by Susan Barrie
The only thing she did not like to think about was what awaited Miranda when they arrived at their journey’s end.
That night she was sitting working away at the embroidered cloth when the footsteps she had been subconsciously listening for all day stopped outside her door. She allowed her needle to remain poised halfway to her work as she called, “Come in.”
Dinner had been over for about a couple of hours, and the house was very still once more. It was the sort of silence that in an old house, can almost be felt, and as Sir John quietly opened the door the grandfather clock in the hall started to chime and shatter it, and it was echoed by the silvery tones of the distant stable clock that seemed to hang quivering in the cold night air without.
Lucy stood up at once to offer Sir John a chair, but he declined it.
“Thank you,” he said, as he stood staring down at her glowing electric fire that simulated the appearance of logs in an antique basket, “but I’ve been sitting for most of the evening in the library and I’d like to stand for a change, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course not,” Lucy said, and wondered whether Lynette Harling had been sitting with him in the library—although it was difficult to picture the strange vividness of Lynette against that somber background—and, if not, why not?
Lucy kept a motionless hand over the needlework in her lap while she studied Sir John secretly under lowered eyelids. He seemed temporarily to have forgotten her presence while he stared at the fire, and for the first time since she had known him she thought that tonight there were lines of natural gravity in his face, and his whole demeanor seemed to be somehow clouded. His dark brows brooded and were drawn close together, and his lips were compressed and there seemed to be a tired droop to them at the corners.
He leaned one shoulder against the mantelpiece, and it was not such an exceptionally broad shoulder. His build was really very slender, and it was emphasized by the dark clothes he wore at night. Somehow at that moment Lucy could not think of him as the head of a firm of shipbuilders and President of the Ash-Aird Line. There seemed to be little of the steely, self-contained strength about him that she had once suspected—and that must still be there, although the mask had slipped a little under the obvious worry and anxiety that consumed him at the moment. She could feel that he was worried, and she knew that he was making no attempt to hide it from her. He was no longer Tiberius—Kathleen’s name for him—if, indeed, he had ever shared any of the qualities of the Tiberius who had lived so long ago, which Lucy strongly doubted.
To her, at that moment, there was something about him that made her want to get up and insist that he accept one of her comfortable chairs, and that he also permit her to make him a cup of tea, although he probably hated tea, or merely despised it. She did not realize that she was looking at him in a very revealing fashion when he suddenly turned and looked at her.
“Nurse Nolan,” he began, “I....” And then all at once he
paused, while they gazed at one another as if compelled. Lucy felt a hot tide of color rise up in her cheeks, and she suddenly felt rather breathless, as if she was waiting for something to happen. And then the moment passed, and Sir John continued, “I’ve no doubt you’ve been expecting me to come and see you before this?”
“I ...well, I ...”
She wished he would not stand there, so close to her on the thick fur rug that she could have put out a hand and touched him had she been weak enough to give way to the desire to do so, and still looking down at her with something rather baffling in his dark gray eyes. She picked up her sewing and ostentatiously put one or two stitches into it while she fumbled mentally for words.
“You were anxious to hear all there is to hear about Miranda, I’m sure,” he said. But he cast a glance around the room as he spoke, taking in the attractive cosiness of it, with the reading lamp at Lucy’s elbow shedding a flood of warm light across the carpet, and the little things of hers that were scattered around. There was something shut-in and intimate about the room, and all at once he changed his mind. “I think I will sit down,” he told her, and promptly sank into an armchair. A faint twinkle appeared in his eyes as he stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed one well-shod foot over the other, while he allowed his head to sink back into the cushion behind it. “I must say you’re very restful here—really restful!”
“I was just about to make some tea.” Lucy’s glance went to the electric kettle and the switch beside it, and then she looked up at him again, diffidently. “Can’t I persuade you to have some, too?”
The twinkle in his eyes deepened.
“I suppose that’s a hospital habit that you find it difficult to shake off?” he observed. “Tea at all hours! But although I’m not personally addicted to it, I don’t mind having a cup now if you really are going to make some?”
“Oh, yes, I am!” she assured him.
She was glad of the opportunity to get up and bestir herself, although she was conscious at the same time that his eyes followed most of her movements. But as she set out the cups on the little tray and put the teapot to warm on the tiled hearth, she became less nervous, not quite so full of that strange confusion that had attacked her when he stood so near to her. She talked quickly, and somewhat irrelevantly, while she brewed the tea, and he answered her in an absentminded fashion that gave no clue to what he was actually thinking.
“Thank you.” He accepted his cup from her hands, and put it beside him on the small table she arranged conveniently close to his elbow. She lifted the lid of a cigarette box and offered it to him, but he shook his head, the tiniest of smiles replacing the twinkle in his eyes. “I prefer my own, if it won’t offend you? They’re specially blended for me—a mixture of Turkish and Virginian tobaccos. Try one yourself.”
