Джозеф Конрад - Suspense

The presence of all these people at Latham Hall which, considered at first as a temporary arrangement, was to last for some years, did not affect in the least Lady Latham’s beautifully dressed idle equanimity. Had not the d’Armands been Sir Charles’s intimate friends years ago, in France? But she had no curiosity. She was vaguely impressed by the fact that the marquise was a god–daughter of the Queen of Naples. For the rest it was only so many people more in the servants’ hall, at the dinner–table, and in the drawing–room, where the evenings were spent.

High up on one of the walls a lamp with a shaded reflector concentrated its light on the yellow satin coat of the half–length portrait of a rubicund Latham in a white Coburg, which, but for the manly and sensitive mouth, might have been the portrait of his own coachman. Apart from that spot of beautiful colour, the vast room with its windows giving on a terrace (from which Sir Charles was in the habit of viewing sunsets) remained dim with an effect of immensity in which the occupants, and even Sir Charles himself, acquired the appearance of unsubstantial shadows uttering words that had to travel across long, almost unlighted distances.

On one side of the mantel–piece of Italian marbles (a late addition designed by Sir Charles himself), Lady Latham’s profuse jewellery sparkled about her splendid and restful person, posed placidly on a sofa. Opposite her, the marquise would be lying down on a deep couch with one of Lady Latham’s shawls spread over her feet. The d’Armands in the flight from the Terror had saved very little besides their lives, and the Marquise d’Armand’s life had by this time become a very precarious possession.

Sir Charles was perhaps more acutely aware of this than the marquis, her husband. Sir Charles remembered her as gentle in her changing moods of gaiety and thought, charming, active, fascinating, and certainly the most intelligent, as she was the most beautiful, of the women of the French court. Her voice reaching him clear, but feeble, across the drawing–room had a pathetic appeal; and the tone of his answers was tinged with the memory of a great sentiment and with the deference due to great misfortunes. From time to time Lady Latham would make a remark in a matter–of–fact tone which would provoke something resembling curtness in Sir Charles’s elaborately polite reply, and the thought that that woman would have made the very Lord’s Prayer sound prosaic. And then in the long pauses they would pursue their own thoughts as perplexed and full of unrest as the world of seas and continents that began at the edge of the long terrace graced by gorgeous sunsets; the wide world filled with the strife of ideas, and the struggle of nations in perhaps the most troubled time of its history.

From the depths of the Italian chimney–piece the firelight of blazing English logs would fall on Adèle d’Armand sitting quietly on a low stool near her mother’s couch. Her fair hair, white complexion and dark blue eyes contrasted strongly with the deeper colour scheme of Henrietta Latham, whose locks were rich chestnut brown, and whose eyes had a dark lustre full of intelligence rather than sentiment. Now and then the French child would turn her head to look at Sir Charles, for whom in her silent existence she had developed a filial affection.

In those days Adèle d’Armand did not see much of her own father. Most of the time the marquis was away. Each of his frequent absences was an act of devotion to his exiled princes, who appreciated it no doubt, but found devotion only natural in a man of that family. The evidence of their regard for the marquis took the shape mainly of distant and dangerous missions to the courts of north Germany and northern Italy. In the general disruption of the old order, those missions were all futile, because no one ever stopped an avalanche by means of plots and negotiations. But in the marquis the perfect comprehension of that profound truth was mingled with the sort of enthusiasm that fabricates the very hopes on which it feeds. He would receive his instructions for those desperate journeys with extreme gravity and depart on them without delay, after a flying visit to the Hall to embrace his ailing wife and his silent child, and hold a grave conference with his stately English friend from whom he never concealed a single one of his thoughts or his hopes. And Sir Charles approved of them both, because the thoughts were sober, and absolutely free from absurd illusions common to all exiles, thus appealing to Sir Charles’s reason, and also to his secret disdain of all great aristocracies—and the second, being based on the marquis’s conviction of England’s unbroken might and consistency, seemed to Sir Charles the most natural thing in the world.

They paced a damp laurel–bordered walk together for an hour or so; Sir Charles lame and stately, like a disabled child of Jupiter himself, the marquis restraining his stride, and stooping with a furrowed brow to talk in measured, level tones. The wisdom of Sir Charles expressed itself in curt sentences in which scorn for men’s haphazard activities and shortsighted views was combined with a calm belief in the future.

