Beyond The Blue Mountains - Plaidy Jean (бесплатные онлайн книги читаем полные .TXT) 📗
“What a brute I am! You … so young and innocent … To think that I… I have always wanted to do the honourable thing by the people who came into my house …”
She laid her lips gently against his. Like her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother, she had the arts of loving at her fingertips.
“If I tell you something, promise not to despise me… Gunnar.
It is such a queer name!” His arms tightened about her.
“I like to hear you say it. My mother gave it to me. She was Swedish.”
is it right for me to call you by it? Perhaps I will… when we are alone! It will be necessary to remember when others are present. It will be necessary not to show by a look…”
She paused, wondering how he would take this suggestion that love between them was to be no isolated incident.
He said: “I have plunged you into this deceit you who are so young and have been entrusted to my care.”
She laughed softly.
I said I would tell you something, if you would not despise me.”
“Despise you! It is you who should …”
She laid a hand on his lips.
“No,” she said, ‘the fault is with me. It is I who am wicked, abandoned. You see, I could not bear to think of your going miles away. I wanted to see you … so I came to your door … and asked if I could help…”
He was enchanted. He would not know that a woman could be like this. He thought her naive, more innocent than ever. How repulsive were those women like Lucille, who stood guard over a virginity which one had no wish to assail, who handed out favours one did not greatly desire, as though they were the most precious gifts on earth! And here was this girl, this innocent child, giving so freely, and so naively confessing that she wanted to give. He was overcome with tenderness.
“Listen to me, Carolan,” he said. This must never happen again. I cannot understand myself, I must have been possessed by the devil.”
She gazed at him. Physically he was magnificent; his features were not unattractive. She liked his simplicity: the puritan in him appealed to her because Marcus might be many things, but never a puritan. Marcus was a liar and a cheat: he would caress one with his eyes, with his words; he was full of artifice: he would suit his methods to the woman of the moment Why think of Marcus, knowing him to be a cheat? Now here was Mr. Masterman … Gunnar, as she would think of him in future … a man of power in the colony, and a man who was more completely in her power than Marcus could ever be. A simple man, a puritan. A man who had strayed from his virtuous path because he could not resist Carolan Haredon, his convict servant. He did not seek passion; his love was natural and pure as the wind and the sun and the rain; Marcus’s was something grown in a hothouse, cultivated, seeming delightful because so much care had been spent on it, completely artificial. Yet there was no natural recklessness about Gunnar. Why, he had locked both doors leading into his room before he had made love to her! Now Marcus was the essence of recklessness. Marcus was unsafe, and that locking of the two doors was in itself a symbol … a symbol of safety and security which one must enjoy if one walked beside this man. She had learned cunning from Marcus perhaps.
“You see, Carolan,” he said, his brow wrinkled, ‘that there must be no other time. It will be difficult, but I shall go away, I shall spend much time at the stations.”
“Tell me about the stations,” she said.
He was rather slow of speech, reluctant to enthuse, but he gave her a picture of a lonely station surrounded by grasslands where sheep fed and cattle were raised and wild horses tamed. It appealed to something in her. She imagined the two of them living there, cooking their own meals after a day in the open, making love out of doors. Mr. Masterman, the master. When men spoke of him there was awe in their voices. She thought of his trembling before her, whispering that there must be no more; and she smiled, for she knew it was for her to say whether or not there should be any more.
She listened to his description of a muster. She could feel a horse between her knees; she could feel the wind on her cheeks as they galloped … both of them together. He belonged to fresh air and camp fires, and it was pleasant to think of enjoying these things with him.
She was almost happy; if only she could forget this nagging ache for Marcus she could be happy. Gunnar Masterman offered such balm to her wounded vanity. The master who was in the power of his servant. The strong man who could only be weak with her.
She lay against him.
“Tell me more. I want to know all about you.”
He told her about the Swedish mother who had died on the journey across the Atlantic. He had been born, he told her, just over thirty years ago, during that year and this always seemed strange and very significant to him when Lord North became Prime Minister of England, and Captain Cook discovered New South Wales. He was a man, he assured her, who for ever tried to override superstition, but did she not see the significance? Who had been responsible for the loss of the American colonies? Chiefly Lord North and his half-crazy monarch. Who had been responsible for the opening up of this colony? Captain Cook! Did she see now what he meant? He, Gunnar Masterman, had been born in that year when the fate of America and of New South Wales was decided. He had always seen it that way. When he was quite a small boy, he and his sister Greta and his parents had left America for England, for his puritan father had been a staunch loyalist and had no place in the New America. Gunnar remembered only little of his life before the journey across the sea, during which his mother died. It was a new life for them all on the other side of the water; it was a step from moderate prosperity to a desperate privation. The Old Country had little hospitality to offer those of her loyal sons who had fought for her three thousand miles away; there were little reward but vague promises of a chance in the new country discovered by Captain Cook, promises which did not materialize. His father was a strange man; he did not complain; he had tried to make puritans of those people who lived in the fever-infested huts and haunted the low taverns along Thames-side. It was a self-appointed task, and he starved and preached, though at the wharves and on the barges he did work sometimes. It was there by the river that he met his second wife. She was beautiful and abandoned; she picked up a living from the sailors and wharf-men who frequented the taverns. He took her to his shabby little home and married her, because he must have wanted her as his son now wanted his convict servant. Listening, Carolan felt a tenderness for the man and for his son twining itself about her cunning. She saw the eldest of that poor family, a tall, lean boy, almost hungry. They kept a lodging-house by the river at one time a squalid place; but the stepmother could not be weaned from the gin bottle, and the father from the saving of souls; and thus they could not expect to become successful lodging-house keepers. They had several children, and Gunnar, who had hazy recollections of a sunnier life, soon decided that they could not go on living that way. He began to earn money, carrying parcels, loading barges… anything to earn some money.
“I never told anyone else,” he said wonderingly.
“Why do I feel I have to tell you? I think it is because I have fallen in love with you, and you are so generous that it seems wrong not to tell you the truth about myself.”
Carolan felt tears pricking her eyelids and the tenderness within her deepen. I shall never fall in love again, she assured herself. It is well to be loved, but not to love.
He told of winter and the icicles hanging from the gables of the lodging-house, and the cold wind sweeping up from the east, all along the river; pumping water in the yard; chilblains, coughs, colds; some of his brothers and sisters dying off, and his father, preaching in the market place, and his mother, going to bed and refusing to get up until the weather changed. He it was who must wash the children and feed them. Was this Mr. Masterman?
