Читать книгу Creeping Jenny - Winifred Ashton - Страница 4

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The oak tree grew in Petticoat Lane, and when Mary Anne was sixteen years old the ivy that ran up it in straight pale-green lines reached no higher than her heart. When Mary Anne, daughter of Robert Thistledallow, was sixteen years old she was formally acknowledged her father’s heir, thus, as he said, smoking out the wasps’ nest. But she did not inherit his name. Of that her father’s prudence and her mother’s passion had robbed her before she was born, though the cold and heat of their opposed natures fought in her while she lived. She would have given much for the name. What they gave her she did not value. She hated her blood and she never had any passion for money.

Her mother, the gipsy Teresa, was a handsome woman of thirty, whose tribe had reappeared one summer, after many years’ absence, upon the common land above Babyon Court. Teresa’s mates told fortunes and taught charms to support themselves and their husbands; but Teresa had no husband, which was singular by gipsy standards. But Teresa, past her bloom as they reckoned it, kept her beauty and kept it to herself, till, at Lambhayne Races, the spring after her tribe’s reappearance, she told his fortune to that amorous yet prudent bachelor, Robert Thistledallow of Riverhayes Farm.

Robert was fifty—stout, handsome, light-eyed, the ruler of a fawning string of cousins and their wives, a money-getter and keeper, a farmer by training, an inspired dealer by nature, and a fair judge of horses, women and servants. He had, too, a boisterous sense of humour; but though he loved a joke as he loved a badger hunt, he seldom forgave a man or woman who contradicted him to his face, and never one who, to his face, made a jest of him. He was too eccentric and independent to be popular, but men liked him well enough: and he knew that a generation of valley housewives, because they feared him a little and liked his looks and his goods, had schemed to become Mrs. Thistledallow, and were now advancing their daughters for selection. He liked the knowledge and chuckled: continued to give good parties at Christmas, Michaelmas and Hallowe’en, and to boast that no woman would ever catch him. In his fiftieth year, however, his housekeeper died and Teresa the gipsy told his fortune at the Lambhayne Races.

When, the following spring, the gipsies resumed their wanderings, Teresa remained behind. She was sick: and a dark, bowed, elder woman, much muffled in a shawl, sought and paid a week’s lodging for her at High Babyon, the brown village whose walls rise sheer from the roadside and whose gardens run down the cliff between the moor and the valley bottom. Teresa, the villagers understood, was to follow her wild people when she could get about again.

Teresa, drifting on to the moor at the end of the week to see if the encampment were indeed deserted, and finding her answer in the blackened fireplaces and reviving grass, recovered like the grass between a night and a morning. She was blooming and dewy with health and high hopes as she told her landlady a luck-penny fortune, swung a bundle over her shoulder and sprang away. She had indeed the sideway swiftness of a cat surprised in the woods. Under the woman’s eyes she moved once or twice at a tangent from the path, and was gone. You would not have thought that a creature could be so easily invisible on the open moor. Presently she reappeared, a black stroke whose shadow lengthened, touched and was swallowed by the fringing shadows of the Babyon woods. She ran into them as a drop of water runs down a pane to the pool on the sill: and the moor was once more a pure bloom of colour unflecked by the passing of the human fly.

Teresa, equally invisible in the guarded Babyon woods, dropped lightly down the hot slopes till she reached the river where it entered Riverhayes land. She went as one who knew the place by description: she recognised landmarks with interest. Here, after a pause, she sat down, dabbling her arched brown feet in the musical water, plucking and nibbling sprig after sprig of the luxuriant cress. She was smiling. She was waiting. Here, at the noon halt in the haying, she was found by Robert Thistledallow: and the farm spies reported that they did not meet as strangers.

When work resumed, Robert came back into the fields across the river, splashing through the shallows in his high boots, and the gipsy, still barefooted, followed, with hazel eyes under strong brows flashing for any one who looked at her, with white teeth flashing only when Robert looked or spoke. She worked with the rest till the dews fell: then, at a crook of the farmer’s finger, followed him home. The mystery was explained. Here was the new housekeeper. Now who but old Bob——? The men chuckled: the matrons raged: while the younger generation repaired once more with relieved hearts to the forbidden gates and oak-shaded primrose banks of Petticoat Lane.

