand at her brow, a female Absalom straining against the bough’s clutch! She was too wild for him. Moreover he resented her—“Now, Jamie!” No young woman should use such a tone to him, as if he were a schoolboy. He would show her!

“Now, Hariot!” he returned it: and his blue eyes took the glance of her black ones stoutly.

“But, Jamie, how are you treating me? What is it? What’s amiss? What’s all this talk of cousins? My dear, we are to be married in a month. My gown is half made. Cousins marry every day. Why, my dear, Grandmamma was born a Babyon, yet Sir Endymion married her—his own first cousin, as I am to you.”

“That’s it! My friend says——”

She put out her hands to him, and when he would not see their appeal, caught at the lapels of his coat.

“Jamie! Look at me, Jamie! How unkind you are! Won’t you look at me?”

He looked at her. The shining leaves of the camellia cracked and spat and twisted as a flame sprang up out of the ashes and licked the twig. A thin smoke spiralled upwards and drifted between them, confusing his sight. The acrid scent bothered him: her grip tightened.

“Jamie, if you think—dream—that any one, any man, any friend, can talk us into breaking our contract—do you think that?—you’re much mistaken. I’m your wife: indeed I am. You can’t be off with me now. It’s too late. The settlements are signed. My money is yours. You could use it to-day: you could spend every guinea and I couldn’t stop you. We’re as good as married.”

He stammered.

“I’m not—I won’t—I can’t—I’m not enough for you, Cousin Hariot. You’re a great lady, don’t you see? A duke, a lord—you ought to marry a great lord.”

She pressed in on him.

“There’s no ought. I could have—I should have—but I waited for you. I’ve thought of us as married. We are married. I’ve thought of you——”

A dark flame warmed her face. Ten years older and he had thought her a goddess; but at twenty she frightened him with her ‘married!’

“Cousin Hariot—it’s this—I esteem—I admire—but we are not suited——”

She broke in.

“Jamie, I’m older than you. Six years. It’s nothing, six years, and yet it’ll be of use to you, Jamie! I can use my six years for you, when it comes to asking things, contriving things, in society, in the press of things. I’m wise. I can—steer, Jamie. You’ll see! And I shall like to. That’s why I waited for you. As you say—of course I could have married. I tell you I could have married at fifteen—seventeen—twenty. There were suitors enough. I let them go away again. I didn’t want made men. I wanted some one to make. Jamie, I’ll make you, I tell you! What do you want to do? What do you want to be? Chancellor? First Lord? Secretary of State? There’s nothing you couldn’t be with me to help you. I can make people do what I want though they don’t want to. I made you want to kiss me: I made you hang on my doorstep for an hour waiting to escort me, didn’t I, the second time we met? It was a family plan, a cradle plan, our marriage; yet you have me to thank, Jamie! I saved the fortune for you. My father would have broken with your guardian: he had a duke for me when I was twenty-two. But I wouldn’t have it. I’d seen you by then. I said to myself—‘He’s the husband for me! There’s a fate linking us. We aren’t cousins for nothing. I’ll take him. I’ll make him what he pleases—make him a king if he pleases.’ ” And then as he laughed uneasily she repeated with a vehemence that bewildered him—“I mean it, Jamie! I’ve so much money—mounds of gold! Jamie, do you understand what it means to own half a million pounds? It makes a queen of me and I’ll make a king of you. They’ld shut me up again: they’ld call me mad, if I began to use my money now as I will use it one day—through you! Through you I shall have such power. Jamie, I mean what I say. I’ll make you a king, an emperor. Look what Sarah Marlborough did and was! We’ll do better than Sarah. We can do what we choose. I can buy you a corner of creation. I can do it, I tell you! I tell you—there’s nothing in the world I can’t do!”

She stopped abruptly, putting her handkerchief to her lips. He could feel the convulsive shaking of her body and was repulsed, bewildered and suspicious. The phrase she had used rang in his ears—‘They’ld shut me up again.’ He felt himself shrinking as he watched and listened, shrinking from her not as a woman but as a human being: and it seemed to him that he need not be ashamed of his fear of her, that there was maybe a reason for his renewing nervous fear of what she might, in her inexplicable woman’s shamelessness, say or do next. He felt that no code of his knowledge would in any way restrain her free utterance and gesture.

