22
" To Morton Stone, all those first weeks at Meerlust had a strange, dream-like quality. The contours and smells of the country, the odd style of the house’s architecture, the stinkwood furniture and ancient brass with
which its rooms were furnished, had an exotic flavour that left him slightly bewildered.
They didn’t, naturally, bewilder Catherine at all. She was rapturously recapturing the days when she and Hans had been children together. To Morton there was something beautiful, and at the same time pathetic,
in the quickness with which she responded to each remembered detail: the bird-song, the flowers that now bloomed in incredible profusion, the smell of the veld, the soft accents of Cape-Dutch dialect. It was pathetic for two reasons. First because these memories, which he could neither share nor understand, increased the distance between them; once again, because all her rapture was shadowed for him by the gloom of an in-
definite apprehensiveness.
This very excess of happiness took it out of her. She wasn’t, as he could see, and as the Malans’ Dutch doctor told him, any better for the change. It seemed to spur her to a morbid restlessness. She was catching at every
memory, within, or just out of reach, as though some inward consciousness told her that the time for its enjoyment was limited. It irked her to find him, as it seemed to her, dull and unresponsive. As for Morton, the sense
of impending disaster never left him. He could have faced it more easily, he felt, at home, amid familiar surroundings, than in this strange, unreal oasis of beauty, five thousand miles from anywhere. "
― Francis Brett Young , The Cage Bird and Other Stories
26
" And he stayed. For three years he stayed in the shadow of Meerlust; a model of the uttermost devotion; a lost soul in purgatory. It would have been better, as the doctor had said, if Catherine Stone had died. Within twenty-four hours of the original disaster
she recovered consciousness, lying, as the half-dead lie, with one side paralysed and without the power of speech. She could not speak, but she could see. Her eyes never stopped seeing. Through the long hours of
day and night when Morton sat by her, watching in silence, those blue eyes dwelt on him. There was no bitterness, no accusation in them — only a supernatural power of penetration, terribly impersonal, which
seemed to pierce through into the depths of his consciousness, stripping bare the pretences of tenderness, the realities of remorse with which he comforted him-
self.He might easily deceive himself, but never Catherine’s eyes. "
― Francis Brett Young , The Cage Bird and Other Stories
29
" His self-esteem was a mass of smarting pin-
pricks. Whenever he assured himself, as he tried to do, that he was the heroic victim of a grand and melancholy passion, the memory of some new and petty indignity
stabbed him awake.
“I’m darned if I’m going to put up with it,” he told Matilda that evening. “What I want to know is this: Am I the master of my own house?”
Matilda only smiled.
And so it went on. You might, Jimmy thought, have supposed that treatment of this kind would arouse the fair one’s pity, poor substitute as that might be for the warmer emotion which, by all romantic canons, she
owed to her rescuer. In protest he adopted an air of injured tenderness and nobility. But Matilda soon knocked the bottom out of that.
“Don’t take any notice,” she told their guest, “if he happens to touch your hand when he’s passing the butter. He’s quite harmless, is Jimmy, and even if he does like to dream he’s a Don Juan, that doesn’t take me in! I know him! We haven’t been married six
years for nothing.”
“Oh, haven’t we?” said Jimmy, darkly. ‘That’s
where you’re mistaken! ”
“Just listen to him!” laughed Matilda. “He hates you to think he’s been faithful. Isn’t he just a lamb?”
And the object of Jimmy’s frustrated passion merely smiled. She was always smiling. The tragic figure of the Boulogne boat, the distressed beauty of the Customs House, the vision of pathetic loveliness whom he, James Marler, had swept off her feet with such
manly magnificence, no longer existed. Those grave, impassioned dialogues which he had imagined taking place under the romantic towers of the Crystal Palace had never materialized. She was gay, she was childish,
perhaps she was even more beautiful; but her gaiety, her childishness, her beauty were not for him. "
― Francis Brett Young , The Cage Bird and Other Stories
35
" She had chosen the gallery because of its intellectual altitude; because she had heard it whispered that all the best people (in her sense, not in her mother’s) frequented it. She had chosen the gallery as a symbol of
emancipation, of rebellion; its very discomfort was a psychological luxury. She had chosen it — most of all — because, if she had descended, in a physical and artistic
sense, to her mother’s box, she would have been pursued and devoured all evening by the earnest, amorous, pale- blue eyes of her admirer, Lord Ledwyche (pronounced
Ledditch) whom her family and his had decided she was destined to marry. Even in the country a little of Ledwyche went a long way. Against the highly sophisti-cated, intensely modern background of the Russian
Ballet his presence was discordant. Not that Helena disapproved of discords. On the contrary, she adored them just as long as they didn’t happen to be generally
admired by the wrong people, such as Charlie Ledwyche. If Charlie had been frankly eighteenth-century baroque she could have tolerated him; if he had been Cubistic, like a skyscraper, she could have been proud of him; but his style was all wrong — it belonged
neither to the day before yesterday nor to the day after to-morrow; he was just the wrong period. Sham Gothic, like the Houses of Parliament, which he so decorously adorned. "
― Francis Brett Young , The Cage Bird and Other Stories
