Lake of Shadows

by Jane Arbor

  Gently she pressed down the lids over his unfocused eyes, withdrew her arm and hurried to the door to call Bridie. Reading the alarm in Kate’s face, the girl tried to press past her into the room. But Kate said with gentle firmness, “No, dear—Call Dr. Kilian, will you? Tell him Father has collapsed; make it very urgent. And Bridie,”—as Bridie plunged towards the telephone—“afterwards call Dennis at the Lakestrand; say Father has been taken ill and we must both stay with him, so I can’t drive the car over tonight.”

  For both girls that was the beginning of days and nights of strain and alternating hope and despair while their father and all that medical care could do for him massed forces against the pain which was taking its cruel toll of an old man’s strength.

  There were times when he was conscious, even rational; others when he drifted away on a drug-induced tide to a world where they could neither follow nor help him, but only keep watch and ward—and wait.

  That first night both had dreaded the word “hospital” from Dr. Kilian. But though to their infinite relief he did not say it, he warned them they must keep an open mind about the possibility. Meanwhile he was installing a nurse, under whose direction the three of them could share the day-and-night care of the patient. And on his way out Dr. Kilian had added, “You’d do well to cable Norah, you know.”

  The significance of that was not lost on Kate. “Father is—as ill as that?” she had asked.

  “He is, I’m afraid, and Norah should be told. But don’t bring her home unless she insists on coming. For as he is now, he wouldn’t know her, and she’s better left where she is, with her husband.” Dr. Kilian paused and took Kate’s quivering chin between his finger and thumb. “You’re blaming yourself sorely for what happened this morning, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t. You couldn’t have foreseen it. You couldn’t have prevented it. And you shouldn’t let young Regan or Burke blame themselves either. For this could have happened at whatever extra exertion he put himself to, and would you have had him choose a worthier one, Kate?”

  “No, I suppose not—” But Kate’s thoughts had been with Dennis and of the comfort he might ask of her if her father should die as a result of the morning’s work.

  Everyone was kind. Conor halted the noisier work on the golf-course; he gave Bridie indefinite leave from her job and rang up morning and evening to ask what he or his staff could do for them in Cork or Morah Beg or the village.

  Mrs. Burke ordered lunch for both girls and the nurse to be cooked in the Lakestrand kitchens and sent over each noon in heated containers, and twice a week their linen was whisked away, to the hotel laundry and, returned immaculate.

  The Post Office asked for and relayed daily bulletins on how “Himself” was fighting the evil that was on him ... Unbidden, the Heenan boys fitted silencers to their motorbikes. The older O’Sheas volunteered to chop wood and fetch peat; the younger competed to feed the hens. And Dennis rowed over from the Island every day to sit with the Professor or to take Bridie or Kate out, without once pressing Kate for an answer to his question.

  Meanwhile, after two days and nights of total coma, the Professor drifted briefly out of his private twilight, only to return to it; to rally again; to slip back, sometimes his periods of consciousness the longer, sometimes those of his torpor.

  Once, his mind neither fully here nor there in time, he mistook Bridie for her mother, calling her by his wife’s name and by the long-unused endearments they had made their own. At first aghast, then bracing herself to meet him all along the way, Bridie answered him soothingly, lovingly, though later she threw herself into Kate’s arms in a passion of regret for the bitter hurt she might have done him, but for chance and for Conor and for Kate.

  Kate comforted her, “Darling, if you had defied us and run away, he would have forgiven you.” But Bridie’s tears, she knew, were for the things Bridie would never have forgiven herself.

  There were other times when the Professor spoke in Gaelic to no one in particular, but rather as if he needed to hear his voice making the strange music of the words. And there was to be yet another time when he knew Kate clearly for herself, but had forgotten that she had already broken with Basil Kent.

  “Maybe you’ll not listen to me, but you’d be making a mistake to marry that fellow from England,” he told her.

