章节正文
"What do you mean?" asked the Duchess hurriedly.
"What makes you think so?"
"I know," said Vasco simply.
"Know? How can you know? How can anyone know? The
thing happened three years ago."
"In a locker of the SUB-ROSA I found a water-tight
strong-box. It contained papers." Vasco paused with
dramatic effect and searched for a moment in the inner
breast-pocket of his coat. He drew out a folded slip of
paper. The Duchess snatched at it in almost indecent
haste and moved appreciably nearer the fireplace.
"Was this in the SUB-ROSA'S strong-box?" she asked.
"Oh no," said Vasco carelessly, "that is a list of
the well-known people who would be involved in a very
disagreeable scandal if the SUB-ROSA'S papers were made
public. I've put you at the head of it, otherwise it
follows alphabetical order."
The Duchess gazed helplessly at the string of names,
which seemed for the moment to include nearly every one
she knew. As a matter of fact, her own name at the head
of the list exercised an almost paralysing effect on her
thinking faculties.
"Of course you have destroyed the papers?" she
asked, when she had somewhat recovered herself. She was
conscious that she made the remark with an entire lack of
conviction.
Vasco shook his head.
"But you should have," said Lulu angrily; "if, as
you say, they are highly compromising - "
"Oh, they are, I assure you of that," interposed the
young man.
"Then you should put them out of harm's way at once.
Supposing anything should leak out, think of all these
poor, unfortunate people who would be involved in the
disclosures," and Lulu tapped the list with an agitated
gesture.
"Unfortunate, perhaps, but not poor," corrected
Vasco; "if you read the list carefully you'll notice that
I haven't troubled to include anyone whose financial
standing isn't above question."
Lulu glared at her nephew for some moments in
silence. Then she asked hoarsely: "What are you going to
do?"
"Nothing - for the remainder of my life," he
answered meaningly. "A little hunting, perhaps," he
continued, "and I shall have a villa at Florence. The
Villa Sub-Rosa would sound rather quaint and picturesque,
don't you think, and quite a lot of people would be able
to attach a meaning to the name. And I suppose I must
have a hobby; I shall probably collect Raeburns."
Lulu's relative, who lived at the Court of Monaco,
got quite a snappish answer when she wrote recommending
some further invention in the realm of marine research.
THE COBWEB
THE farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as
a matter of accident or haphazard choice; yet its
situation might have been planned by a master-strategist
in farmhousearchitecture. Dairy and poultry-yard, and
herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed
to lead by easy access into its wide flagged haven, where
there was room for everything and where muddy boots left
traces that were easily swept away. And yet, for all
that it stood so well in the centre of human bustle, its
long, latticed window, with the wide window-seat, built
into an embrasure beyond the huge fireplace, looked out
on a wild spreading view of hill and heather and wooded
combe. The window nook made almost a little room in
itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as
situation and capabilities went. Young Mrs. Ladbruk,
whose husband had just come into the farm by way of
inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and
her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz
curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old
china. The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim,
cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was
not a room that lent itself readily either to comfort or
decoration.
"When we are more settled I shall work wonders in
the way of making the kitchen habitable," said the young
woman to her occasional visitors. There was an unspoken
wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed as well
as unspoken. Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm;
jointly with her husband she might have her say, and to a
certain extent her way, in ordering its affairs. But she
was not mistress of the kitchen.
On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company
with chipped sauce-boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters,
and paid bills, rested a worn and ragged Bible, on whose
front page was the record, in faded ink, of a baptism
dated ninety-four years ago. "Martha Crale" was the name
written on that yellow page. The yellow, wrinkled old
dame who hobbled and muttered about the kitchen, looking
like a dead autumn leaf which the winter winds still
pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy. For
longer than anyone could remember she had pattered to and
fro between oven and wash-house and dairy, and out to
chicken-run and garden, grumbling and muttering and
scolding, but working unceasingly. Emma Ladbruk, of
whose coming she took as little notice as she would of a
bee wandering in at a window on a summer's day, used at
first to watch her with a kind of frightened curiosity.
