Beyond The Blue Mountains - Plaidy Jean (бесплатные онлайн книги читаем полные .TXT) 📗

She ran to Papa; he lifted her up; she kissed him and went on kissing to try to explain by kisses that she would rather have given up her exciting evening than that he and Mamma should be worried like this.

Then Mamma turned her head and said: “It is all right now. She was lost. This… gentleman brought her home.”

Papa hugged Katharine and said: “Bring him in! Bring him in!”

They went into the house, and when they were inside. Mamma took Katharine from Papa’s arms, and her eyes were cold and very angry.

“Go to your room at once, Katharine!” she said, and her voice was like ice, and sharp like the edge of a knife; and Katharine went in shame because she knew she ought to have insisted on coming home, and that Esther had been right; that that jaunty, exciting, lovely man Marcus had not kept his word about sending a message.

She went to her room and waited there, feeling that something awful was going to happen. It was not very long before she heard Marcus ride away. She hoped they had been nice to him, for he had been very nice to her. She hoped they had given him refreshment; it would be awful if Mamma were not nice to him just because he had forgotten to send that message.

James and Martin came in.

“Where have you been?” demanded James.

“I was lost.” What a glorious account of her adventure she had imagined herself giving James. And now she had nothing to say except “I was lost.” which they knew already.

“We had a search party I’ cried James excitedly.

“Lanthorns and flaming torches!” screeched Martin.

“We thought you’d been murdered, you see,” said James cheerfully.

“I might have been,” she said.

“Yes,” said James with unnecessary melancholy, ‘but you weren’t.”

Miss Kelly came in.

“I wonder you’re not ashamed,” she said.

“I never saw such a fuss. I think what you deserve is a thorough good whipping.”

Miss Kelly bustled the boys out and turned the key in the lock.

It was some time before Mamma came in. Katharine threw herself against her.

“Mammal Why am I locked up here? It wasn’t my fault; I was lost … Anybody might get lost… And then I heard Henry’s horse. It was exciting; I coo-eed and he coo-eed, and then he came and took me to his home.”

“Yes?” said Mamma in an odd, stony voice.

“And then it was such fun, Mamma. Oh, he has been everywhere. And he told us, Mamma. He told us all about it. All about London and the Old Country. He talks differently from anyone else different from Margery or Papa, or even you. He tells you things, and you see them, and oh. Mamma, don’t you like him?

Can he come here? He would like to. It’s nicer here than there … and I think they quarrel a lot. She looks at him as if she hates him. and he doesn’t care a bit when she cries, and he kisses the servant, and there’s an Elizabeth. Henry says he’s got half-brothers and sisters. Henry’s nice. Oh. Mamma, can they come?”

“Really, Katharine, I haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re saying. You are most incoherent. And it was very, very naughty of you to go off like that; and I am going to punish you for being so thoughtless. Your father and I were very worried.”

“Oh, but Mamma, the man came. She said you would be worried; he said he would send a man to tell you where I was.”

“Who is she?”

The one they call Esther.”

“Esther.” said Mamma faintly. And then: “Of course, no man was sent.”

“Oh. but he said …”. “He is a liar,” said Mamma.

“Oh, but Mamma, I’m sure there is a mistake. I know he said I must ask him…”

“He has gone now.”

“I am going there again, Mamma. They asked me. He and Henry said I must go again.”

“You will never see them again,” said Mamma. Katharine was incredulous. She could find nothing to say.

“And,” said Mamma, ‘you will stay here for the rest of the day alone.”

Mamma went out then. She had been pale, but now her face was flushed, her eyes hard as the glittering stones in the pendant she wore round her neck.

Katharine heard the key turn in the lock. She was angry with Mamma, angry with Papa even, poor Papa who had done nothing but be very pleased because she was home again. Still, she was angry with the whole world, for more than anything she wanted to see Marcus and Henry again.

“And I will!” she said. She went over to the Bible on the chest of drawers, the Bible which Miss Kelly had given her last Christmas. She laid her hands on it and swore as she did when she and James played Judge and Prisoners. But there was no jest this; it was a solemn vow.

“With God’s help, so I will,” she said. Her eyes were resolute, her mind made up.

Carolan was dressing for her dinner-party. It was a very important dinner-party, a sort of coming out for Katharine. She was seventeen. Carolan’s thoughts must go back to a similar occasion nearly twenty years ago, when she was going to her first ball. A green dress she had worn; she was wearing a green dress now. How different though, this rather plump and still beautiful woman, poised and confident, the mother of five sons and one daughter, Mrs. Masterman of Sydney. How different from that slender girl who had gone down to the hall at Haredon to dance with Everard.

Audrey, her maid, was ready to do her hair. Audrey’s eyes, meeting hers in the mirror, sparkled with admiration. She had rescued Audrey from the kitchen, much as Lucille had rea her all those years ago, and the girl was her willing slave. _. could hardly remember now what Lucille had looked like, and yet the memory of her was as evergreen as the fir trees which had grown so abundantly in the damp climate of Haredon. There was everything to remind her in this house. Why did they not leave it? Simply because together they never broached the subject; they dared not. If she said to Gunnar: “Let us leave this house,” he would know she was thinking of Lucille. And what they had been trying to do all the time, all through those eighteen years, was to show each other, without mentioning the subject, that neither of them ever thought of Lucille.

It was a ridiculous pretence; she knew he thought of her often. She knew the shadow of his first wife lay heavy across the happiness he might have enjoyed with his second.

Audrey said: “Pearls, Madam?” And she smiled her assent. He: smile was charming as it ever was. She always tried to be charming to the servants, particularly if they had been convicts. Behind each of them she would see a grim shadow of Newgate that could make hideous memories rush back at her, and whatever had been their crime, she would make excuses for them. Of Audrey she knew little except that she was sentenced to transportation for fourteen years, and had, by all accounts, been a desperate creature. And yet here was Audrey, almost gentle, pliable, eager to please. She never asked questions of Audrey; it occurred to her that the girl might not wish to talk, but because there was a daintiness about her which most lacked, she had taken her to be her maid, and Audrey was grateful.

“Audrey clasped the pearls about her neck and stood back to admire.

They are lovely, Madam.”

A gift from Gunnar one of his many gifts. She was fond of him, though at times he irritated her almost beyond endurance. His ideas were so conventional that they bored her; she knew, almost to the phrase, what he would say on almost any subject. His conduct was absolutely what it should have been except on one occasion; and how ironical it was that her tenderness for him should be just because of that lapse.

She smiled faintly at her reflection in the mirror. Ripe womanhood, full sensuous lips, and green eyes that flashed from mood to mood with a speed that could be disastrous. She was her mother’s daughter; she belonged to that procession of women to whom numerous love-affairs were as natural as eating and drinking. But there was a certain strength in her which the others had lacked; perhaps it had grown up in the evil soil of Newgate, because that fetid air had nourished it. A glance from a pair of merry eyes, admiring, passionate and she was as ready for adventure as her mother had been. But she had resisted every time, for she could not forget that her husband had jeopardized not only his soul but and ironical as it might seem, this was of almost as great importance to him his position here in Sydney, for love of her.