He wished he had not yielded to this impulse to tell her of his change of mind. He wished that he had made this bid for liberty any way but by word of mouth. But that would be to shirk. He wouldn’t be a jilt: he would see that Hariot agreed with him before he left her. However wild she was in her speech he must wait and bear it and talk to her until she saw that he was right. She was fond of him, poor soul! That was the trouble. But was it for him to be angry with her on that score? No, no! Indeed he wished he could be fond of her in return: indeed he did. He wished most heartily that the boyish heartache of two years ago had lasted. But the family guardians, his and hers, had been too clever. They should have married him to her then, a newly caught and willing fish. If he had travelled with Hariot as he had wished to do, things might have been different. But no, they had been so clever with their talk of “Too soon!” and “Majority!” They had barely let him see her: a kiss or two: a family betrothal feast: and then Hariot was hurried away on some unnecessary visit and he sent on his travels. For a year he had heard nothing: then indeed Hariot had begun to write to him: letters waited for him at Genoa, Padua, Cadiz, letters that, he felt, should have hurried him home, his first love-letters. But there were so many of them. At any rate when he came home he had hurried to Hariot to renew his courtship and had loved her as much as ever at their first meeting. But at the second meeting Menella Traill was there: she made Hariot seem old and strange, and a person to fear. Menella was frightened of Hariot, for he had caught her one day crying, and she had owned as much: and that fear, ridiculous as it was, had slipped from her lips into his heart as he comforted Menella. Yes, he had left her comforted, though he was not comforted himself. He should not have kissed her: that was disloyal to Hariot, and he knew it and Menella knew it. Hariot had been kind enough to Menella. Menella was scarcely a lady, a country parson’s daughter whom Hariot had seen in church and had fancied for a companion. Menella told him the tale. She had sistered Hariot for two years now, and it was plain to him, for all she said little, that she had not found it easy, though Hariot was kind to her and bought her pretty clothes and gave her her own cast-off clothes. Yes, Hariot had been sisterly and kind, and Menella shook and paled whenever Hariot spoke to her. Watching Menella’s terror he had grown to share it: that is to say, he was not afraid as a girl might be, but he knew clearly as he watched the two girls that the family had been too clever. Fortune or no fortune, Hariot was not for him. They had sent him on his travels alone and now he had come back, you see, a man of the world, able to acknowledge that she was too old for him, too grand for him, too much for him altogether. But then he must tell her so: he must be honest and make an end of the business.

He smiled at her uneasily.

“Cousin, it’s no use talking. I’m fond of you, of course. But, don’t you see, marrying—that’s another matter. We shouldn’t like it, Cousin! We shouldn’t be suited. I don’t want to be a king or a great man or—or any nonsense. I’m Jamie Babyon of Babyon Court and that’s enough for me. But it wouldn’t be near enough for you, Hariot! You’re so beautiful and rich and fine. You couldn’t come otter-hunting with me, now could you, Cousin Hariot? Or know about the still-room and poachers’ wives and the price of hay? But that’s what I shall want to talk of, Cousin Hariot, and so—and so—cousins and all—and so I say, let’s part friends and go our ways. You see, I don’t want to be great.”

Her motionless silence emboldened him.

“Come, Cousin! You know I’m in the right. Come now!”

He held out his hand to her, but she struck it down, panting. He took it as an excuse to turn on his heel and leave; but she cried “No, no!” to his movement, in such choking accents of revolt that unwillingly he stopped and waited while she struggled with herself for control of her speech. The puffs and spirals of smoke still twisting up from the burning laurel came at him, as it seemed, almost with intention, like the blind filaments of a living creature, attacking his sight and his judgment. He dispersed them with a movement, angrily, the more so because it seemed to him that she drew in the scent of the smoke with deep breaths, strengthening herself; for her eyes dilated and she spoke so loudly that his capacity to apprehend her meaning was dulled. He listened to the instrument and hardly comprehended the tune.

“Jamie, you’re not going to leave me? You don’t understand! You can’t! Look at me, Jamie! Look at me, I say! Listen to me! I tell you this to warn you, because I can see things coming before they come. Stay with me! I’ll let you do what you like with me. I’ll be quiet and obedient. But if you leave me as you did two years ago—all the more because you leave me—I shall still be with you. I won’t be put away and forsaken. One after another they came and went away again. I wasn’t strong enough to keep them. But you—you shan’t go! I’m strong enough to keep you. You’re younger than I. You’re only a boy still. You shall do as I say. That’s because you are part of me, Jamie, because I married you with my soul. I’ll go with you, I say! Yes, you’ll carry me with you wherever you go. You shan’t get away from me as you did two years ago. If you do, I’ll do worse than I did then. I didn’t know then that you were in league to cheat me, to keep me in one room, to take away my clothes and my money. That woman struck me, Jamie—again and again she struck me. I knew you’d given your orders; but I cheated you all. I didn’t feel the blows because I was away. I was following you, Jamie! But I couldn’t cross running water, so I came back. And they pretended to be glad and let me buy new clothes. Menella pretended to be glad, too, the bitch, when she’d been wearing my clothes, I tell you! O Jamie, Jamie, they were so cruel to me! They took away my body, Jamie, so that I shouldn’t follow you. They took it away, I say! What could I do but scream for my body? To call that being mad, was that fair? They locked all the doors and there I was naked outside the doors of life: and I couldn’t get to you across the sea. Souls can’t cross water unless a body carries them. Jamie, you wouldn’t do that to me: you wouldn’t take away my body? You’ll be kind to me: you’ll understand: you’ll lend me—anything. You and I will get married and be so happy, Jamie—my darling—my dear, dear Jamie!”

