Rest Harrow: A Comedy of ResolutionHewlett, Maurice
General
Rest Harrow: A Comedy of Resolution
Hewlett, Maurice
Fiction
But Ingram had other things to think of, and returned to his letter. “I
shall take this as she means it, Bill. She wants me to go slow--I can
take a hint. She shall have her head. When I get her down to Wanless we
shall be all right. The place isn't fit to live in now, you know. I was
up there last week--and found everything going to pot. Not a horse
fit to ride--not a sound one amongst 'em. Plantations all to
pieces--gardens--tenants in arrears--oh, beastly! She'll have it all to
rights in no time, and she'll simply revel in it. She'll come round--you
leave that to me. If _I_ can't get a girl round I ought to.”
Chevenix listened, and judged. He knew his Ingram pretty well, and took
his confidence, like his confidences, for what they were worth. “Where
did you say that the Duplessis lived?”
“I think she's in a hotel. It might be Brown's. I believe it _is_
Brown's. What d'you want her for?”
“Think she knows some of my people,” said Chevenix, and presently took
himself out of the Coffee Tree Club.
But Sanchia, her day's work done, went--not to church, but to
Bloomsbury. Entering the portals of the Museum, she swam to the portico,
full of her cares. But smoothly, swiftly, she went, with that even,
gliding gait peculiar to her kind, which has precisely the effect of a
swan breasting the stream. Past the door, she turned to the left, not
glancing at the aligned Caesars, scarcely bowing to Demeter of the
remote gaze. In that long gallery, where the Caryatid thrusts her bosom
that her neck may be the prouder to the weight, she saw the objects
of her present pilgrimage--beaten, blind, and dumb, immovable as the
eternal hills, the Attic Fates; and before them at gaze, his arms folded
over his narrow chest, Morosine the Pole.
Whether she had sought him here or not, she did not falter in her
advance. Smoothly, swiftly, and silently she came to him and stood by
his side. He turned his head, looked sharply at her pale face and sad
eyes, then resumed his meditation before the Three. Neither of them had
a care to speak.
Presently Morosine said, “I knew that you would be here.” He kept his
face towards the mystery, and so did she when she echoed him. “Did you
know that? You know me, I think.”
“I believe that I do. You have come here for strength. You will get it.”
Ruefully enough she answered, “I wish I could believe that.”
“You have it in you already. These great ladies will call it out. I wish
you had been here, say, the day before yesterday. They might have helped
you.”
“But they did help me,” she said. “They were with me. I remembered what
we had talked about before them.”
He nodded his head. “I had intended that you should. I was rightly
inspired.”
“Without them,” she went on, “I don't know what I should have done. It
seems absurd to say so, but--”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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