From the first, however, though there was inevitably incessant discussion of the farmer’s action, there was no feeling against the woman. As a housekeeper she was a failure: helpless as a fine lady and careless as a slut; but though the moment was awaited with excitement in which Robert should discover her inefficiencies, nothing was done by the farm feudality to hasten the catastrophe that all knew must come. On the contrary, the hinds and milkmaids ran at her bidding and hid her blunders whenever they could, for no discoverable reason except that she had a manner which they accepted, as dogs will obey the voice of a stranger who has dogs of his own. They liked her easy lady ways, feared the flash of her eye, and spoke well of her.

Nevertheless the farmer’s goods began to waste. The woman did not care, because she was incapable of realising that in sinning against her lover’s pocket she sinned against his soul. It was her season of mastery over him and, reckless of his goods, she was reckless also of her mastery.

For very naturally the half-planned, inevitable purpose which their first meeting had created in the heart of each, had been accomplished. The wild woman could not sleep easily in her attic, whose little window was level with the floor. Gasping like a fish on a bank in the hot nights, she had, on the very evening of her advent, slipped down with her blanket to the half-cut stack in the little paddock fringed with apple trees. There, heedless of river mists and river music, she slept blessedly. For two nights Robert Thistledallow lay awake after her footsteps had passed his door: on the third he rose and followed her. That she meant him to follow need not be doubted. She was thirty and chaste: now, for reasons that seemed good to her, she had set him up in her heart. The attraction of opposites may be the rule, but these two were exceptions: they had the rare disastrous attraction for each other of likeness of purpose. Each was a whip-handler. He had whistled and she had come meekly; but at heart she came like the Norman Conqueror who, clutching a fistful of earth as he fell on his knees, cried, “This is my land!” For there was blood in her that turned with as much distaste from the life of the nomad as it turned from the quick dark men among whom she had lived. The gipsy wanted to be a landed woman: the dark blood desired the fair. Robert had the colouring of those Flemish ancestors who had taught Devon to make lace: he had their slow speech and prospering ways: and these things made him so new and strange that she was ready to worship, though she intended to rule. For it was only in their craving for and dependence on rule that they resembled each other: and she did not realise that the resemblance existed. For the rest of the summer, because she was young and quick and he was old and slow, she did rule; but her passion in the end frightened and wearied him. In the autumn, moreover, the cold drove her back into the house to sleep, and in the house she was property—a noble mare in a stable: in the house he regained his mastery of himself and her. By Christmas it was plain that she was with child.

Would he marry her? It was the one question that all his relatives asked each other at the New Year party.

Would he marry her? It was the one question that her eyes asked him whenever he looked at her. No blinding admiration, no dazzling promise, no mystery, no deviltry, dwelt in her eyes any more: only the doubt, the question, the order—“Will you marry me? You must marry me. When are you going to marry me?” He said to himself that he would not be coerced: probably he would marry her; but he would not be coerced. He began to watch her, irritably: and seeing her unshapely, with her fire quenched, his fire, too, died low. The dust of the ill-swept rooms, the overflowing pig-pails, the weedy gardens, offended his thrift and decency: in dust, refuse, weeds, his inclination vanished. He would not be drawn into discussions: he would not vouchsafe his decision: he let her stay till her child was born, fetching in the new housekeeper, a safe old woman of sixty, to see the discarded mistress through her labour. Even when she was well again he was too prudent or too indolent—it was a mixture of both—to end the situation. The days dragged on, and Teresa was even beginning to gather a rein or two—willingly resigned to her by the timid new importation who had nursed the quality and, in obeying Teresa, found life like old times—when a dispute occurred between the two masters in the house that settled the matter. Sooner or later the child must be christened—what?

“I call it Isabella,” said Teresa.

Robert did not like the outlandish name. It did well enough for a gipsy; but ‘Mary’ and ‘Anne’ had been Thistledallow names this hundred years.

