【国外英文文学】Adam Johnstone's Son.doc

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1、【国外英文文学】Adam Johnstones Son Illustration: I SOMETIMES THINK THAT ONES PAST LIFE IS WRITTEN IN AFOREIGN LANGUAGE, SAID MRS. BOWRING, SHUTTING THE BOOK SHE HELD.P. F. Collier & SonNew YorkCopyright 1895, 1896, 1897by F. Marion CrawfordAll Rights ReservedADAM JOHNSTONES SONCHAPTER II sometimes think th

2、at ones past life is written in a foreignlanguage, said Mrs. Bowring, shutting the book she held, but keepingthe place with one smooth, thin forefinger, while her still, blue eyesturned from her daughters face towards the hazy hills that hemmed thesea thirty miles to the southward. When one wants to

3、 read it, one findsever so many words which one cannot understand, and one has to look themout in a sort of unfamiliar dictionary, and try to make sense of thesentences as best one can. Only the big things are clear.Clare glanced at her mother, smiling innocently and half mechanically,without much d

4、efinite expression, and quite without curiosity. Youth canbe in sympathy with age, while not understanding it, while notsuspecting, perhaps, that there is anything to understand beyond thestreaked hair and the pale glance and the little torture-lines whichpaint the portrait of fifty years for the ey

5、es of twenty.Every woman knows the calendar of her own face. The lines are years,one for such and such a year, one for such and such another; the streaksare months, perhaps, or weeks, or sometimes hours, where the tear-stormshave bleached the brown, the black, or the gold. This littlewrinkle-it was

6、so very little then! she says. It came when I doubtedfor a day. There is a shadow there, just at each temple, where the cloudpassed, when my sun went out. The bright hair grew lower on my forehead.It is worn away, as though by a crown, that was not of gold. There arehollows there, near the ears, on

7、each side, since that week when lovewas done to death before my eyes and died-intestate-leaving hissubstance to be divided amongst indifferent heirs. They wrangle for whathe has left, but he himself is gone, beyond hearing or caring, and,thank God, beyond suffering. But the marks are left.Youth look

8、s on and sees alike the ill-healed wounds of the martyrdom andthe rough scars of sins scourges, and does not understand. ClareBowring smiled, without definite expression, just because her mother hadspoken and seemed to ask for sympathy; and then she looked away for afew moments. She had a bit of wor

9、k in her hands, a little bag which shewas making out of a piece of old Italian damask, to hold a needle-caseand thread and scissors. She had stopped sewing, and instinctivelywaited before beginning again, as though to acknowledge by a littleaffectionate deference that her mother had said something s

10、erious andhad a right to expect attention. But she did not answer, for she couldnot understand.Her own young life was vividly clear to her; so very vividly clear, thatit sometimes made her think of a tiresome chromolithograph. All thefacts and thoughts of it were so near that she knew them by heart,

11、 aspeople come to know the patterns of the wall-paper in the room theyinhabit. She had nothing to hide, nothing to regret, nothing which shethought she should care very much to recall, though she rememberedeverything. A girl is very young when she can recollect distinctly everyfrock she has had, the

12、 first long one, and the second, and the third;and the first ball gown, and the second, and no third, because that isstill in the future, and a particular pair of gloves which did not fit,and a certain pair of shoes she wore so long because they were socomfortable, and the precise origin of every on

13、e of the few trinkets andbits of jewellery she possesses. That was Clare Bowrings case. Shecould remember everything and everybody in her life. But her father wasnot in her memories, and there was a little motionless grey cloud inthe place where he should have been. He had been a soldier, and had be

14、enkilled in an obscure skirmish with black men, in one of Englandsobscure but expensive little wars. Death is always very much the samething, and it seems unfair that the guns of Balaclava should still roarglory while the black mans quick spear-thrust only spells dead,without comment. But glory in d

15、eath is even more a matter of luck thanfame in life. At all events, Captain Bowring, as brave a gentleman asever faced fire, had perished like so many other brave gentlemen of hiskind, in a quiet way, without any fuss, beyond killing half a dozen orso of his assailants, and had left his widow the gl