  “I’m not going to, Father.”

  “You shouldn’t say that, if it’s only to indulge me. Not that I have it against him that he’s English. Your mother was English herself... But he’s not your kind, and you’d do better to look to the Lake for a man of your own. Haven’t I told you so before?”

  “You have, Father, but—”

  “I remember now. I asked you if you’d take Dennis instead, and you said he hadn’t that kind of a thought for you at all. But you’ve been thinking of each other since in that way? Or so he tells me.”

  “Dennis told you so? When?”

  But the Professor’s eyes clouded and he shook his head. Dates and occasions were beyond him. And when he spoke next it was to muse to himself.

  “Dennis ... and Kate. Should I warn her she must love too ... that kindness isn’t enough, lest she take him for his need of her pity alone? And isn’t there another one I’ve been thinking of for her this short while? No more a born man of the Lake than Dennis, this one, this—Burke. But he claims he has the great pride in it ... pride and vision, and aren’t there few enough of us with either? ... Was I ever hearing, though, that that one cared for Kate or she for him? No—”

  But there the murmur trailed away into incoherencies and finally to silence. And though the girls did not know it then, their father was not to speak to either of them again. The next morning while it was still dark the nurse called them and Dr. Kilian to him, and by the time the dawn wind had begun to play with the surface of the lake it was heralding a daybreak which the last of the Black Ruthven men would not see.

  CHAPTER NINE

  For a long time Kate believed she could never forget Bridie’s first reaction to their loss. For when the girl said with a kind of poignant wonder, “Now I suppose I can go to Dublin, do the things I’ve always wanted to. And yet I know that if we could only have Father back, I’d not ask for any of it,” she spoke Kate’s thought too. Now they were both free, yet both would willingly have bartered their new freedom for the gentle chains of their own making which bound their love and duty no longer.

  Now they had time on their hands and were to experience the awful malaise of having no one but themselves to serve or care for. As they shared the work of clearing and sorting the Professor’s papers and effects, Bridie said once, “You’d think Father used to go about this house beating gongs, the way this awful silence has come down on it since,” and Kate sadly agreed. There had been so little stridency, so little aggression about him, yet the house, and in particular his study, tidy, orderly, garnered, seemed to echo with emptiness for want of him.

  They discussed their plans, knowing that, much as they loved the place and its associations, there was no future for either of them there. There was money enough to give Bridie her floristry training, but the house must be sold to provide nest-eggs for all three girls. Norah was looking forward to her first baby and did not expect to be home until her husband’s long leave, a year hence. And though Kate allowed Bridie to believe she would return as soon as possible to her job in London, she knew she must face answering Dennis’s question first.

  Conor’s reaction to their tragedy had been typical of the man. He had not telephoned the conventional tentative, “If there’s anything I can do—he had come straight over and done it, taking one sad duty after another into his hands, always there for them or at the end of a telephone line whenever they needed help or advice which was always forthcoming.

  That was the difference between him and Dennis, who had loved the Professor deeply and whose sense of loss looked to them for comfort as much as theirs sought his. Dennis’s dejection of spiri
t matched theirs and they shared memories of which Conor knew nothing. Conor’s goodwill was all present action and he offered few formal condolences. But it was Conor, not Dennis, who spoke a truth for which Kate knew she was groping, though without finding it until he put it into words.

  Conor said, “You know, Kate, the thing you are when someone you love has died is a lopped tree. But not a felled one—mark that. Believe it or not, you’ll grow new branches and the sap that’ll grow them won’t be mere healed regrets; it’ll be all the best that he was. That remains. That you’ll keep. You may forget the way he looked and the sound of his voice, but in time the good in him, the quality of him will be you—yours to be loved for in your turn. Have you the courage and the patience, d’you think, to wait for that?”

