A Fringe of Leaves Read Online Free PDF Page B

specimen?’
    Although unprepared for this sudden interest she was not altogether taken by surprise: she had grown to accept his intrusion on her thoughts, or those of them which lay closest to the surface.
    She replied, ‘I didn’t think to ask,’ while examining with displeasure her rather too broad, if not unshapely hands.
    ‘Like all the flowers of this country—or the few we’ve seen on our walks—it is more strange than beautiful,’ Mr Roxburgh pronounced.
    ‘I haven’t made up my mind. Memorable, certainly.’ She wondered whether her voice sounded as hard and dry as she felt it become in her throat. ‘Whether beautiful, or only strange, I doubt I shall ever forget their flowers.’
    Yes, her voice sounded ugly, doubtless due to a constriction of the throat, as her locked hands sped their becalmed brig, her thoughts in tow, till she was again seated beside the silver kettle, behind brocade curtains which the servant had drawn, listening for some indication that her husband would join her at the tea-table, or whether she would conduct the silent ritual of taking tea alone.
    When Mr Roxburgh spoke again she was not immediately conscious that they were aboard a berthed ship, or that he was reading aloud from the book in his lap.
‘“… felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari …”
    Splendid stuff! Did you hear, Ellen?’
    ‘Yes. I heard. But shall not understand unless you have the goodness to translate. I thought you would have known that.’ Now she merely sounded like a peevish woman.
    ‘As you are in almost every respect admirable, one tends to forget that you don’t always understand.’
    While he gave the lines his renewed consideration, humming to himself from behind his moustache, drumming on the page with his fingertips, she was forced up from her chair to fidget restlessly in the narrow space in which they were confined.
    ‘Perhaps this will satisfy you,’ he ventured at last, ‘without doing justice to the original verses. “Happy is he” he no more than muttered, ‘ “who has unveiled the cause of things, and who can ignore inexorable Fate and the roar of insatiate Hell.” ’ Mr Roxburgh coughed for his own efforts on concluding them.
    Then he said almost immediately, ‘The light which prevails in Virgil makes that black streak seem blacker.’ There followed a sweeping of the page as though to rid it of crumbs. ‘I don’t believe he feared death.’ Again a scratching or a sweeping. ‘For that matter—although I’ve been threatened several times—and am prepared to be gathered in by—our Maker—death has always appeared to me something of a literary conceit.’ His laughter came out as a high neighing, so that her heart, turning to water, lapped against the timbers of the stays in which she was boarded up.
    ‘I should modify that, I suppose,’ Mr Roxburgh conceded, ‘by adding: in connection with myself.’ Once more the desperate neighing of some gaunt-ribbed gelding.
    She had halted close behind his chair, and leant, and put her arms around him, as though attempting to cleave to him as she had sworn. ‘It’s my loss that I can’t share your pleasures in the way you would wish.’ Her hot mouth drove her regret into the crown of his head. ‘It was too late when I started to learn. I shall only ever know what my instinct tells me.’
    ‘I would not have it otherwise.’
    She suffered him to twist the rings on her fingers.
    ‘There is almost nothing’, she sighed, ‘which cannot be changed for the better.’
    But in her own case, a kind of sensual apathy intervened as often as not between the intention and the act. Or, in the beginning, life to be lived.
    He had indeed lent her books, first of all the little one he called his ‘crib’ to the Bucolics when she brought the tray to the room. She had scarce read it, for it made her nervous to have a gentleman’s book in her