by Sara Seale
“...As I heard the sweet lark sing In the clear air of the day...”
“There! You see?” she said triumphantly.
His grey eyes were cold again.
“Don’t run away with rosy dreams of a spectacular comeback, will you, Sarah?” he observed dryly.
She made a small, impatient movement, tossing back her black hair.
“I’m not a fool,” she said. “If you say you can never play professionally again, I believe you. I can understand that you need more than mere facility to play in public, but that’s no reason why you should abandon the piano altogether. Surely there is pleasure for you in making music, just as there is for me in singing?”
He looked at her oddly.
“You think there might be?”
“Well, unless what you really care about is just the applause, and I don’t think you’re like that, Adrian.”
He smiled reluctantly.
“You’re very severe. No, I don’t think I’m like that, either.”
She leaned across the piano and touched him shyly. “For me, and people like me, you would bring a great deal of pleasure,” she said. “You mustn’t despise the amateur.”
“Have I given you that impression?”
“Not exactly. But I’ve always felt that you would rather not play at all than descend to amateur status yourself, and I think that’s a—a denial of a gift.”
There was a little silence, then he said gently:
“How do you know these things?”
“I thought everyone knew,” she replied simply.
He looked tired, but the strain had gone from his face. “Everyone’s not as wise as you, Sarah,” he said. “I’ll consider your advice.”
Kathy came running into the room, her cheeks pink, her eyes shining.
“I heard you,” she cried. “Oh, Adrian, it’s wonderful! “You’ll play again after all ... it makes me want to cry ... we will have given you back to music, and—”
“Be quiet, Kathy,” said Sarah sharply.
“Sarah!” said Kathy and looked as if she had been slapped.
“Spare me the rhapsodies, they’re quite misplaced,” Adrian said and got up and left the room. It was the first time he had ever spoken to her without gentleness.
Kathy looked as if she was about to cry.
“What’s the matter with you both?” she said. “I heard him playing—it was wonderful. I suppose you just don’t understand about music, but we should encourage him, we should coax him back to his career.”
“Oh, Kathy,” said Sarah a little helplessly, “one doesn’t coax someone of Adrian’s ability into a mushy state of self deception.”
“Mushy—Adrian mushy!”
“No, he’s not, that’s the whole point. He’ll never be good enough to play again in public, that’s all.”
“How would you know?”
“He knows and that’s sufficient. But I’d just got him round to the idea that that was no reason why he should refuse to play at all, when you had to come bursting in all dewy-eyed and rapturous.”
The tears gathered on Kathy’s lashes.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Of course I was excited—it sounded like a miracle. You couldn’t be expected to understand a musician as I would, but why do you have to interfere? Why do you always have to interfere?”
“I don’t think I do that.”
“Yes, you do. You try to manage all our lives, me and Joe, and now Adrian. Just because father left you Dun Rury it doesn’t give you the right to arrange my affairs.”
“Sarah’s pointed face looked suddenly a little pinched.
“I don’t want to manage your affairs, Kathy,” she said. “You and Joe—well, we all thought you would have him in the end—so did poor Joe—but that’s got nothing to do with this. Oh, darling, why are we quarrelling? We never quarrel.” She put her arms round her sister and tried to draw her close, but Kathy pushed her away.
“It was you who started the whole thing, telling me to be quiet in front of Adrian, both of you shutting me out when I’m the one person in this house who can really understand what his accident has meant to him.”
“All right, Kathy,” Sarah said wearily. “Perhaps he will explain it to you better than I can. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
She went quietly from the room, and a few minutes later Adrian saw her from the nursery window running with that now familiar urgency down the snowy drive and out through the gates.
She returned late, troubled about her quarrel with Kathy, but she found her sister sewing by the snug fire, and she lifted a smiling face and said in her usual gentle tones:
“I was silly, Sarah. Adrian has explained to me. I spent a lovely afternoon in the nursery.”
Sarah came to the fire and stood warming her frozen fingers.
“Kathy—” she said uncertainly, but Kathy raised her head again and her eyes were soft and untroubled.
“I’ve said I was silly, Sarah,” she said. “And I’m sorry I was cross. I wish the snow would go. We’re all cooped up here too much together.”
But the snow still lay, and a few days later the stable roof collapsed.
“I felt it would,” said Sarah gloomily, surveying the damage. “That means a new roof before I’m ready to pay for it.”
