"Rives, Hallie Erminie - In the Wake of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rives Hallie Erminie)

over the farm land, he saw this blue face and dodging gaze. It came before him
with an absurd incongruity and yet with a reiterate malevolence.
The sun was high as he walked hack toward the village, past the great,
gray-columned house whose shambling porticoes pointed to a past of wealth and
grandeur. As he neared the gate a sudden cry made him quicken his steps. A
repeating screamЧ a man's, yet wolf-like, rising and falling with monotonous
inflectionsЧ filled all the hollows with sound. Its note had a quality of the
animal that thickened the hearer's blood. It came from the house. Maxwell broke
into a run, burst open the gate and rushed toward the porch.
Rounding a clump of evergreens he saw a strange spectacle. Seated on the ground
was the blue-faced man, his fingers clutching the stubble, his lips emitting the
beast-like screams which had brought Maxwell from the roadway. Bending over him,
with her back toward the gate, was the lady of the sad face and the pearl-gray
hair. She was smoothing the thin fringe from the sunken temples, bending now and
then to lay her lips caressingly and sobbingly upon his head. From under her arm
the yellow eyes looked out straight toward Maxwell. He felt them pass shiftily
across his face with a sense of shrinking repulsion. The volume of screams
showed no abatement.
The tones with which the woman sought to soothe this outburst were exquisitely
tender. "Poor Victor!" she was saying; "poor, poor boy!"
Maxwell had stopped short at the mad lustre of those yellow eyes; the woman had
not heard his approach. With a strange tightening of the throat he shrank behind
a bush and retreated to the road, looking fearfully back over his shoulder.
Throughout the long walk back to the village hotel, at every turning, this
picture started before himЧ a slight, gray-gowned figure with hands whose
trembling motions suggested the settling of a dove to guard its young, and from
under whose caress gleamed out topaz eyes in which lurked the devil of madness.
He stared over the table of the low-ceiled, smoky-beamed dining-room, unheeding
the conversation, his mind pursuing the vagrant resemblance of the morning. He
came to himself with a sort of shock to hear his neighbor say: "That's the first
time I've seen ole Vic Brockman for two years. Miss Ma'y Ann took him drivin'
this mornin'Ч you ought to seen 'em. The ole fellow had on a nubia that had as
many colors as a peacock's tail. Queer how he hangs onto life all these years,"
he continued reflectively. "It'd be a blessin' if he'd shuffle off. Speakin' of
womenЧ there's a woman for you! Job Stacker, when he lived on the next farm,
used to say that she cared for that idiot brother of hers ever since the war
like a baby. If he'd got killed out and out, instead of comin' home with no top
to his head and no sense in it, it'd been better for her. Then she could have
married that sweetheart of hers and had troubles of her own."
He turned to Maxwell. "I was talkin'," he said, "of Miss Brockman, who owns the
Pool placeЧ that big white house over the hill. It's a pity the mortgage changed
hands. I suppose Miss Ma'y Ann is going to be sold out. It's hard. Old Squire
Pool, her grandfather, was the biggest man in four counties, and befo' the war
her ma was the high-headest girl you ever saw. Wonder who got that mortgage?"
In the evening, as Maxwell and the village lawyer, who was Justice of the Peace,
Conveyancer, and Notary Public all in one, walked in the fading light up the
hill toward the property which was so soon to be sent to the hammer, there was
small conversation between them. The papers requiring the final signature
protruded from Maxwell's great-coat pocket. His mind was wandering through a
labyrinth of recollection, pursuing the phantom of a blue face, surmounted by