16、ory of receiving asmall pension in return for his blood, and that was all. Some day, whenthe dead are reckoned, and the manner of their death noted, poor Bowringmay count for more than some of his friends who died at home from aconstitutional inability to enjoy all the good things fortune set before

17、them, complicated by a disposition incapable of being satisfied withonly a part of the feast. But at the time of this tale they counted formore than he; for they had been constrained to leave behind them whatthey could not consume, while he, poor man, had left very little besidesthe aforesaid intere

18、st in the investment of his blood, in the form of apension to his widow, and the small grey cloud in the memory of hisgirl-child, in the place where he should have been. For he had beenkilled when she had been a baby.The mother and daughter were lonely, if not alone in the world; for whenone has no

19、money to speak of, and no relations at all, the world is alonely place, regarded from the ordinary point of view-which is, ofcourse, the true one. They had no home in England, and they generallylived abroad, more or less, in one or another of the places of societysdeparted spirits, such as Florence.

20、 They had not, however, entered intoLimbo without hope, since they were able to return to the social earthwhen they pleased, and to be alive again, and the people they met abroadsometimes asked them to stop with them at home, recognising the factthat they were still socially living and casting shado

21、ws. They were sureof half a hundred friendly faces in London and of half a dozenhospitable houses in the country; and that is not little for people whohave nothing wherewith to buy smiles and pay for invitations. Clare hadmore than once met women of her mothers age and older, who had lookedat her ra

22、ther thoughtfully and longer than had seemed quite natural,saying very quietly that her father had been a great friend of theirs.But those were not the women whom her mother liked best, and Claresometimes wondered whether the little grey cloud in her memory, whichrepresented her father, might not be

23、 there to hide away something morehuman than an ideal. Her mother spoke of him, sometimes gravely,sometimes with a far-away smile, but never tenderly. The smile did notmean much, Clare thought. People often spoke of dead people with a sortof faint look of uncertain beatitude-the same which many thin

24、kappropriate to the singing of hymns. The absence of anything liketenderness meant more. The gravity was only natural and decent.Your father was a brave man, Mrs. Bowring sometimes said. Your fatherwas very handsome, she would say. He was very quick-tempered, sheperhaps added.But that was all. Clare

25、 had a friend whose husband had died young andsuddenly, and her friends heart was broken. She did not speak as Mrs.Bowring did. When the latter said that her past life seemed to bewritten in a foreign language, Clare did not understand, but she knewthat the something of which the translation was los

26、t, as it were,belonged to her father. She always felt an instinctive desire to defendhim, and to make her mother feel more sympathy for his memory. Yet, atthe same time, she loved her mother in such a way as made her feel thatif there had been any trouble, her father must have been in the wrong.Then

27、 she was quite sure that she did not understand, and she held hertongue, and smiled vaguely, and waited a moment before she went on withher work.Besides, she was not at all inclined to argue anything at present. Shehad been ill, and her mother was worn out with taking care of her, andthey had come t

28、o Amalfi to get quite well and strong again in the air ofthe southern spring. They had settled themselves for a couple of monthsin the queer hotel, which was once a monastery, perched high up underthe still higher overhanging rocks, far above the beach and the busylittle town; and now, in the May af

29、ternoon, they sat side by side underthe trellis of vines on the terraced walk, their faces turned southward,in the shade of the steep mountain behind them; the sea was blue attheir feet, and quite still, but farther out the westerly breeze thatswept past the Conca combed it to crisp roughness; then

30、it was less blueto southward, and gradually it grew less real, till it lost colour andmelted into a sky-haze that almost hid the southern mountains and thelizard-like head of the far Licosa.A bit of coarse faded carpet lay upon the ground under the two ladiesfeet, and the shady air had a soft green

31、tinge in it from the youngvine-leaves overhead. At first sight one would have said that both weredelicate, if not ill. Both were fair, though in different degrees, andboth were pale and quiet, and looked a little weary.The young girl sat in the deep straw chair, hatless, with bare whitehands that he

32、ld her work. Her thick flaxen hair, straightly parted andsmoothed away from its low growth on the forehead, half hid small freshears, unpierced. Long lashes, too white for beauty, cast very faintlight shadows as she looked down; but when she raised the lids, thedark-blue eyes were bright, with wide