She was so old and so much a part of the place, it was
difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing. Old
Shep, the white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for
his time to die, seemed almost more human than the
withered, dried-up old woman. He had been a riotous,
roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was
already a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a
blind, breathing carcase, nothing more, and she still
worked with frail energy, still swept and baked and
washed, fetched and carried. If there were something in
these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with
death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of
ghost-dogs there must be out on those hills, that Martha
had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last goodbye
word to in that old kitchen. And what memories she must
have of human generations that had passed away in her
time. It was difficult for anyone, let alone a stranger
like Emma, to get her to talk of the days that had been;
her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose
feeding-time was overdue, and the various little faults
and lapses that chequer a farmhouseroutine. Now and
again, when election time came round, she would unstore
her recollections of the old names round which the fight
had waged in the days gone by. There had been a
Palmerston, that had been a name down Tiverton way;
Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow flies, but to
Martha it was almost a foreign country. Later there had
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names
that she had forgotten; the names changed, but it was
always Libruls and Toories, Yellows and Blues. And they
always quarrelled and shouted as to who was right and who
was wrong. The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face - she had seen his
picture on the walls. She had seen it on the floor too,
with a rotten apple squashed over it, for the farm had
changed its politics from time to time. Martha had never
been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever
done the farm a stroke of good. Such was her sweeping
verdict, given with all a peasant's distrust of the
outside world.
When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat
faded away, Emma Ladbruk was uncomfortably conscious of
another feeling towards the old woman. She was a quaint
old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part
and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once
pathetic and picturesque - but she was dreadfully in the
way. Emma had come to the farm full of plans for little
reforms and improvements, in part the result of training
in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of
her own ideas and fancies. Reforms in the kitchen
region, if those deaf old ears could have been induced to
give them even a hearing, would have met with short
shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region
spread over the zone of dairy and market business and
half the work of the household. Emma, with the latest
science of dead-poultry dressing at her finger-tips, sat
by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed the
chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for
nearly four-score years - all leg and no breast. And the
hundred hints anent effective cleaning and labour-
lightening and the things that make for wholesomeness
which the young woman was ready to impart or to put into
action dropped away into nothingness before that wan,
muttering, unheeding presence. Above all, the coveted
window corner, that was to be a dainty, cheerful oasis in
the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and lumbered with
a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal
authority, would not have dared or cared to displace;
over them seemed to be spun the protection of something
that was like a human cobweb. Decidedly Martha was in
the way. It would have been an unworthy meanness to have
wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened
by a few paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was
conscious that the wish was there, disowned though it
might be, lurking at the back of her mind.
She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with
a qualm of self-reproach one day when she came into the
kitchen and found an unaccustomed state of things in that
usually busy quarter. Old Martha was not working. A
basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out in
the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest
of overdue feeding-time. But Martha sat huddled in a
shrunken bunch on the window seat, looking out with her
dim old eyes as though she saw something stranger than
the autumn landscape.
"Is anything the matter, Martha?" asked the young
woman.
"'Tis death, 'tis death a-coming," answered the
quavering voice; "I knew 'twere coming. I knew it.
'Tweren't for nothing that old Shep's been howling all
morning. An' last night I heard the screech-owl give the
death-cry, and there were something white as run across
the yard yesterday; 'tweren't a cat nor a stoat, 'twere
something. The fowls knew 'twere something; they all
drew off to one side. Ay, there's been warnings. I knew
it were a-coming."
The young woman's eyes clouded with pity. The old
thing sitting there so white and shrunken had once been a
"What makes you think so?"
"I know," said Vasco simply.
"Know? How can you know? How can anyone know? The
thing happened three years ago."
"In a locker of the SUB-ROSA I found a water-tight
strong-box. It contained papers." Vasco paused with
dramatic effect and searched for a moment in the inner
breast-pocket of his coat. He drew out a folded slip of
paper. The Duchess snatched at it in almost indecent
haste and moved appreciably nearer the fireplace.
"Was this in the SUB-ROSA'S strong-box?" she asked.
"Oh no," said Vasco carelessly, "that is a list of
the well-known people who would be involved in a very
disagreeable scandal if the SUB-ROSA'S papers were made
public. I've put you at the head of it, otherwise it
follows alphabetical order."