She was fawning on him: her arms were round him: he could scarcely breathe for the stricture of her arms about his neck. Her head was flung back to see him better: her lips were parted: her wild eyes full of tears. He was shocked and stirred beyond measure. He had a terrible sensation of helplessness: he had a vision of a giant drowning and crying for help as it drowned: and of himself as a dwarf safe ashore, watching in futility. The smoke eddied about them still, dilating and distorting the shape of his cousin’s face. In a sort of anger he lifted his hands and pulled her hands apart because he didn’t know what to do but free himself. What could a man do to this creature? She wasn’t Menella. She was a black woman on a red ground, writhing round a vase, a sight he should have seen last year, on his tour, not now, home in safe sunny England. What was he to say to her? He considered and said—

“Cousin, you’re ill. Sit down. I’ll call your maid.”

“Jamie, save my life!”

He said—

“I’ll call your maid. I’ll go.”

“Jamie, I warn you. I’ll go with you.”

“Cousin, you mustn’t be so noisy.”

“Oh,” she cried, her hands on her throat, “let me! It’s so silent where I am—outside. Steps don’t echo. Shadows don’t fall. A pistol shot, that’s no more than a latch falling, in my world. But I don’t want to go back. I want to stay here. You can keep me here, Jamie, if you will. You will, eh? Eh, Jamie? Eh?”

She came after him at a run as he stayed by the door, his hand rattling the gilded knob. She cried in anguish—

“What? You’ll still leave me, after all I’ve said to you? Then you may—you may, Jamie—oh, cruel, cruel! But that doesn’t mean that I’ll ever leave you. But you’ll forget me——”

“Now, Cousin, indeed I won’t.”

“Forget me—forget me! When I touch you, you’ll say—‘The wind blew a dead leaf against me!’ You’ll brush me off.”

“I have to go, Cousin! An appointment——”

“You won’t see me; but I’ll see you: nor hear me; but I’ll hear you. I warn you, Jamie, I’ll creep into your brain. I’ll hear your thoughts before you think them. I’ll suck your soul out, I tell you: and in the hollow, hollow places where your soul was, there I’ll live!”

She stood a moment swaying from the feet upward. She was, it seemed to him at that moment, night, a night monster, cutting off from him the light that streamed in behind her through the broad panes, over the window-sill where Menella had been so lately, where Menella’s pretty tools, her golden thimble, her set of scissors in the faded velvet case, her tangle of rainbow silks, still were heaped. It was as if she were denying him his right to sunshine and Menella. And then, suddenly, she was stilled in all her being—eyes, mouth, heaving breast, straining nostrils and hands, all were still on an instant, as a tree stills when the wind drops. She was translated before his eyes into the elegant Cousin Hariot of his boyish admiration—languid, graceful, arch.

“Must you go, dear Jamie? Indeed I think you must. A young woman, you know, unattended—what will Dekker and my maid say to it? Menella should be here. Where is Menella? Yes, you must go, Jamie! There, it isn’t long to wait, eh, Jamie? What’s a month? My dress is half made, all of the lace that you brought me. And a head, my dear, a head to dream of! Orange blossoms and dewdrops of diamonds! No feather—you don’t like feathers—a gauze twist: I sent for it to Paris. It will enchant you. Shall I let you see it? But no, not lucky. You shall see it on our wedding-day.”

He said—it seemed to him that he screamed at her in a voice, a womanish voice of which he was ashamed—

“Cousin Hariot, I won’t marry you! I won’t! Is that plain? I won’t! And now I’m going, and—and—and I’m sorry, Cousin Hariot!”

He turned the handle and flung open the door and pulled it to again behind him, stumbling into the hall and out of the house, under the knowing eyes of Dekker, the man.

He thought he heard her call after him: he was not sure of that. He was only sure that he was well out of it, out of the room, house, street: well out of Hariot’s life, never to go back again into Hariot’s house and room and life.

He was only sure that the Pantiles on a spring afternoon, though he had little recollection of how he got there, was the freest, gayest place in the world, a better place than any woman’s, any queen’s drawing-room: and that the veriest pink-ribboned chit mincing beside Mamma upon the pavement would make him a better wife than the dark woman of his blood.