Ducdame Read Online Free Page B

to set light to the fire.
    “No, you’ll never see no rain like our rain, miss, in all thecountries you do travel through! ’Tain’t in nature that water should fall from dry clouds same as from wet clouds, and there aren’t no clouds this side of Salisbury Plain so wet as ours!”
    Thanks to Cousin Ann, Pandie was always affable now; and the sound of her voice and the look of her sturdy broad back bent over the coals filled Netta with a delicious feeling of security.
    Oh, how often in former times she had longed to be at once thoroughly idle and thoroughly respectable!
    It was her craving for this particular combination that had betrayed her into the Major-General episode, the single one of all her experiences that she would have liked blotted completely out of her memory.
    “I like your rain very much,” she said softly. “Were you born in Ashover, Pandie?”
    “Me, miss? Me, mum? The Lord love us! No, mum. I were born down Somerset-way atween Tarnton and Durston . ‘Twas fresh water, too, where Father lived. But ’tweren’t Frome-water. ’Twas Parret-water; and there were big willow trees over’n and terrible black mud under’n. Corpses themselves would turn to water where I was born‚ miss; but that’s not saying anything against these parts.”
    When Pandie was gone the crackling of the newly lit sticks increased Netta’s content.
    The effect of rain-lashed windows was to give to the light that filled the room a curious atmospheric quality; a quality that roused in the woman who sat there an indefinable feeling connected with a mysterious dream she had sometimes, the exact outlines of which, though repeated again and again‚ she invariably lost.
    What the rain really did was to throw a greenish-gray shadow into the room, a shadow that was broken at this moment by spurts and splashes of redness coming from the grate.
    She drank her remaining cup of tea in quick little sips, holding up the cup with a certain nonchalant air as she had seen Cousin Ann do, the little finger stiffly extended, the elbow resting on the table.
    Over the fireplace was a portrait of Sir Robert Ashover, the unfortunate Cavalier; and the sad eyes and melancholy forehead of this picture met her gaze with penetrating sympathy .
    From the very first she had taken a fancy to Sir Robert. She loved his carefully combed curls and his dreamy sensuous lips. She looked at him now with renewed reassurance. He was certainly the last person in the world to will any harm to a poor girl.
    She found herself on the point of wishing that Rook was more like Sir Robert and less like his mother.
    But Rook had something in him that separated him from all of them; from her most of all.
    Oh, dear! She hurriedly jerked up her consciousness, like an entangled fishing line, out of that trouble; and threw it again, with a clear fresh swing, into less weedy waters.
    How wonderful it was to be free from worry.
    She had worried a great deal when she first came to this place. She wondered what her Bristol friends, Madge and Minnie, would feel if they were in her shoes.
    She smiled to herself as she thought of such a possibility. They would be miserable. They would be pining for shops and picture houses and “boys.” Why was it she didn’t crave for any of these things? Minnie and Madge had always said she was a “funny one‚” and she supposed they were right. She remembered how even Rook had expressed surprise that she could go on like this, month after month, doing nothing at all and wanting nothing at all.
    Cousin Ann was the only person who never seemed to get annoyed with her. It did not appear to aggravate Cousin Ann when she wanted to read stories in her bedroom insteadof walking through the mud and rain. The young lady even chose books for her, just the ones she liked best, out of the jumble of volumes that filled the house.
    Thinking of Cousin Ann she rose from her chair and went out into the hall.
    Here she stood for a moment, very still and quiet,