第12章

As I have said,I was unpacking my luggage after a journey from London into Ukraine.The MS.of "Almayer's Folly"--my companion already for some three years or more,and then in the ninth chapter of its age--was deposited unostentatiously on the writing-table placed between two windows.It didn't occur to me to put it away in the drawer the table was fitted with,but my eye was attracted by the good form of the same drawer's brass handles.Two candelabra,with four candles each,lighted up festally the room which had waited so many years for the wandering nephew.The blinds were down.

Within five hundred yards of the chair on which I sat stood the first peasant hut of the village--part of my maternal grandfather's estate,the only part remaining in the possession of a member of the family;and beyond the village in the limitless blackness of a winter's night there lay the great unfenced fields--not a flat and severe plain,but a kindly bread-giving land of low rounded ridges,all white now,with the black patches of timber nestling in the hollows.The road by which I had come ran through the village with a turn just outside the gates closing the short drive.Somebody was abroad on the deep snow track;a quick tinkle of bells stole gradually into the stillness of the room like a tuneful whisper.

My unpacking had been watched over by the servant who had come to help me,and,for the most part,had been standing attentive but unnecessary at the door of the room.I did not want him in the least,but I did not like to tell him to go away.He was a young fellow,certainly more than ten years younger than myself;I had not been--I won't say in that place,but within sixty miles of it,ever since the year '67;yet his guileless physiognomy of the open peasant type seemed strangely familiar.It was quite possible that he might have been a descendant,a son,or even a grandson,of the servants whose friendly faces had been familiar to me in my early childhood.As a matter of fact he had no such claim on my consideration.He was the product of some village near by and was there on his promotion,having learned the service in one or two houses as pantry boy.I know this because I asked the worthy V----next day.I might well have spared the question.I discovered before long that all the faces about the house and all the faces in the village:the grave faces with long mustaches of the heads of families,the downy faces of the young men,the faces of the little fair-haired children,the handsome,tanned,wide-browed faces of the mothers seen at the doors of the huts,were as familiar to me as though I had known them all from childhood and my childhood were a matter of the day before yesterday.

The tinkle of the traveller's bells,after growing louder,had faded away quickly,and the tumult of barking dogs in the village had calmed down at last.My uncle,lounging in the corner of a small couch,smoked his long Turkish chibouk in silence.

"This is an extremely nice writing-table you have got for my room,"I remarked.

"It is really your property,"he said,keeping his eyes on me,with an interested and wistful expression,as he had done ever since I had entered the house."Forty years ago your mother used to write at this very table.In our house in Oratow,it stood in the little sitting-room which,by a tacit arrangement,was given up to the girls--I mean to your mother and her sister who died so young.It was a present to them jointly from your uncle Nicholas B.when your mother was seventeen and your aunt two years younger.She was a very dear,delightful girl,that aunt of yours,of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.

She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind in which your mother was far superior.It was her good sense,the admirable sweetness of her nature,her exceptional facility and ease in daily relations,that endeared her to every body.Her death was a terrible grief and a serious moral loss for us all.Had she lived she would have brought the greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot to enter,as wife,mother,and mistress of a household.She would have created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content which only those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke.Your mother--of far greater beauty,exceptionally distinguished in person,manner,and intellect--had a less easy disposition.

Being more brilliantly gifted,she also expected more from life.