His gold case was produced and held out in front of her, and when she had selected a cigarette he lit it for her, and then lighted his own. While the flame of his lighter was held close to her face his sleek head seemed to come very near to her own, and for an instant, before the little blue, dancing spurt of flame was extinguished, her eyelashes swept upward, and her eyes looked into his. It was a moment that did something queer to her heartbeat, but it subsided when he lay back in his chair again.
He let out a little sigh.
“When I came upstairs a few moments ago, I was feeling ... well, I don’t know how to express to you how I was feeling! But there was nothing pleasant about it. I was sunk somewhere between dejection and complete despondency. I wasn’t even very hopeful, although I have been given to understand that there is a certain amount of hope for Miranda. But here in this room—although I haven’t yet tasted your tea—” flashing almost a warm smile at her “—I already feel different.”
“I’m glad,” Lucy said simply. And she added, “I thought, somehow, you were not very happy about— things.”
“No,” he agreed, “I was not,” and he stared at the glowing false coals of the electric fire.
“And yet you say Dr. Wern held out hope?”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, he did. He says there’s a fifty-fifty chance.”
“But—” Lucy was immediately perturbed “—I rather gathered from Miranda—in fact, I’m quite sure Dr. Wern himself assured her that he could cure her altogether and she would walk again! She’s got no doubt about it in her own mind.”
“Isn’t that perhaps as well?”
He looked at her with the tired look back in his gray eyes.
“You mean that ... Oh, no!” Lucy exclaimed, and clasped her hands together automatically over her slender breasts. “Not—not one thing or the other? Either she’ll walk again, or....”
Sir John nodded his head very slowly, and ground out the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray she had provided for the purpose.
“That’s what I do mean—that’s what Rupprecht Wern means! After all, no man can achieve the impossible, and we know that specialists she had seen in this country have all pronounced their verdict that there is little ho
pe of Miranda’s ever walking again. You know how it is with these spinal injuries. You’ve probably had to witness this sort of thing before.”
“Yes, but Miranda is so young!”
He shrugged slightly.
“Young or not, she is not in a condition to make an operation of this sort—the sort of operation Wern will perform on her if she goes to Vienna—a certain success. But for certain complications he could guarantee success, but as it is—the most he can guarantee is that it will either go one way or the other with her! If her strength holds out, she will walk again—if not....”
Lucy again felt cold inside, as she had felt on the afternoon of the day Dr. Wern arrived to make his examination of Miranda, and she had gone in to sit with the invalid while her father talked to the doctor in this very room—this brightly lighted, cozy and intimate small room!
She looked around it with vague eyes, and then she lifted her cup of tea to her lips with shaking hands. She gulped at it hastily, and then spilled a considerable amount of it into her saucer.
Sir John watched her with grave eyes, and then bent forward to take the cup away from her and replace it on the tray. He even offered her his handkerchief to wipe away a few drops of tea that had rolled onto her dress.
“You’re very much attached to Miranda, aren’t you?” he asked, as she rubbed, without quite realizing what she was doing, at the skirt of her dress.
She nodded, but she did not trust herself to speak. “Then, in that case, you must see that Wern did the right thing when he told her that he could make her walk again? He can—if the ordeal she had already faced up to hasn’t made it impossible for her to stand up to very much more! But if, on the other hand, things don’t ... don’t go as we hope they will ... then she will never know! So, therefore, the wise thing plainly was to let her believe that she will come through this thing with flying colors, and, happy in that belief, at least she will not dread what is ahead of her!”
“Yes,” Lucy whispered, “I see that. And at the moment she is quite confident.”
“Which is a state of mind Wern wishes to encourage.”
“And you have quite decided to allow him to operate?”
“I think so—yes, yes, I have!”
He lay back in his chair again, and once more he started at the fire. There was something quiet and reflective in the expression on his face.
“I expect,” he said, almost musingly, “that you’ve sometimes thought that I don’t concern myself very much about Miranda?”
Lucy stared at him, unable to think of the best way in which to reply to such a question.
“You may even have decided—as I’m sure you did several weeks ago—that I neglect her?”
“Oh, no!” Lucy said quickly, because his eyes seemed to be accusing her. “Not ... not that! Not really that!”
“Then what?” he said swiftly. “What kind of thoughts have you had about me?”
Lucy had been maltreating his handkerchief between her restless fingers, and now she gazed down at it where it lay in her lap, a ball of crumpled white linen stained by the tea she had spilt. She picked it up and endeavored to smooth out the creases.
“I thought that perhaps you ... you were not very fond of children! After all, some people are not—it isn’t entirely unnatural.... But, even so, I’m quite sure you’ve always
done everything possible for Miranda, from her earliest years.” She looked up at him quickly, and then away again, for he was lying back watching her, and there was a kind of intrigued cynicism in his eyes now. “You’ve surrounded her with everything she needed, and you could hardly do more—”
“Except betray a little interest in her!”
“You could have done that,” she agreed quietly, “if you felt interest in her.”
“Come, come!” he exclaimed, with a cold curl of a smile on his lips. “You forget that I am, after all, her father!”
