Barclay The Upas Tree

A Christmas Tale for all the Year
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-80-273-0144-7
Verlag: e-artnow
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 127 Seiten

This carefully crafted ebook: 'The Upas Tree' is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Ronny West goes off to Africa by himself to research his next novel, leaving his wife, Helen, in England, unaware that she is pregnant. Ronnie is due to return around Christmas, but on the way he stops off in Leipzig where he meets one of Helen's cousins, Aubrey, a 'bad guy' who had once proposed to her. Aubrey finds Helen's letter in which she notifies Ronnie of giving birth to their child, and hides it from Ronnie, trying to keep him away from going back home to her. Florence L. Barclay (1862-1921) was an English romance novelist and short story writer. In her early forties health problems left her bedridden for a time and she passed the hours by writing. Several of her novels were made into movies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barclay, Florence L.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Townsend, F. H.

Leseproben

CHAPTER 4

FIRELIGHT IN THE STUDIO

Table of Contents

It was Ronnie's last evening in England. The parting, which had seemed so far away, must take place on the morrow. It took all Helen's bright courage to keep up Ronnie's spirits.

After dinner they sat together in a room they still called the studio, although Helen had given up her painting, soon after their marriage.

It was a large old-fashioned room, oak-panelled and spacious.

A huge mirror, in a massive gilt frame, hung upon the wall opposite door and fireplace, reaching from the ceiling to the parquet floor.

Ronald, who used the studio as a smoking-room, had introduced three or four deep wicker chairs, comfortably cushioned, and a couple of oriental tables.

The fireplace lent itself grandly in winter to great log-fires, when the crimson curtains were drawn in ample folds over the many windows, shutting out the dank bleakness of the park without, and imparting a look of cosiness to the empty room.

A dozen old family portraits—banished from more important places, because their expressions annoyed Ronnie—were crowded into whatever space was available, and glowered down, from the bad light to which they had been relegated, on the very modern young man whose uncomplimentary remarks had effected their banishment, and who sprawled luxuriously in the firelight, monarch of all he surveyed, in the domain which for centuries had been their own.

The only other thing in the room was a piano, on which Ronnie very effectively and very inaccurately strummed by ear; and on which Helen, with careful skill, played his accompaniments, when he was seized with a sudden desire to sing.

Ronald's music was always a perplexity to Helen. There was a quality about it so extraordinarily, so unusually, beautiful; combined with an entire lack of method or of training, and a quite startling ignorance of the most rudimentary rules.

On one occasion, during a sharp attack of influenza, when he had insisted upon being down and about, with a temperature of 104, he suddenly rose from the depths of a chair in which he had been lying, talking wild and feverish nonsense; stumbled over to the piano, dropped heavily upon the stool, then proceeded to play and sing, in a way, which brought tears to his wife's eyes, while her heart stood still with anxiety and wonder.

Yet, when she mentioned it a few days later, he appeared to have forgotten all about it, turning the subject with almost petulant abruptness.

—————

But, on this their last evening together, the piano stood unheeded. They seemed only to want two chairs, and each other.

She could hardly take her eyes from his face, remembering how many months must pass before she could see him again. Yet it was Ronnie who made moan, and Helen who bravely comforted; turning as often as possible to earnest discussion of his plot and its possibilities. But after a while even she went under, to the thought of the nearness of the parting.

Though it was late in April, the evenings were chilly; a fire glowed in the grate.

Presently Ronnie rose, turned off the electric light, and seated himself on the rug in the firelight, resting his head against his wife's knees.

Silently she passed her fingers through his hair.

Something in the quality of her silence turned Ronald's thoughts from himself to her alone. "Helen," he said, "I hate to be leaving you. Shall you be very lonely?"

She could not answer.

"You are sure your good old Mademoiselle Victorine is coming to be with you?"

"Yes, dear. She holds herself in readiness to come as soon as I feel able to send for her. She and I lived alone together here during eighteen months, after Papa's death. We were very quietly happy. I do not see why we should not be happy again."

"What shall you do all day?"

"Well, I shall have my duties in the village and on the estate; and, for our recreation, we shall read French and German, and do plenty of music. Mademoiselle Victorine delights in playing what she calls 'des à quatre mains,' which consist in our both prancing vigorously upon the same piano; she steadily punishing the bass; while I fly after her, on the more lively treble. It is good practice; it has its fascinations, and it will take the place of riding, for me."