  Kate shook her head. “I don’t know. At present I’m afraid of forgetting every smallest thing about him,” she admitted. But her heart knew Conor was right—the real eternities did not depend on the frailty of human memory. They would endure and be passed on for as long as anyone loved and was loved. But how had Conor known it so clearly while she had only fumbled blindly towards it in the dark?

  Meanwhile Dennis had planned a kindness of his own, which came to light when he was at the house one morning with Kate.

  When the telephone rang she answered it in his hearing, then turned to him. “That was Ferber the estate agent,” she told him. “But I suppose you gathered that?”

  “I did,” he agreed.

  “They say you’ve offered our full price for the house, and that you don’t want vacant possession. Is that true?”

  He nodded. “If Ferber says so—”

  “But, Dennis—why?”

  “For various reasons. No, Kate”—as her chin went up defensively—“there are no strings to my offer, don’t think it. We’ll talk about—all that when you’re ready, not before. But had you thought how you and Bridie would be placed for a home if someone else wanted to buy and you had to move out quickly?”

  “Well, Bridie is going to Dublin next month and she’ll be living in a hostel Rory has found for her. And I—”

  “Norah, then?” put in Dennis quickly. “She and Tom will need a stamping ground when they come home on leave.”

  “That’s a long way ahead. And even if you want the house, we couldn’t let you pay vacant possession price and then not get it.”

  “Even if I don’t want to live in it alone, and one or other of you three may need it for quite a time yet? If you insist, you can pay me a peppercorn rent for it for as long as any of you want it as a pied-a-terre. But you mustn’t cheat me of the gesture of buying it, Kate, you really mustn’t. I’ve money enough to take the price in my stride, and there’s no other way open to me of repaying the debt I owe you.”

  “You owe us no debt, Dennis!”

  “More than one, Kate dear. Haven’t you and Bridie and your father always been here for me whenever I’ve needed you? You’ve made this place a home for me; you’ve fed me, mothered me, borne with me—So much for one debt; and for the rest, what do you suppose it does to me to realise that, but for me, the Professor might still be alive?”

  Kate protested, “Oh, Dennis, you mustn’t shoulder that guilt! Dr. Kilian said—”

  “I know—that it could have happened to him any time. But does that help me, unless I can do the little in my power to make up to you for the hand I had in its happening just when it did? That’s why you’ve got to let me buy the house on my terms, Kate. Will you?” Realising that this time it lay directly in her power to help him, Kate told him that if Norah agreed, the house was his, and had her reward when he said, “Bless you, Kate. You’ve done more for me than you know.”

  The news went round the Lake and was debated wherever people gathered. On the subject of Kate’s and Bridie’s affairs the theme changed from, “And what’ll those two poor girls do, now their da has gone?” to “They’re saying that young Regan of the Island has bought the house under them, the way he’s letting them stay in it until Bridie is away to Dublin and Kate back to England. Though what he’s thinking of, to let a fine girl like Kate slip through his fingers, and he a widower with no ties to him, only the Dear knows.”

  It was in that form that the gossip reached the Lakestrand and the ears of Mrs. Burke who, preferring fact to rumour any day, was not content to leave it there.

  “I’d have thought those two would have had matters fixed between them before now,” she told Conor. “Bridie says Kate means to go back to England, but that could be because she’s under some obligation to her firm. Could you be asking Dennis perhaps what his intentions are? Or shall I?”

  “You will not,” said Conor shortly. “For there’s no need.”

  “No need? D’you say that? How do you know?”

  “From the evidence of my eyes and from the Professor himself. The day we picked Dennis from the lake he called him ‘Kate’s man’, and who should know if he didn’t?”

  “Who indeed? Except, of course, that the poor man didn’t always get the rights of what was going on around him. But if it’s so, I’m very glad for them, and to make sure, you could tell Dennis as much the next time he’s over here, and I’ll tell Kate.”

  “You do that if you like,” said Conor. “But don’t expect me to be congratulating Regan. For I’m not glad.”