“Yes, but—”
“There are fathers and fathers, eh?”
Lucy was acutely embarrassed, but at the same time it was no use pretending anything with him he was shrewd enough to read her thoughts and she realized it. He also had an excellent memory.
“You once more or less accused me of keeping Miranda like a prisoner in a tower—a lonely little prisoner who was unwanted by anyone save you and Fiske and, possibly, Abbott and Purvis, as well! Do you remember that?” he asked her.
“Yes,” Lucy admitted, still very quietly, “I do remember perfectly.”
“Well, since you do, I will be perfectly truthful with you-” he leaned a little toward her “—and confess that my interest in Miranda was never great until these last few weeks! Perhaps that was because I hardly ever saw her, and imagined she was perfectly happy seeing little of me! You see—” a note creeping into his voice that suddenly almost hurt her, for it contained a kind of hollow echo of loneliness “—after my wife died, I found that the one thing that took my mind off everything was—complete absorption in my work! It became an obsession—that and the ease with which I accumulated more and more wealth. It was like an opiate that lulled me into a state of false contentment and made me believe that there was nothing else in life I wanted. But I’ve recently discovered that there are other things....”
His voice was suddenly deep and quiet, and it vibrated slightly in a way that made an impression on Lucy similar to that that a sensitive hand passing a bow across a violin string would have on the violin string. “There is much more to life than the way I have been living it—I know that now!”
Lucy felt a kind of swift, unbearable hurt, for of course he was referring in an oblique way to Lynette Harling—the woman he proposed to make his second wife! Marriage to her would open up all sorts of avenues that would lead to a new and enchanting kind of happiness for him! His association with Lynette had even, or so it seemed, made him become aware of his child. Lucy crushed his handkerchief into a tighter ball in her hand, and he seemed to be regarding her with a good deal of earnestness.
“I think it was you, as a result of that accusation you hurled at my head, who made me suddenly realize that Miranda was, after all, my own daughter—”
There came a quick tap at the door, and they both looked up in surprise. When Lucy called “Come in,” Lynette Harling flung open the door, and then stood there in the aperture regarding them, holding a gorgeous dressing gown of stiffened Chinese blue satin around her. She seemed amazed at the sight of Sir John, sitting intimately on the other side of Lucy’s fire and sharing its genial warmth with her, and as for Sir John himself, he appeared only capable of gazing up at her as if the sight of her, with two brilliant braids of hair falling one on each side of her swanlike neck, had smitten him dumb and immobile with admiration.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It was Lucy who recovered from her surprise first. “You wanted me for something, Miss Harling?” she asked.
Lynette Harling’s long, green eyes smiled in a queer way.
“Yes,” she admitted, “I did! I wanted to borrow a couple of aspirins, because I’m not sleeping very well lately. But if I’m interrupting something...?”
“Of course not,” Lucy said quickly, and Sir John stood up. He looked toward Lynette with a mixture of surprise and concern in his eyes.
“But I’d no idea you’d gone to bed yet, Lynette! When I came upstairs you were playing the phonograph, and you and Burke were dancing. I imagined you would go on dancing for quite a while.”
She gave him a kind of gentle, half-pitying smile.
“Instead of which I suddenly discovered how tired I was, and decided to go to bed! I’m like that, you know—exhaustion sweeps over me all in a moment, and I simply have to do something about it! And, in any case—you were not there!”
“I had something important to discuss with Nurse Nolan.”
“Ah, yes—the poor little Miranda, and this operation, I suppose?” She gave him the kind of smile this time that combined with the obvious effects of the housecoat, her unbound titi
an hair and the rest of her ravishing appearance, would have played havoc with almost any male who was not altogether insensible. “Have you decided yet that Nurse
Nolan is to go with her to Vienna? It seems to me an excellent plan!”
“We haven’t got as far as discussing Nurse Nolan’s going to Vienna.”
“No?” with delicate eyebrows raised. “But you will, of course, suggest to her that she accompanies Miranda?” She looked around the room, a sudden shrewdness in her eyes as they took in the well-thought-out comfort of it, and Lucy’s workbasket standing open, and her embroidery peeping out of it. She noticed the tea tray, too, on the little table between the two deep armchairs, and the ashtray containing the stubs of two recently smoked cigarettes.
“I think, Nurse Nolan, if you don’t mind,” she said in a very formal tone, “that if you can spare me the two aspirins I came for I’ll return to my own room and try and get some sleep. I really feel quite limp!”
“In that case,” suggested Lucy, “wouldn’t it be better if I brought them to you, and you took them with a glass of hot milk? I can easily slip down to the kitchen and heat some.”
“Oh, well—if it won’t be troubling you....”
“It would be no trouble at all.”
“I’m sure Nurse Nolan would be delighted to tuck you in for the night and make sure that you are comfortable, Lynette,” Sir John told her, smiling at her with the gentleness he always reserved for her, while he studied the pale mask of her face—no doubt for some evidence of the exhaustion she was experiencing, which, Lucy realized, probably caused him considerable concern.