Array Коллектив авторов - 30 лучших рассказов американских писателей

He shivered slightly, and ducked his head under the cover again. But the brightness of the sun and some exhilarating quality in the air tempted him to have another outlook, avoiding as far as possible the grimly decorated walls. If they had only left him his faithful servant he could have relieved himself of that mischievous badinage which always alternately horrified and delighted that devoted negro. But he was alone – absolutely alone – in this conventicle!

Presently he saw the door open slowly. It gave admission to the small round face and yellow ringlets of a little girl, and finally to her whole figure, clasping a doll nearly as large as herself. For a moment she stood there, arrested by the display of Mr. Hamlin’s dressing case on the table. Then her glances moved around the room and rested upon the bed. Her blue eyes and Mr. Hamlin’s brown ones met and mingled. Without a moment’s hesitation she moved to the bedside. Taking her doll’s hands in her own, she displayed it before him.

‘Isn’t it pitty?’

Mr. Hamlin was instantly his old self again. Thrusting his hand comfortably under the pillow, he lay on his side and gazed at it long and affectionately. ‘I never,’ he said in a faint voice, but with immovable features, ‘saw anything so perfectly beautiful. Is it alive?’

‘It’s a dolly,’ she returned gravely, smoothing down its frock and straightening its helpless feet. Then seized with a spontaneous idea, like a young animal she suddenly presented it to him with both hands and said, —

‘Kiss it.’

Mr. Hamlin implanted a chaste salute on its vermilion cheek. ‘Would you mind letting me hold it for a little?’ he said with extreme diffidence.

The child was delighted, as he expected. Mr. Hamlin placed it in a sitting posture on the edge of his bed, and put an ostentatious paternal arm around it.

‘But you’re alive, ain’t you?’ he said to the child.

This subtle witticism convulsed her. ‘I’m a little girl,’ she gurgled.

‘I see; her mother?’

‘Ess.’

‘And who’s your mother?’

‘Mammy.’

‘Mrs. Rivers?’

The child nodded until her ringlets were shaken on her cheek. After a moment she began to laugh bashfully and with repression, yet as Mr. Hamlin thought a little mischievously. Then as he looked at her interrogatively she suddenly caught hold of the ruffle of his sleeve.

‘Oo’s got on mammy’s nighty.’

Mr. Hamlin started. He saw the child’s obvious mistake and actually felt himself blushing. It was unprecedented – it was the sheerest weakness – it must have something to do with the confounded air.

‘I grieve to say you are deeply mistaken – it is my very own,’ he returned with great gravity. Nevertheless, he drew the coverlet close over his shoulder. But here he was again attracted by another face at the half-opened door – a freckled one, belonging to a boy apparently a year or two older than the girl. He was violently telegraphing to her to come away, although it was evident that he was at the same time deeply interested in the guest’s toilet articles. Yet as his bright gray eyes and Mr. Hamlin’s brown ones met, he succumbed, as the girl had, and walked directly to the bedside. But he did it bashfully – as the girl had not. He even attempted a defensive explanation.

‘She hadn’t oughter come in here, and mar wouldn’t let her, and she knows it,’ he said with superior virtue.

‘But I asked her to come as I’m asking you,’ said Mr. Hamlin promptly, ‘and don’t you go back on your sister or you’ll never be president of the United States.’ With this he laid his hand on the boy’s tow head, and then, lifting himself on his pillow to a half-sitting posture, put an arm around each of the children, drawing them together, with the doll occupying the central post of honor. ‘Now,’ continued Mr. Hamlin, albeit in a voice a little faint from the exertion, ‘now that we’re comfortable together I’ll tell you the story of the good little boy who became a pirate in order to save his grandmother and little sister from being eaten by a wolf at the door.’

But, alas! that interesting record of self-sacrifice never was told. For it chanced that Melinda Bird, Mrs. Rivers’s help, following the trail of the missing children, came upon the open door and glanced in. There, to her astonishment, she saw the domestic group already described, and to her eyes dominated by the ‘most beautiful and perfectly elegant’ young man she had ever seen. But let not the incautious reader suppose that she succumbed as weakly as her artless charges to these fascinations. The character and antecedents of that young man had been already delivered to her in the kitchen by the other help. With that single glance she halted; her eyes sought the ceiling in chaste exaltation. Falling back a step, she called in ladylike hauteur and precision, ‘Mary Emmeline and John Wesley.’

Mr. Hamlin glanced at the children. ‘It’s Melindy looking for us,’ said John Wesley. But they did not move. At which Mr. Hamlin called out faintly but cheerfully, ‘They’re here, all right.’

Again the voice arose with still more marked and lofty distinctness, ‘John Wesley and Mary Em-me-line.’ It seemed to Mr. Hamlin that human accents could not convey a more significant and elevated ignoring of some implied impropriety in his invitation. He was for a moment crushed.

But he only said to his little friends with a smile, ‘You’d better go now and we’ll have that story later.’

‘Affer beckus?’ suggested Mary Emmeline.

‘In the woods,’ added John Wesley.

Mr. Hamlin nodded blandly. The children trotted to the door. It closed upon them and Miss Bird’s parting admonition, loud enough for Mr. Hamlin to hear, ‘No more freedoms, no more intrudings, you hear.’

The older culprit, Hamlin, retreated luxuriously under his blankets, but presently another new sensation came over him – absolutely, hunger. Perhaps it was the child’s allusion to ‘beckus,’ but he found himself wondering when it would be ready. This anxiety was soon relieved by the appearance of his host himself bearing a tray, possibly in deference to Miss Bird’s sense of propriety. It appeared also that Dr. Duchesne had previously given suitable directions for his diet, and Mr. Hamlin found his repast simple but enjoyable. Always playfully or ironically polite to strangers, he thanked his host and said he had slept splendidly.

‘It’s this yer “ozone” in the air that Dr. Duchesne talks about,’ said Seth complacently.

‘I am inclined to think it is also those texts,’ said Mr. Hamlin gravely, as he indicated them on the wall. ‘You see they reminded me of church and my boyhood’s slumbers there. I have never slept so peacefully since.’ Seth’s face brightened so interestedly at what he believed to be a suggestion of his guest’s conversion that Mr. Hamlin was fain to change the subject. When his host had withdrawn he proceeded to dress himself, but here became conscious of his weakness and was obliged to sit down. In one of those enforced rests he chanced to be near the window, and for the first time looked on the environs of his place of exile. For a moment he was staggered. Everything seemed to pitch downward from the rocky outcrop on which the rambling house and farm sheds stood. Even the great pines around it swept downward like a green wave, to rise again in enormous billows as far as the eye could reach. He could count a dozen of their tumbled crests following each other on their way to the distant plain. In some vague point of that shimmering horizon of heat and dust was the spot he came from the preceding night. Yet the recollection of it and his feverish past seemed to confuse him, and he turned his eyes gladly away.