The Duchess gazed helplessly at the string of names,
which seemed for the moment to include nearly every one
she knew. As a matter of fact, her own name at the head
of the list exercised an almost paralysing effect on her
thinking faculties.
"Of course you have destroyed the papers?" she
asked, when she had somewhat recovered herself. She was
conscious that she made the remark with an entire lack of
conviction.
Vasco shook his head.
"But you should have," said Lulu angrily; "if, as
you say, they are highly compromising - "
"Oh, they are, I assure you of that," interposed the
young man.
"Then you should put them out of harm's way at once.
Supposing anything should leak out, think of all these
poor, unfortunate people who would be involved in the
disclosures," and Lulu tapped the list with an agitated
gesture.
"Unfortunate, perhaps, but not poor," corrected
Vasco; "if you read the list carefully you'll notice that
I haven't troubled to include anyone whose financial
standing isn't above question."
Lulu glared at her nephew for some moments in
silence. Then she asked hoarsely: "What are you going to
do?"
"Nothing - for the remainder of my life," he
answered meaningly. "A little hunting, perhaps," he
continued, "and I shall have a villa at Florence. The
Villa Sub-Rosa would sound rather quaint and picturesque,
don't you think, and quite a lot of people would be able
to attach a meaning to the name. And I suppose I must
have a hobby; I shall probably collect Raeburns."
Lulu's relative, who lived at the Court of Monaco,
got quite a snappish answer when she wrote recommending
some further invention in the realm of marine research.
THE COBWEB
THE farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as
a matter of accident or haphazard choice; yet its
situation might have been planned by a master-strategist
in farmhousearchitecture. Dairy and poultry-yard, and
herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed
to lead by easy access into its wide flagged haven, where
there was room for everything and where muddy boots left
traces that were easily swept away. And yet, for all
that it stood so well in the centre of human bustle, its
long, latticed window, with the wide window-seat, built
into an embrasure beyond the huge fireplace, looked out
on a wild spreading view of hill and heather and wooded
combe. The window nook made almost a little room in
itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as
situation and capabilities went. Young Mrs. Ladbruk,
whose husband had just come into the farm by way of
inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner, and
her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz
curtains and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old
china. The musty farm parlour, looking out on to a prim,
cheerless garden imprisoned within high, blank walls, was
not a room that lent itself readily either to comfort or
decoration.
"When we are more settled I shall work wonders in
the way of making the kitchen habitable," said the young
woman to her occasional visitors. There was an unspoken
wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed as well
as unspoken. Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm;
jointly with her husband she might have her say, and to a
certain extent her way, in ordering its affairs. But she
was not mistress of the kitchen.
On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company
with chipped sauce-boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters,
and paid bills, rested a worn and ragged Bible, on whose
front page was the record, in faded ink, of a baptism
dated ninety-four years ago. "Martha Crale" was the name
written on that yellow page. The yellow, wrinkled old
dame who hobbled and muttered about the kitchen, looking
like a dead autumn leaf which the winter winds still
pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy. For
longer than anyone could remember she had pattered to and
fro between oven and wash-house and dairy, and out to
chicken-run and garden, grumbling and muttering and
scolding, but working unceasingly. Emma Ladbruk, of
whose coming she took as little notice as she would of a
bee wandering in at a window on a summer's day, used at
first to watch her with a kind of frightened curiosity.
She was so old and so much a part of the place, it was
difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing. Old
Shep, the white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for
his time to die, seemed almost more human than the
withered, dried-up old woman. He had been a riotous,
roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was
already a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a
blind, breathing carcase, nothing more, and she still
worked with frail energy, still swept and baked and
washed, fetched and carried. If there were something in
these wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with
death, Emma used to think to herself, what generations of
ghost-dogs there must be out on those hills, that Martha
had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last goodbye
word to in that old kitchen. And what memories she must
have of human generations that had passed away in her
time. It was difficult for anyone, let alone a stranger
like Emma, to get her to talk of the days that had been;
her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose
feeding-time was overdue, and the various little faults
and lapses that chequer a farmhouseroutine. Now and
again, when election time came round, she would unstore
her recollections of the old names round which the fight
had waged in the days gone by. There had been a
Palmerston, that had been a name down Tiverton way;
Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow flies, but to
Martha it was almost a foreign country. Later there had
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names
that she had forgotten; the names changed, but it was
always Libruls and Toories, Yellows and Blues. And they
always quarrelled and shouted as to who was right and who
was wrong. The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face - she had seen his
picture on the walls. She had seen it on the floor too,
with a rotten apple squashed over it, for the farm had
changed its politics from time to time. Martha had never
been on one side or the other; none of "they" had ever
done the farm a stroke of good. Such was her sweeping
verdict, given with all a peasant's distrust of the
outside world.