“I have called it Isabella,” said Teresa. “It’s a pretty name among my people. See, she knows it already. Don’t you, Belle?” And the child gave her in answer the seraphic knowing smile of infancy.

“It’s a name not liked hereabouts,” said Robert heavily. “There was a trollop up to The Court afore I settled here called Isabella. A Jew had this house then, and she took up wi’ him. She bled him finely. Isabella! They’ll tell ye the tale of her if you ask hereabouts.”

She pressed her fine lips together.

“It’s still a lady’s name.”

“Lady! She left two behind her, dead and dying. Would ye call the child after such a one?”

She said nothing. Her look derided him.

“Answer me! Would ye?”

She laughed in his face.

“Noise doesn’t muzzle me, Master! Shout away! You won’t frighten me or Belle here. Belle’s the littl’un’s name! I’ve called her after my own mother. You could have given her a grander name in a gone time, Robert: you could ha’ called her Thistledallow. But she’s Belle now. Belle Come-by-chance—Belle Haycock—Little Belle Heather-bell, born beneath a roof an’ all! Come, my bonny!” And she tossed the child till it crowed and gurgled while he watched glowering, and said at last—

“Come now! Whose house is this?”

She gave him a witch look from under her half-dropped lids as she turned to the open door and called. The housekeeper came running. Said Teresa disdainfully—

“You’re very slow. Here now, take your master’s daughter! That’s it! Hold her right! Take care of her! She’s weaned in the nick of time, I reckon. Laugh at me, my bonny! There, take her!”

She thrust the child upon the bewildered woman, bundled her from the room and turned to him—

“Whose house? Yours, Robert! Do I question it? Didn’t you invite me into your house?” She had a light in her eye. It was an invitation to battle or a dance, but he did not look at her as he weighed his words before answering. In the end he said heavily—

“You’d better be gone.”

Her look hardened. She said nothing.

He mumbled—

“You’re too masterful. It don’t go down with me. No! ‘Belle,’ would you? Two of you—it would be two too many.”

He went to his desk and was busy with keys. Then, from a cavity below the desk face, his heavy body used as a screen to hide his simple secrecies from the scornful woman, he took out a chinking bag, untied it and counted out twenty coins, bright as his infant daughter’s hair: and as he counted them, elaborated his decision. He would tell her now that he had meant to marry her; but she was too masterful. He had meant to keep the child and call it Mary from his mother; but now he would not. She might keep her Belle. But he was dealing fairly by her none the less. Here was twenty guineas, dear money, easy earned. Let her take it and the child and begone, and good luck all round.

She had sat down in the high chair by the fire, and now, with her pointed chin pressed into her palm and her pointed elbow digging into the chair-rest, she laughed at him as she listened, till he was red with the insult of her continued, impudent laughter. When she had laughed enough, she leaned back against the horsehair, and then he saw, drawing herself up out of the slackness of illness and ill-training, bodily, like a snake rising from its own coils, a new Teresa, a lady dealing with a tenant, a fine lady, cool, vicious and remote. She dismissed his money with a glance as an impertinence. Then she dealt with his notion of saddling her with his child. She told him, with a faint gesture of dislike that stuck his pride full of pins, that it had been burden enough in the bearing. Well, it was born, and now he might keep his own. Some day perhaps she might return and see how it had thriven. She did not know, but it might be. Meanwhile—and she dropped mockingly to the gipper whine—“Good-day to you, kind gentleman!”

And so left him and his house within the hour, pausing only to bestow upon the new housekeeper the silk gowns that had been given her, and upon the blubbering eight-year-old errand-maid a string of corals from her own brown long neck. There were no petitions, no delayings. Instead, she sprang away from Robert’s doorstone like a young mare loosed from a stable, coat dusty and staring, but with the clean gait of the wild.

Robert, her farewell ringing in his ears, stood for some time in his empty, deserted room looking at his rejected money. Then, with a certain satisfaction, he put it all away again. Then he went upstairs. The excited maids peeped after him—“The master’s gone to see the littl’un! What now?”