Read Online A Fringe of Leaves by Patrick White - Free Book Online Page B

leaping from the ship as the prow beached in the cove at sunset. (She was that foolish, or ‘romantic’.)
    Mr Roxburgh said, ‘There are those who are able to rise, at any rate morally, above their physical condition.’
    He was nothing if not moral, she felt. It did not console her.
    ‘Couldn’t you get on your feet?’ she asked, ‘If I give a hand?’
    He obeyed as though she had been the mother to whom he so frequently referred, and whom she would not have cared to meet; better Lady Ottering giving advice through a carriage window, or passing judgment on geums or phlox as she trod the garden path on visits of patronage to her former maid.
    In the silence the storm had left behind, Mr Roxburgh remarked as they crossed the road dividing farm from moor, ‘I admire your strength of character.’
    ‘Dear life!’ She was so embarrassed she almost choked. ‘ Strength— yes! That’s about all I’ve got to my name. And must depend on it.’
    Presently they saw the roof, and then the slope gave up the house, the ramshackle outhouses, and the scraggy pear and damson trees. There was mud on their boots. She scraped it off her own at the back door and indicated that he should do the same before entering.
    Dr Hicks prescribed nothing more drastic for his patient’s ‘turn’ than the tincture of digitalis he was already taking. Mr Roxburgh lay abed, and she persuaded Mamma to wait on him. Because Mamma had experienced less of their lodger’s condition and mind, she would be less likely to expect him to break in her hands.
    And as soon as he was restored, Mr Roxburgh decided, ‘It’s time I went home. My mother will be wondering.’
    Ellen Gluyas was relieved, though she would not have admitted it to Pa or Will. She would not have admitted that the smells of medicines lingered (if they did) in the room where he had slept (it was again hers) or that she could still detect in the parlour a distinct smell of ancient books. He had left behind a bottle of ink which she appropriated, for what purpose she could not think. The smell of ink was real enough when she uncorked the bottle. Between Mr Roxburgh’s visit and her attendance at the dame’s school where she got such learning as she could boast, the smell of ink had scarce crossed her nostrils. Now whenever she sniffed at the bottle of which she had possessed herself, she experienced a sensation as of slight drunkenness mingled with that of sober despair.

    Bristol Maid ’s sides were shuddering as she laboured, and Mr Roxburgh called to his wife from the saloon that the fellow had brought their breakfast, which she should come and eat if she had any intention of doing so. Restored to balance, Mrs Roxburgh did as she was told.
    Mr Roxburgh was sipping tea with evident repugnance. ‘The same old musty stuff,’ he warned, ‘but hot.’
    It was, as she knew, little more than a brew of sticks, yet she preferred to ignore the salt pork (more fat than lean, more conducive to nausea) and join her husband in drinking the travesty of tea.
    She sipped at it, and her eyes were moistened and enlarged. Except that their surroundings were so very different, they might have been seated together at Birdlip House, Cheltenham. At least the silences they kept were the same, and the moments when he emerged from his, to complain, or else it seemed, to take stock of her.
    This morning Mr Roxburgh said, ‘You are looking uncommonly nice, Ellen.’ This she had learnt to interpret as a compliment from one brought up to abstain from vulgar enthusiasm.
    It required no answer, but she murmured, ‘All of it old and familiar,’ and looked down, and touched her skirt.
    ‘I was right in advising you to wear green.’
    ‘My aunt used to say that green made a woman look trumpery.’
    ‘Your aunt, I noticed, didn’t care for you to look your best.’
    Mr Roxburgh continued examining his wife, less pointedly perhaps, more thoughtfully. As a youth he had written poetry, but even to himself, his