When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat
faded away, Emma Ladbruk was uncomfortably conscious of
another feeling towards the old woman. She was a quaint
old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part
and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once
pathetic and picturesque - but she was dreadfully in the
way. Emma had come to the farm full of plans for little
reforms and improvements, in part the result of training
in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of
her own ideas and fancies. Reforms in the kitchen
region, if those deaf old ears could have been induced to
give them even a hearing, would have met with short
shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region
spread over the zone of dairy and market business and
half the work of the household. Emma, with the latest
science of dead-poultry dressing at her finger-tips, sat
by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed the
chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for
nearly four-score years - all leg and no breast. And the
hundred hints anent effective cleaning and labour-
lightening and the things that make for wholesomeness
which the young woman was ready to impart or to put into
action dropped away into nothingness before that wan,
muttering, unheeding presence. Above all, the coveted
window corner, that was to be a dainty, cheerful oasis in
the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and lumbered with
a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal
authority, would not have dared or cared to displace;
over them seemed to be spun the protection of something
that was like a human cobweb. Decidedly Martha was in
the way. It would have been an unworthy meanness to have
wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened
by a few paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was
conscious that the wish was there, disowned though it
might be, lurking at the back of her mind.
She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with
a qualm of self-reproach one day when she came into the
kitchen and found an unaccustomed state of things in that
usually busy quarter. Old Martha was not working. A
basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out in
the yard the poultry were beginning to clamour a protest
of overdue feeding-time. But Martha sat huddled in a
shrunken bunch on the window seat, looking out with her
dim old eyes as though she saw something stranger than
the autumn landscape.
"Is anything the matter, Martha?" asked the young
woman.
"'Tis death, 'tis death a-coming," answered the
quavering voice; "I knew 'twere coming. I knew it.
'Tweren't for nothing that old Shep's been howling all
morning. An' last night I heard the screech-owl give the
death-cry, and there were something white as run across
the yard yesterday; 'tweren't a cat nor a stoat, 'twere
something. The fowls knew 'twere something; they all
drew off to one side. Ay, there's been warnings. I knew
