Man and Wife, Wilkie Collins [best ebook reader android .TXT] 📗

male friends to me, unless they have turned fifty. What shall we do till luncheon-time? It’s cool and quiet in here among the books. I want a mild excitement⁠—and I have got absolutely nothing to do. Suppose you read me some poetry?”

“While he is here?” asked Arnold, pointing to the personified antithesis of poetry⁠—otherwise to Geoffrey, seated with his back to them at the farther end of the library.

“Pooh!” said Blanche. “There’s only an animal in the room. We needn’t mind him!”

“I say!” exclaimed Arnold. “You’re as bitter, this morning, as Sir Patrick himself. What will you say to me when we are married if you talk in that way of my friend?”

Blanche stole her hand into Arnold’s hand and gave it a little significant squeeze. “I shall always be nice to you,” she whispered⁠—with a look that contained a host of pretty promises in itself. Arnold returned the look (Geoffrey was unquestionably in the way!). Their eyes met tenderly (why couldn’t the great awkward brute write his letters somewhere else?). With a faint little sigh, Blanche dropped resignedly into one of the comfortable armchairs⁠—and asked once more for “some poetry,” in a voice that faltered softly, and with a color that was brighter than usual.

“Whose poetry am I to read?” inquired Arnold.

“Anybody’s,” said Blanche. “This is another of my impulses. I am dying for some poetry. I don’t know whose poetry. And I don’t know why.”

Arnold went straight to the nearest bookshelf, and took down the first volume that his hand lighted on⁠—a solid quarto, bound in sober brown.

“Well?” asked Blanche. “What have you found?”

Arnold opened the volume, and conscientiously read the title exactly as it stood:

“Paradise Lost. A Poem. By John Milton.”

“I have never read Milton,” said Blanche. “Have you?”

“No.”

“Another instance of sympathy between us. No educated person ought to be ignorant of Milton. Let us be educated persons. Please begin.”

“At the beginning?”

“Of course! Stop! You musn’t sit all that way off⁠—you must sit where I can look at you. My attention wanders if I don’t look at people while they read.”

Arnold took a stool at Blanche’s feet, and opened the “First Book” of Paradise Lost. His “system” as a reader of blank verse was simplicity itself. In poetry we are some of us (as many living poets can testify) all for sound; and some of us (as few living poets can testify) all for sense. Arnold was for sound. He ended every line inexorably with a full stop; and he got on to his full stop as fast as the inevitable impediment of the words would let him. He began:

“Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit.
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste.
Brought death into the world and all our woe.
With loss of Eden till one greater Man.
Restore us and regain the blissful seat.
Sing heavenly Muse⁠—”

“Beautiful!” said Blanche. “What a shame it seems to have had Milton all this time in the library and never to have read him yet! We will have Mornings with Milton, Arnold. He seems long; but we are both young, and we may live to get to the end of him. Do you know dear, now I look at you again, you don’t seem to have come back to Windygates in good spirits.”

“Don’t I? I can’t account for it.”

“I can. It’s sympathy with me. I am out of spirits too.”

“You!”

“Yes. After what I saw at Craig Fernie, I grow more and more uneasy about Anne. You will understand that, I am sure, after what I told you this morning?”

Arnold looked back, in a violent hurry, from Blanche to Milton. That renewed reference to events at Craig Fernie was a renewed reproach to him for his conduct at the inn. He attempted to silence her by pointing to Geoffrey.

“Don’t forget,” he whispered, “that there is somebody in the room besides ourselves.”

Blanche shrugged her shoulders contemptuously.

“What does he matter?” she asked. “What does he know or care about Anne?”

There was only one other chance of diverting her from the delicate subject. Arnold went on reading headlong, two lines in advance of the place at which he had left off, with more sound and less sense than ever:

“In the beginning how the heavens and earth.
Rose out of Chaos or if Sion hill⁠—”

At “Sion hill,” Blanche interrupted him again.

“Do wait a little, Arnold. I can’t have Milton crammed down my throat in that way. Besides I had something to say. Did I tell you that I consulted my uncle about Anne? I don’t think I did. I caught him alone in this very room. I told him all I have told you. I showed him Anne’s letter. And I said, ‘What do you think?’ He took a little time (and a great deal of snuff) before he would say what he thought. When he did speak, he told me I might quite possibly be right in suspecting Anne’s husband to be a very abominable person. His keeping himself out of my way was (just as I thought) a suspicious circumstance, to begin with. And then there was the sudden extinguishing of the candles, when I first went in. I thought (and Mrs. Inchbare thought) it was done by the wind. Sir Patrick suspects it was done by the horrid man himself, to prevent me from seeing him when I entered the room. I am firmly persuaded Sir Patrick is right. What do you think?”

“I think we had better go on,” said Arnold, with his head down over his book. “We seem to be forgetting Milton.”

“How you do worry about Milton! That last bit wasn’t as interesting as the other. Is there any love in Paradise Lost?”

“Perhaps we may find some if we go on.”

“Very well, then. Go on. And be quick about it.”

Arnold was so quick about it that he lost his place. Instead of going on he went back. He read once more:

“In the beginning how the heavens and earth.
Rose out of Chaos or if Sion hill⁠—”

“You read that before,” said