After the peace of Amiens the Comte d’Artois, the representative of the exiled dynasty in England, having expressed the desire to have the marquis always by his side, the marquise and Adèle left Latham Hall for the poverty and makeshifts of the life of well–nigh penniless exiles in London. It was as great a proof of devotion to his royal cause as any that could be given. They settled down in a grimy house of yellow brick in four rooms up a very narrow and steep staircase. For attendants they had a dark mulatto maid brought as a child from the West Indies before the Revolution by an aunt of the marquise, and a man of rather nondescript nationality called Bernard, who had been at one time a hanger–on in the country–house of the d’Armands, but following the family in its flight and its wanderings before they had found refuge in England had displayed unexpected talents as a general factotum. Life at Latham Hall had bored him exceedingly. The sense of complete security was almost too much for his patience. The regularity of the hours and the certitude of abundant meals depressed his spirits at times. The change to London revived him greatly, for there he had something to do, and found daily occasion to display his varied gifts. He went marketing in the early morning, dusted the room he called the salon, cooked the meals, washed the floors; and in all his comings and goings was cheered, inspired and made happy by the large white smile of Miss Aglae, the negress, with whom he was very much in love. At twelve o’clock after tidying himself a bit he would go in on the tips of his heavy square shoes and carry the marquise from her room to the sofa in the salon with elaborate sureness and infinite respect, while Aglae followed with pillow, shawl, and smelling–bottle, wearing a forced air of gravity. Bernard was acutely aware of her presence and would be certain—the marquise once settled on her sofa—to get a flash of a white grin all to himself. Later Mlle. Adèle, white and fair, would go out visiting, followed by Aglae as closely as night follows day; and Bernard would watch them down the depths of the staircase in the hope of catching sight of a quickly upturned dark brown face with fine rolling eyes. This would leave him happy for the rest of the afternoon. In the evening his function was to announce visitors who had toiled up the stairs; some of the first names in France that had come trudging on foot through the mud or dust of the squalid streets to fill the dimly–lighted room which was the salon of the Marquise d’Armand. For those duties Bernard would put on a pair of white stockings, which Miss Aglae washed for him every second day, and encase his wide shoulders in a very tight green shabby jacket with large metal buttons. Miss Aglae always found a minute or two to give him a hasty inspection and a brush–down. Those were delightful instants. Holding his breath and in a state of rigid beatitude he turned about as ordered in gay whispers by his exotic lady–love. Later he would sit on a stool outside the closed door listening to the well–bred soft uproar of conversation; and when the guests began to depart he lighted them downstairs, holding a tallow dip in a small candlestick over the banister of the landing. When his duties for the day were over, he made up for himself a bed on the floor of a narrow passage which separated the living rooms from a sort of large cupboard in which Miss Aglae reposed from her daily labours. Bernard, lying under a pair of thin blankets, and with the tallow candle burning on the floor, kept slumber off till Miss Aglae stuck out her head tied up in an old red foulard—nothing but her head through the crack of the door—in order to have a little whispered conversation. That was the time when the servants exchanged their views and communicated to each other their ideas and observations. The black maid’s were shrewder than the white factotum’s. Being a personal attendant of the two ladies she had occasion to see and hear more than her admirer. They commented on the evident decline of the marquise’s health, not dolefully, but simply as a significant fact of the situation; on the marquis’s manner of daily life which had become domestic and almost sedentary. He went out every day, but now he never went away for weeks and months as he used to before. Those sudden and mysterious missions for which a misanthropic Yorkshire baronet had paid out of his own pocket had come to an end. A Marquis d’Armand could not be sent out as a common spy, and there was now no court in Christendom that would dare to receive an emissary, secret or open, of the royal exiles. Bernard, who could read, explained these things shortly to Miss Aglae. All great folk were terrified at that Bonaparte. He made all the generals tremble. On those facts Miss Aglae would have it that he must be a sorcerer. Bernard had another view of Napoleonic greatness. It was nothing but the power of lies. And on one occasion, after a slight hesitation, he burst out: “Shall I tell you the truth about him, Miss Aglae?” The tied–up black head protruding through the crack of the door nodded assent many times in the dim light of the shallow dip. “Well, then,” continued Bernard with another desperate effort, “he is of no account.”