it were a-coming."
The young woman's eyes clouded with pity. The old
thing sitting there so white and shrunken had once been a
- well-known [,wel´nəun]
a.著名的，众所周知的 (初中英语单词) - otherwise [´ʌðəwaiz] ad.另外 conj.否则 (初中英语单词)
- unfortunate [ʌn´fɔ:tʃunit] a.不幸的，运气差的 (初中英语单词)
- nephew [´nevju:, ´nɛfju] n.侄子；外甥 (初中英语单词)
- attach [ə´tætʃ] v.附；使隶属；使依恋 (初中英语单词)
- relative [´relətiv] a.有关系的 n.亲属 (初中英语单词)
- invention [in´venʃən] n.创造；发明；虚构 (初中英语单词)
- readily [´redili] ad.乐意地；容易地 (初中英语单词)
- occasional [ə´keiʒənəl] a.偶然的；临时的 (初中英语单词)
- mistress [´mistris] n.女主人；情妇；女能手 (初中英语单词)
- extent [ik´stent] n.长度；程度；范围 (初中英语单词)
- hither [´hiðə] ad.到此处 (初中英语单词)
- thither [´ðiðə] ad.到那里 a.那边的 (初中英语单词)
- working [´wə:kiŋ] a.工人的；劳动的 (初中英语单词)
- waiting [´weitiŋ] n.等候；伺候 (初中英语单词)
- energy [´enədʒi] n.活力，精力；能力 (初中英语单词)
- perish [´periʃ] v.灭亡；消灭；(使)死去 (初中英语单词)
- spoken [´spəukən] speak的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- election [i´lekʃən] n.选举；选择 (初中英语单词)
- politics [´pɔlitiks] n.政治(学)；政治活动 (初中英语单词)
- curiosity [,kjuəri´ɔsiti] n.好奇；奇事；珍品 (初中英语单词)
- conscious [´kɔnʃəs] a.意识的；自觉的 (初中英语单词)
- tradition [trə´diʃən] n.传统；惯例；传说 (初中英语单词)
- parcel [´pɑ:sl] n.包裹；一批 vt.区分 (初中英语单词)
- dreadfully [dredfuli] ad.可怕地；糟透地 (初中英语单词)
- effective [i´fektiv] a.有效的；有力的 (初中英语单词)
- cheerful [´tʃiəful] a.快乐的；高兴的 (初中英语单词)
- protection [prə´tekʃən] n.警戒；护照；通行证 (初中英语单词)
- beginning [bi´giniŋ] n.开始，开端；起源 (初中英语单词)
- yesterday [´jestədi] n.&ad.昨天；前不久 (初中英语单词)
- duchess [´dʌtʃis] n.公爵夫人；女公爵 (高中英语单词)
- carelessly [´kɛəlisli] ad.粗心地；疏忽地 (高中英语单词)
- scandal [´skændl] n.丑闻；耻辱；流言蜚语 (高中英语单词)
- angrily [´æŋgrili] ad.生气地；愤怒地 (高中英语单词)
- remainder [ri´meində] n.剩余物；残余部分 (高中英语单词)
- quaint [kweint] a.离奇的；奇妙的 (高中英语单词)
- marine [mə´ri:n] a.海的 n.海军陆战队 (高中英语单词)
- farmhouse [´fɑ:mhaus] n.农场住房，农舍 (高中英语单词)
- architecture [´ɑ:kitektʃə] n.建筑术；建筑学 (高中英语单词)
- access [´ækses] n.接近；通路；进入 (高中英语单词)
- bustle [´bʌsəl] v.(使)匆忙 n.匆忙 (高中英语单词)
- fireplace [´faiəpleis] n.壁炉，炉灶 (高中英语单词)
- shelves [ʃelvz] shelf的复数 (高中英语单词)
- ragged [´rægid] a.衣服破烂的 (高中英语单词)
- shrill [ʃril] a.(声音)尖锐的 (高中英语单词)
- routine [ru:´ti:n] n.日常工作 a.日常的 (高中英语单词)
- rotten [´rɔtn] a.腐烂的；腐朽的 (高中英语单词)
- distrust [dis´trʌst] n.&vt.不信任，怀疑 (高中英语单词)
- picturesque [,piktʃə´resk] a.似画的；别致的 (高中英语单词)
- hearing [´hiəriŋ] n.听力；听证会；审讯 (高中英语单词)
- impart [im´pɑ:t] vt.传授；赋予；告知 (高中英语单词)
- dainty [´deinti] a.秀丽的 n.美味 (高中英语单词)
- litter [´litə] n.杂乱 v.乱丢 (高中英语单词)
- decidedly [di´saididli] ad.坚决地，果断地 (高中英语单词)
- poultry [´pəultri] n.&v.家禽 (高中英语单词)
- florence [´flɔrəns] n.佛罗伦萨 (英语四级单词)
- dresser [´dresə] n.(剧院)服装员；碗柜 (英语四级单词)
- calves [kɑ:vz] calf的复数 (英语四级单词)
- outcome [´autkʌm] n.结果；后果；成果 (英语四级单词)
- cobweb [´kɔbweb] n.蜘蛛网；蛛丝 (英语四级单词)
- unworthy [ʌn´wə:ði] a.不值得的；不足道的 (英语四级单词)
- helplessly [´helplisli] ad.无能为力地 (英语六级单词)
- hoarsely [´hɔ:sli] ad.嘶哑地 (英语六级单词)
- hunting [´hʌntiŋ] n.打猎 (英语六级单词)
- heather [´heðə] n.石南属植物 (英语六级单词)
- collie [´kɔli] n.柯利牧羊犬 (英语六级单词)
- scornful [´skɔ:nful] a.轻蔑的，藐视的 (英语六级单词)
文章标签:名著
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