be forgotten. You will be able to give her many more comforts. We women – we all like to be dressed well and have pleasant rooms to sit in, and a young man at your age should not be idle. You must go away from this little backward place. We shall miss you, but you are clever and must go and work with other men and have your talents admitted.”
“How emulous you would have me. Perhaps I shall be well-to-do some day; meanwhile I only wish to stay here with my friends.”
She went over to the window and looked out with her face turned from him. The evening light cast a long shadow behind her on the floor. After some moments, she said, “I see people ploughing on the slope of the hill. There are people working on a house to the right. Everywhere there are people busy,” and, with a slight tremble in her voice, she added, “and, John, nowhere are there any doing what they wish. One has to think of so many things – of duty and God.”
“Mary, I didn’t know you were so religious.”
Coming towards him with a smile, she said, “No more did I, perhaps. But sometimes the self in one is very strong. One has to think a great deal and reason with it. Yet I try hard to lose myself in things about me. These children now – I often lie awake thinking about them. That child who was talking to you is often on my mind. I do not know what will happen to her. She makes me unhappy. I am afraid she is not a good child at all. I am afraid she is not taught well at home. I try hard to be gentle and patient with her. I am a little displeased with myself to-day; so I have lectured you. There! I have made my confession. But,” she added, taking one of his hands in both hers and reddening, “you must go away. You must not be idle. You will gain everything.”
As she stood there with bright eyes, the light of evening about her, Sherman for perhaps the first time saw how beautiful she was, and was flattered by her interest. For the first time also her presence did not make him at peace with the world.
“Will you be an obedient pupil?”
“You know so much more than I do,” he answered, “and are so much wiser. I will write to my uncle and agree to his offer.”
“Now you must go home,” she said. “You must not keep your mother waiting for her tea. There! I have raked the fire out. We must not forget to lock the door behind us.”
As they stood on the doorstep the wind blew a whirl of dead leaves about them.
“They are my old thoughts,” he said; “see, they are all withered.”
They walked together silently. At the vicarage he left her and went homeward.
The deserted flour store at the corner of two roads, the house that had been burnt hollow ten years before and still lifted its blackened beams, the straggling and leafless fruit-trees rising above garden walls, the church where he was christened – these foster-mothers of his infancy seemed to nod and shake their heads over him.
“Mother,” he said, hurriedly entering the room, “we are going to London.”
“As you wish. I always knew you would be a rolling stone,” she answered, and went out to tell the servant that as soon as she had finished the week’s washing they must pack up everything, for they were going to London.
“Yes, we must pack up,” said the old peasant; she did not stop peeling the onion in her hand – she had not comprehended. In the middle of the night she suddenly started up in bed with a pale face and a prayer to the Virgin whose image hung over her head – she had now comprehended.
On January the 5th about two in the afternoon, Sherman sat on the deck of the steamer Lavinia enjoying a period of sunshine between two showers. The steamer Lavinia was a cattle boat. It had been his wish to travel by some more expensive route, but his mother, with her old-fashioned ideas of duty, would not hear of it, and now, as he foresaw, was extremely uncomfortable below, while he, who was a good sailor, was pretty happy on deck, and would have been quite so if the pigs would only tire of their continual squealing. With the exception of a very dirty old woman sitting by a crate of geese, all the passengers but himself were below. This old woman made the journey monthly with geese for the Liverpool market.
Sherman was dreaming. He began to feel very desolate, and commenced a letter to Mary Carton in his notebook to state this fact. He was a laborious and unpractised writer, and found it helped him to make a pencil copy. Sometimes he stopped and watched the puffin sleeping on the waves. Each one of them had its head tucked in in a somewhat different way.
“That is because their characters are different,” he thought.
Gradually he began to notice a great many corks floating by, one after the other. The old woman saw them too, and said, waking out of a half sleep —
“Misther John Sherman, we will be in the Mersey before evening. Why are ye goin’ among them savages in London, Misther John? Why don’t ye stay among your own people – for what have we in this life but a mouthful of air?”
PART II.
MARGARET LELAND
Sherman and his mother rented a small house on the north side of St. Peter’s Square, Hammersmith. The front windows looked out on to the old rank and green square, the windows behind on to a little patch of garden round which the houses gathered and pressed as though they already longed to trample it out. In this garden was a single tall pear-tree that never bore fruit.
Three years passed by without any notable event. Sherman went every day to his office in Tower Hill Street, abused his work a great deal, and was not unhappy perhaps. He was probably a bad clerk, but then nobody was very exacting with the nephew of the head of the firm.
The firm of Sherman and Saunders, ship brokers, was a long-established, old-fashioned house. Saunders had been dead some years and old Michael Sherman ruled alone – an old bachelor full of family pride and pride in his wealth. He lived, for all that, in a very simple fashion. His mahogany furniture was a little solider than other people’s perhaps. He did not understand display. Display finds its excuse in some taste good or bad, and in a long industrious life Michael Sherman had never found leisure to form one. He seemed to live only from habit. Year by year he grew more silent, gradually ceasing to regard anything but his family and his ships. His family were represented by his nephew and his nephew’s mother. He did not feel much affection for them. He believed in his family – that was all. To remind him of the other goal of his thoughts hung round his private office pictures with such inscriptions as “S.S. Indus at the Cape of Good Hope,” “The barque Mary in the Mozambique Channel,” “The barque Livingstone at Port Said,” and many more. Every rope was drawn accurately with a ruler, and here and there were added distant vessels sailing proudly by with all that indifference to perspective peculiar to the drawings of sailors. On every ship was the flag of the firm spread out to show the letters.
No man cared for old Michael Sherman. Every one liked John. Both were silent, but the young man had sometimes a talkative fit. The old man lived for his ledger, the young man for his dreams.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