33、pupils and a straight look, quickto fasten, slow to let go, never yet quite softened, and yet nevermannishly hard. But, in its own way, perhaps, there is no look so hardas the look of maiden innocence can be. There can even be somethingterrible in its unconscious stare. There is the spirit of Gods o

34、wnfearful directness in it. Half quibbling with words perhaps, but surelywith half truth, one might say that youth is, while all else hasbeen; and that youth alone possesses the present, too innocent to knowit all, yet too selfish even to doubt of what is its own-too sure ofitself to doubt anything,

35、 to fear anything, or even truly to pray foranything. There is no equality and no community in virtue; it is onlyoriginal sin that makes us all equal and human. Old Lucifer, fallen,crushed, and damned, knows the worth of forgiveness-not young Michael,flintily hard and monumentally upright in his ste

36、el coat, a terror tothe devil himself. And youth can have something of that archangelicrigidity. Youth is not yet quite human.But there was much in Clare Bowrings face which told that she was to bequite human some day. The lower features were not more than strongenough-the curved lips would be fulle

37、r before long, the small nostrils,the gentle chin, were a little sharper than was natural, now, fromillness, but round in outline and not over prominent; and the slenderthroat was very delicate and feminine. Only in the dark-blue eyes therewas still that unabashed, quick glance and long-abiding stra

38、ightness,and innocent hardness, and the unconscious selfishness of theuncontaminated.Standing on her feet, she would have seemed rather tall than short,though really but of average height. Seated, she looked tall, and herglance was a little downward to most peoples eyes. Just now she was toothin, an

39、d seemed taller than she was. But the fresh light was already inthe young white skin, and there was a soft colour in the lobes of thelittle ears, as the white leaves of daisies sometimes blush all roundtheir tips.The nervous white hands held the little bag lightly, and twined it andsewed it deftly,

40、for Clare was clever with her fingers. Possibly theylooked even a little whiter than they were, by contrast with the darkstuff of her dress, and illness had made them shrink at the lower part,robbing them of their natural strength, though not of their grace. Thereis a sort of refinement, not of tast

41、e, nor of talent, but of feeling andthought, and it shows itself in the hands of those who have it, morethan in any feature of the face, in a sort of very true proportionbetween the hand and its fingers, between each finger and its joints,each joint and each nail; a something which says that such a

42、hand couldnot do anything ignoble, could not take meanly, nor strike cowardly, norpress falsely; a quality of skin neither rough and coarse, nor oversmooth like satin, but cool and pleasant to the touch as fine silk thatis closely woven. The fingers of such hands are very straight and veryelastic, b

43、ut not supple like young snakes, as some fingers are, and thecushion of the hand is not over full nor heavy, nor yet shrunken andundeveloped as in the wasted hands of old Asiatic races.In outward appearance there was that sort of inherited likeness betweenmother and daughter which is apt to strike s

44、trangers more than personsof the same family. Mrs. Bowring had been beautiful in her youth-farmore beautiful than Clare-but her face had been weaker, in spite of theregularity of the features and their faultless proportion. Life had giventhem an acquired strength, but not of the lovely kind, and the

45、 complexionwas faded, and the hair had darkened, and the eyes had paled. Some facesare beautified by suffering. Mrs. Bowrings face was not of that class.It was as though a thin, hard mask had been formed and closely mouldedupon it, as the action of the sea overlays some sorts of soft rock with asurf

46、ace thin as paper but as hard as granite. In spite of the hardness,the features were not really strong. There was refinement in them,however, of the same kind which the daughter had, and as much, thoughless pleasing. A fern-a spray of maidens-hair-loses much of its beautybut none of its refinement w

47、hen petrified in limestone or made fossil incoal.As they sat there, side by side, mother and daughter, where they had satevery day for a week or more, they had very little to say. They hadexhausted the recapitulation of Clares illness, during the first daysof her convalescence. It was not the first

48、time that they had been inAmalfi, and they had enumerated its beauties to each other, and renewedtheir acquaintance with it from a distance, looking down from theterrace upon the low-lying town, and the beach and the painted boats,and the little crowd that swarmed out now and then like ants, very busyand very much in a hurry, run