[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Up to the day of Mira's coming Mrs.Flight and Mrs.Darling had been inseparable for as much as a week at a time.Both were young, pretty, and empty-headed; neither was burdened with children nor ideas.Both were healthy, one was wealthy, neither was wise.Mrs.Darling had the advantage over Mrs.Flight in that she was able to entertain lavishly, whereas Mrs.Flight could only entertain by personal charm and sprightly chat.They were the reigning belles at Scott, and not only the young officers at the post, but the young civilians in town, found great pleasure in their society.There was capital sleighing for several weeks, and Willett and Burtis came as often as every other day to take the ladies an airing.At first it had been Mesdames Flight and Darling, then the bride had to be invited because she was the bride, then because she was a beauty, and finally because Willett would have no one else.Then as it was generally at Darlings' they lunched, dined, danced, supped, were wined and warmed and welcomed, it transpired that Mrs.Flight found herself very frequently dropped from the sleigh-rides,—only invited semi-occasionally, perhaps once in ten days, when Burtis pointed out to Willett that they really must, you know, to which the now infatuated Willett merely responded, "All right.You ask her, then, and let her sit with you." No one but Mrs.Davies shared the sleigh man's seat.During the fortnight that followed the departure of Lieutenant Davies, Mrs.Flight had been devotion itself to her dear, bereaved friend, and, having wept with her, slept with her, sleighed with her, bared her innermost soul to her, and made herself, as she supposed, indispensable, it was to be expected that Mrs.Flight could not look with equanimity upon the discovery that she was not so indispensable after all.She had started Mira on the road to conquest, never dreaming that she herself would be the first overtaken and supplanted.She had thought hitherto no possible harm could come of their taking an occasional drive with their friends, especially as Mr.Flight expressed himself so grateful for the attention shown his wife, and as she and Mrs.Darling seemed chosen rather to the exclusion of the other women, but when Mira and not herself became the invariable occupant of the seat by the swell civilian's side, the indiscretion, not to say the impropriety of the affair, became glaringly apparent.It is rarely from the contemplation of our own, but rather from the errors of our neighbors, that our moral lessons are drawn, and now that in all its nakedness the scandalous nature of Mira's conduct was forced upon her attention, Mrs.Flight reasoned, most logically, that she could be no true friend if she failed to remonstrate and, if need be, admonish and reprove.She did so, and Almira pouted and was grievously vexed.She didn't think so at all, neither had Mrs.Flight until—until she began to be counted out.This led to war, and from pointing the moral Mrs.Flight now turned to adorning the tale with what "everybody was saying." Mira challenged her authorities."I know who you mean,—Mrs.Cranston and Miss Loomis.They hate me and would say anything mean of me." Now, it was not Mrs.Cranston and Miss Loomis at all.They had no more intimacy with Mrs.Flight than they had with Mira, nor as much.They looked upon Mrs.Flight as responsible in great measure for Almira's wrong start.They under no circumstances would confide to Mrs.Flight what they thought of Mrs.Davies, and Mrs.Flight knew it, still she was not unwilling to let Mira suppose that she was now enjoying their confidences even while she referred to other authorities by the dozen as condemning or deploring Mira's conduct, and a stormy scene followed, ending in tears and reproaches,—much heat, followed by chilling cold.For the following fortnight Almira's intimacy was transferred to Mrs.Darling, and from going to spend the night with Mira, Mrs.Flight took to revolving in mind her singular observations while she was there.There had been a thrilling, a delicious, a mysterious and romantic occurrence.Somebody twice came and whistled a strange, soft melody under the window and tapped as with a cane, gently, stealthily, a signal that sounded like Rattat tat, rattat tat, just once repeated, and Mrs.Davies trembled all over and grew icily cold, and begged Mrs.Flight to go to the window and say, "Go away, or I'll call the guard," and when pressed for explanation Mira moaned hysterically and said, but Mrs.Flight must never, never tell, that there was once a young man whom she had known long before who had got desperate on her account, for she couldn't return his love, and he had run away from home and enlisted, and she feared that he was there now, though she had never seen him and never wanted to see him, and it became Mrs.Flight's belief that it was no one less than that handsome young fellow, Brannan, who Captain Devers said was drinking himself to death.And now that Mira had withdrawn from her the confidences of the month gone by and was recklessly driving the road to ruin, flouting her admonitions, what more natural than that Mrs.Flight should forget her own vows of secrecy and conclude it time to seek other advice? Mrs.Darling would have been her first confidante in this revelation, but they, too, had once been devotedly intimate and had now drifted apart.They were no longer on anything more than merely frigidly friendly terms, smiling and kissing in public and hiding womanfully their wounds, yet confiding to friends how much they had been disappointed in the other's character, if not actually deceived.Mrs.Flight found a confidante in the chaplain's wife, a woman simply swamped under an overload of best intentions.It was Bulwer who declared that "It is difficult to say who do the most harm, enemies with the worst intentions or friends with the best," but Bulwer, who had reason to know what he was talking about, never lived at Scott in the Centennial times or at old Camp Sandy in the Arizona "days of the empire," for then he would have known no such difficulty in deciding.Just as the stanch old chaplain was just such another God-fearing, God-serving, devil-downing man as Davies's father, so was the chaplain's wife a counterpart of Davies's mother, filled with the milk of human kindness still unturned, and overflowing with best intentions uncontrollably effervescent.Had she told her husband all might have been stopped right there, but, as the demon of ill luck would have it, he had gone to a distant convention.So she sallied forth, brimming with eagerness to snatch this lovely brand from the burning, to turn this fair, motherless, guideless, possibly guileless girl to the contemplation of her dangers, to the knowledge of her peril, to banish Willett from the dove-cote,—wily hawk that he was,—and settle forthwith the fate of that young scamp Brannan [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

listy-do-eda.opx.pl