"Alexander Green - Crimson Sails" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Alexander)

the contents, which amounted to nearly a hundred pounds. He rose early,
and when the dowerless girl went off to the kitchen, sneaked into her room
and placed his gift in her chest, laying a note on top: "This is yours, Betsy.
(Signed) Robin Hood." The commotion this caused in the kitchen was so
great that Gray had to confess to the deed. He did not take the money
back and did not want to have another word said about it.
His mother was one of those people whom life pours into a ready mould.
She lived in the dream-world of prosperity that provided for every wish of
an ordinary soul; therefore, she had no other occupation save to order
around her dressmakers, doctor and butler. However, her passionate and
ail-but religious attachment for her strange child was, one might assume,
the only vent for those of her inclinations, chloroformed by her upbringing
and fate, which were no longer fully alive, but simmered faintly, leaving
the will idle. The high-born dame resembled a peacock hen that had
hatched a swan's egg. She was quiveringly aware of the magnificent
uniqueness of her son; sadness, love and constraint filled her being when
she pressed the boy to her breast, and her heart spoke unlike her tongue,
which habitually reflected the conventional types of relationships and
ideas. Thus does a cloud effect, concocted so weirdly by the sun's rays,
penetrate the symmetrical interior of a public building, divesting it of its
banal merits; the eye sees but does not recognize the chamber; the
mysterious nuances of light amongst paltriness create a dazzling harmony.
The high-born dame, whose face and figure, it seemed, could respond
but in icy silence to the fiery voices of life and whose delicate beauty
repelled rather than attracted, since one sensed her haughty effort of will,
devoid of feminine attraction -- this same Lillian Gray, when alone with
the boy, was transformed into an ordinary mother speaking in a loving,
gentle voice those endearments which refuse to be committed to paper;
their power lies in the emotions, not in their meaning. She was positively
unable to refuse her son anything. She forgave him everything: his visits to
the kitchen, his abhorrence of his lessons, his disobedience and his many
eccentricities.
If he did not want the trees to be trimmed they were left untouched; if
he asked that someone be pardoned or rewarded -- the person in question
knew that it would be so; he could ride any horse he wished, bring any dog
he wished into the castle, go through the books in the library, run around
barefoot and eat whatever he pleased.
His father tried to put a stop to this and finally yielded -- not to the
principle, but to his wife's wishes. He merely had all the servants' children
moved out of the castle, fearing that by associating with low society the
boy's whims would become inclinations that would be difficult to
eradicate. In general, he was completely taken up with endless family
lawsuits whose origins went back to the era of the founding of the first
paper mills and whose end perhaps lay in the death of the last caviller.
Besides, there were affairs of state, the running of his own estates,
dictating his memoirs, fox-hunts, newspapers to be read and an extended
correspondence to keep him at a certain distance inwardly from the rest of
the family; he saw his son so infrequently that he would sometimes forget
how old the boy was.
Thus, Gray lived in a world of his own. He played all by himself--usually