  “You’re not? Why, son—!” Momentarily his mother’s shrewd eyes flicked him, then she scolded, “And why should you be sour about it? Is it Dennis not good enough for her, you think, or she not good enough for him?”

  “Neither. But Kate will only be taking him by reason of her pity for him and the mothering instinct in her that she should be keeping for her own children.”

  “And who are you to say that Kate mightn’t have enough and to spare for Dennis too? Or that she should ask your advice about marrying him, since she must know her own mind, surely, after knowing all about him long before she ever met you?” said Mrs. Burke mildly.

  “If she’d known her own mind, she’d have taken him then, instead of leaving him to marry happily enough elsewhere—”

  “Son, you can’t say that!”

  “I can and I do,” Conor insisted. “They wouldn’t have given another thought to each other if chance hadn’t thrown them both back here. Dennis is getting her on the rebound from that English fellow who jilted her, and she is taking him out of the charity of her heart. I tell you, Mother, so far as the kind of love that makes a marriage goes, those two just don’t know they’re born. For instance, what man but Dennis, as good as engaged to a girl like Kate, would get her to himself on the shore on a dark night and then only kiss her as if he’d been press-ganged into a game of Postman’s Knock? Or as if she were a bit of Dresden china?”

  Mrs. Burke smiled. “If you were there to see them at it, it couldn’t have been all that dark,” she pointed out.

  Conor snapped, “Oh, Mother, don’t be so darned logical. It wasn’t dark either; if you must know, it was moonlight. But the principle’s the same—if a fellow doesn’t kiss his girl as if he means it in the moonlight, when does he?”

  “I daresay, when they’re quite sure they aren’t being overlooked by Peeping Toms,” said Mrs. Burke dryly. “Anyway, your argument hasn’t a leg to stand on and you know it. You’re just being cantankerous for goodness knows what reason.”

  “Because I’m convinced there’s nothing there should be between Dennis and Kate.”

  “I don’t know. There’s his patent need of someone to care for him, and the security he can offer Kate, and companionship and a friendship that goes back a long way. Believe me, son, there are a lot worse reasons for marriage than all those.”

  “And a heck of a lot better ones too,” retorted Conor as he banged from the room without waiting for the thoughtful, “Well, well—” which was his mother’s reply.

  During the week in which Dennis was expecting to hear the result of the design competition, Kate had to go to Cork on the business of the sale of the house.


  She chose to go in to the city on a day when she could share the van with Bridie, and they arranged to meet in the restaurant of a department store after Kate’s appointment with the solicitors and when Bridie had done her buying in the flower market. Bridie never knew how long she would be at the market; she also had some personal shopping to do that morning, and Kate was at the rendezvous first. It was the mid-morning coffee hour and the place was crowded. But after waiting, she was given a table for two and had just been served with coffee when the waitress brought up someone else.

  The girl smiled charmingly. “If Madam wouldn’t be minding, this lady—” she began, and before Kate could say she was keeping the second chair for a friend, the newcomer had seated herself, was drawing off her gloves and Hester Davenport’s light, reedy voice spoke across the tabled “Small World indeed. Long time, no see,” said Hester as Kate froze with distaste at having to move her own bag and gloves to make room for her.

  “Good morning,” said Kate stiffly. “I was expecting Bridie.”

  “Bridie? Oh, then of course I’ll move when she comes—if there’s room. Meanwhile, I hope you won’t mind if I smoke? And will you?”

  “No, thank you.” Kate refused the proffered cigarettes and stirred her coffee, determined not to be routed but hoping the nothings of polite conversation would not be expected of her.

  Hester, however, appeared entirely at ease. She looked about her. “Do you come here often? I only drop in when I’ve been shopping. Usually in the mornings I’m meeting someone or other in the Yacht Club bar. Are you a member? You should be. You probably wouldn’t find it too difficult to get a sponsor,” she said, her tone implying the reverse of her words.