LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

look, as if he had recently been engaged in a rural game of “blind man’s buff.” The forehead itself, or what could be seen of it, was weighty and thoughtful; the forehead of a scholar or a philosopher.

      Nance had never in all her life been treated by a stranger quite in the way this worthy man treated her, for not only did he return upon his steps immediately after he had passed her, but he permitted his eyes, both in passing and repassing, to search her smilingly up and down from her boots to the top of her head, precisely as if he were a connoisseur in a gallery observing the “values” of a famous picture.

      And yet, for she was not by any means oblivious to such distinctions, the girl was unable to feel even for one second that this surprising admirer was anything but a gentleman—a gentleman, however, with very singular manners. That she certainly did feel. And yet, she liked him, liked him before he uttered a word, liked him with that swift, irrational, magnetic attraction which, with women even more than with men, is the important thing.

      Passing her for the third time he suddenly darted into the grass, and with a movement so comically impetuous that though she gave a start she could not feel angry, picked up her discarded flowers and gravely presented them to her, saying as he did so, “Perhaps you’ll be annoyed at leaving these behind—or do you wish them at the devil?”

      Nance took them from him and smiled frankly into his face.

      “I suppose I oughtn’t to have picked them,” she said. “People don’t like dandelions brought into houses.”

      “What an Attic chin you have!” was the stranger’s next remark. There was such an absence in his tone of all rakish or conventional gallantry that the girl still felt she could not repulse him.

      “You are staying here—in Rodmoor?” he went on.

      Nance explained that she had come to live with Miss Doorm.

      “Ah!” The stranger looked at her curiously, smiling with exquisite sweetness. “You have been here before,” he said. “You came in a coach, pulled by six black horses. You know every sort of reed and every kind of moss in all the fens. You know all the shells on the shore and all the seaweed in the sea.”

      Nance was less puzzled than might be supposed by this fantastic address, as she had the advantage of interpreting it in the light of the humorous and reassuring smile which accompanied its utterance.

      She brought him back to reality by a direct question. “Can you tell me where Mr. Stork lives, please? I’ve a friend staying with him and I want to know which way a person would naturally take coming from there to us. I had rather hoped,” she hesitated a little, “to have met my friend already. But perhaps Mr. Stork is a late riser.”

      The stranger, who had been looking very intently at the opposite hedge while she asked her question, suddenly darted towards it. The queer way in which he ran with his arms swinging loosely from his shoulders, and his body bent a little forward, struck Nance as peculiarly fascinating. When he reached the hedge he hovered momentarily in front of it and then pounced at something. “Missed!” he cried in a peevish voice. “Damn the little scoundrel! A shrew-mouse! That’s what it was! A shrew-mouse!”

      He came hurrying back as fast as he went, almost as if Nance herself had been some kind of furred or feathered animal that might disappear if it were not held fast.

      “I beg your pardon, Madam,” he said, breathlessly, “but you don’t often see those so near the town. Hullo!” This last exclamation was caused by the appearance, not many paces from them, of Adrian Sorio himself who emerged from a gap in the hedge, hatless and excited.

      “I was on the tow-path,” he gasped, “and I caught sight of you. I was afraid you’d have started. Baltazar made me go with him to the station.” He paused and stared at Nance’s companion.

      The latter looked so extremely uncomfortable that the girl hastened to come to his rescue.

      “This gentleman was just going to show me the way,” she said, “to your friend’s house. Look, Adrian! Aren’t these lovely?”

      She held out the dandelions towards him, but he disregarded them.

      “Well,” he remarked rather brusquely, “now I’ve found you, I fancy we’d better go back the way we came. I’m longing to see how Linda feels. I want to take her down to the sea this afternoon. Shall we do that? Or perhaps you can’t both leave Miss Doorm at the same time?”

      He stared at the stranger as if bidding him clear off. But the admirer of shrew-mice had recovered his equanimity. “I know Mr. Stork well,” he remarked to Sorio. “He and I are quite old friends. I was just asking this lady if she had ever been in the fens before, but I gather this is her first visit.”

      Adrian had by this time begun to look so morose that Nance broke in hurriedly.

      “We must introduce ourselves,” she said. “My name is Miss Herrick. This is Mr. Adrian Sorio.” She paused and waited. A long shrill cry followed by a most melancholy wail which gradually died away in the distance, came to them over the marshes.

      “A curlew,” remarked the intruder. “Beautiful and curious—and with very interesting mating habits. They are rare, too.”

      “Come along, Nance,” Sorio burst out. But the girl turned to her new acquaintance and extended her hand.

      “You haven’t told us your name yet,” she said. “I hope we shall meet again.”

      The stranger gave her a look which, for caressing softness, could only be compared to a virtuoso’s finger laid upon an incomparable piece of Egyptian pottery.

      “Certainly we shall meet,” he murmured. “Of course, most certainly. I know every one here. My name is Raughty—Doctor Fingal Raughty. I was with old Doorm when he died. A noble head, though rather malformed behind the ears. He had a peculiar smell too—not unpleasant—rather musky in fact. They called him Badger in the village. He could drink more gin at a sitting than any man I have ever seen. He resembled the portraits of Descartes. Good-bye, Miss—Nance!”

      As soon as the lovers were alone Sorio’s rage broke forth.

      “What a man!” he cried. “Who gave him leave to talk like that of Mr. Doorm? How did he know you weren’t related to him? And what surpassing coolness to call you by your Christian name! Confound him—he’s gone the way we wanted to go. I believe he knew that. Look! He’s fooling about in the ditch, waiting for us to overtake him!”

      Nance could not help laughing a little at this. “Not at all, my dear. He’s looking for shrew-mice.”

      “What?” rejoined the other crossly. “On the public road? He’s mad. Come, we must get round him somehow. Let’s go through here and hit the tow path.”

      They had no more interruptions as they strolled slowly back along the river’s bank. Nance was perplexed, however, by Adrian’s temper. He seemed irritable and brusque. She had never known him in such a mood, and a dim, obscure apprehension to which she could assign no adequate cause, began to invade her heart.

      They had both become so silent, and the girl’s nerves had been so set on edge by his unusual attitude towards her, that she gave a quite perceptible start when he suddenly pointed across the stream to a clump of oak trees, the only ones, he told her, to be found in the neighbourhood.

      “There’s something behind them,” she remarked, “a house of some kind. I shouldn’t like to live out in that place. How they must hear the wind! It must howl and moan sometimes—mustn’t it?” She smiled at him and shivered.

      “I think I miss London Bridge Road a little, and—Kensington Park. Don’t you, too, Adrian?”

      “Yes, there’s a house behind them,” Sorio repeated, disregarding her last words and staring fixedly at the oak trees. “There’s a house behind them.”

      His manner

Скачать книгу