"Shan't you ride, Helen?"

"No, Ronnie; not without you."

"Will you and Mademoiselle Victorine drive your four-in-hands in here?"

"No, not in here, darling. I don't think I shall be able to bear to touch the piano on which you play to me."

"I don't play," said Ronnie. "I strum."

"True, dear. You often strum. But sometimes you play quite wonderfully. I wish you had been properly taught!"

"I always hated being taught anything," said Ronald. "I like doing things, without learning to do them. And I know what you mean, about the times when I really play. But, excepting when the mood is on me, I don't care to think of those times. I never feel really myself when it happens. I seem to be listening to somebody else playing, and trying to remember something I have hopelessly forgotten. It gives me a strained, uncanny feeling, Helen."

"Does it, darling? Then let us talk of something else. Oh, Ronnie, you must promise me to take care of your health out in that climate! I believe you are going at the very worst time of year."

"I have to know it at its worst and at its hottest," he said. "But I shall be all right. I'm strong as a horse, and sound in wind and limb."

"I hope you will get good food."

He laughed. "I expect to have to live on just whatever I can shoot or grub up. You see, the more completely I leave all civilisation, the more correctly I shall get my 'copy.' I can't crawl into the long grass, carrying tins of sardines and bottles of Bass!"

"You might take meat lozenges," suggested Ronnie's wife.

"Meat lozenges, darling, are concentrated nastiness. I felt like an unhealthy bullock the whole of the rest of the day when, to please you, I sucked one while we were mountain climbing. I propose living on interesting and unique fruits and roots—all the things which correspond to locusts and wild honey. But, Helen, I am afraid there will be quite a long time during which I shall not be able either to send or to receive letters. We shall have to console ourselves with the trite old saying: 'No news is good news.' Of course, so far as I am concerned, it would be useless to hear of any cause for anxiety or worry when I could not possibly get back, or deal with it."

"You shall not hear of any worries, or have any anxieties, darling. If difficulties arise, I will deal with them. You must keep a perfectly free mind, all the time. For my part, I will try not to give way to panics about you, if you will promise to cable occasionally, and to write as often as you can."

"You won't go and get ill, will you, Helen?"

She smiled, laying her cheek on the top of his head, as she bent over him.

"I never get ill, darling. Like you, I am sound in wind and limb. We are a most healthy couple."

"We shall both be thirty, Helen, before we meet again. You will attain to that advanced age a month before I shall. On your birthday I shall drink your health in some weird concoction of juices; and I shall say to all the lions and tigers, hippopotamuses, cockatrices and asps, sitting round my camp fire: 'You will hardly believe it, my heathen hearers, out in this well-ordered jungle, where the female is kept in her proper place—but my wife has had the cheek to march up to-day into the next decade, leaving me behind in the youthful twenties!'—Oh, Helen, I wish we had a little kiddie playing around! I am tired of being the youngest of the family."

She clasped both hands about his throat. He might have heard the beating of her heart—had he been listening.

"Ronald, that is a joy which may yet be ours—some day. But my writer of romances, who is such a stickler for grammatical accuracy, is surely the younger of a family of two!"

"Oh, grammar be—relegated to the library!" cried Ronnie, laughing. "And you really presume too much on that one short month, Helen. You often treat me as if I were an infant."

The smile in her eyes held the mother look, in its yearning tenderness.

"Ronnie dear, you are so very much younger than I, in many ways; and you always will be. Unlike the 'Infant of Days,' if you live to be a hundred years old, you will still die young; a child in heart, full of youth's joyous joy in living. You must not mind if your wife occasionally treats you as though you were a dear big baby, requiring maternal care and petting. You are such a veritable boy sometimes, and it soothes the yearning for a little son of yours to cuddle in her arms, when she plays that her big boy is something of a baby."

Ronald took her left hand from about his neck, and kissed it tenderly.

This was his only answer, but his silence meant more to Helen than speech. Words flowed so readily to express his surface thoughts; but when words suddenly and unexpectedly failed, a deeper depth had been reached; and in that silence, his wife found comfort and content.

Ronnie was not all ripples. There was more beneath than the shifting shallows. Deep, still pools were there, and rocks on which might eventually be built a beacon-light for the souls of men....