With Nolan and the garden boy’s help she managed to patch up the hole and stuff it with straw to keep the worst of the cold out, but it was only the beginning of a series of small disasters. Frozen pipes, choked gutters and an ominous crack in the east wall of the house.
“Oh, well,” Sarah said, shrugging off the responsibilities she could not meet, “it will all have to wait till the summer.”
“How long is it since anything was done to the house?” Adrian asked.
“I don’t know. Long before Father’s death. He never bothered much the last years. He said the place would stand for ever.”
“Have you any idea of how touch it would cost to put things in order?”
“No. An awful lot, Uncle B. says. More than I shall ever have.”
“Yet you hang on?”
“Yes, I hang on,” she said, and her face wore the old crusading look. “I shall hang on if it falls down about my ears.”
“I believe you would,” he said and smiled.
Adrian took his usual morning stroll while his rooms were being done, and sometimes Kathy joined him, charming in a knitted scarlet hood and gloves to match, slipping a hand through his arm and quoting verse.
“It’s like a fairy-tale, isn’t it?” she would say, surveying the frozen countryside with the glistening mountains dipping down to the lough. “It’s like Hans Andersen, or that poem of Keats, or the music you played me from the third act of La Boheme.”
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” he said, smiling indulgently at her flights of fancy. “But, like many beautiful things, it has its drawbacks.”
“What has its drawbacks?” asked Sarah, appearing from the yard with a shovel.
“Beauty,” he replied with a grin, enjoying her surprised expression.
“Has beauty drawbacks?” she asked, looking puzzled.
“It can have, but actually we were talking about the snow.”
“Oh, the snow! Well, yes, that’s certainly having its drawbacks. What a good thing Miss Dearlove isn’t still with us. She’d have found a tiny frozen leprechaun clinging to an icicle.”
Kathy giggled.
“Still,” she said, “I was just saying it does look fairy-like with the mountains all wrapped in snow. What’s that song from The Immortal Hour, Adrian? ‘How beautiful they are, the lordly ones who dwell in the hills, the hollow hills...’ ” Sarah leaned on her shovel, and sang softly:
“ ‘How beautiful he is, the Flinty One ...’ ”
Kathy looked a little shocked, but Adrian grinned.
“If you’re not careful, one of these days I’ll come out of the hollow hills and eat you up,” he said, and she darted away, brandishing her shove
l.
“That was rather rude,” Kathy said to her later. “You oughtn’t to have let him know what we used to call him in private. He might be hurt.”
Sarah grinned.
“Have a sense of humor, darling,” she said, “Adrian doesn’t mind.”
Kathy stuck out her underlip like a child.
“You don’t know. And we called him the Flinty One before we knew he wasn’t really. I wouldn’t like him to misunderstand.”
“Oh, Kathy!” Sarah dropped a kiss on her sister’s head and ran away.
But her thoughts turned often to Joe in those snowbound days. Did he, too, feel shut out? Did he picture Kathy thrown into a forced intimacy with a man who had so much more to give her than had he himself and know that small dull ache which seemed to be her own constant companion now?
Shutting up byre and stable for the night, Sarah would lean against the half-door, listening to the beats munching, and watching the light from her lantern throw grotesque shadows on the rotting timbers while she tried to assess her emotions. Joe loves Kathy, so that is quite simple, she would argue with herself, but I love only my father and Dun Rury, only Adrian is somehow mixed up in it too ... then she would return to the house, and Adrian might be reading verse aloud while Aunt Em knitted by the snug fire and Kathy bent over her dressmaking, looking up every so often to smile at him.
“Do you like that?” he would sometimes say, including Sarah in their intimacy, and she would more often than not answer rudely: “No, I think it’s mushy.”
Most afternoons he would say to Kathy as soon as lunch was over: “Come along, young woman. Everyone in this house works except us,” and they would go off together, his hand on her shoulder, she laughing up at him, pleased that he should need her help. Sarah would watch them, then, if there were no jobs outside to be done, she would sit until tea-time with Nonie in the kitchen where she could not hear the music and voices coming from the nursery. He was falling in love with Kathy, she thought, and who could blame him? She shut her eyes in unexpected pain. All her life she had been accustomed to the admiration of others for her sister; this was the first time it had hurt her. Her heart ached for Joe and for the old happy days when life was uncomplicated and the nursery just the room where they had spent their childhood.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
By the end of the second week there was still no sign of a thaw. The bath water system was out of action and Nonie boiled great cauldrons of water which were carried up to the bathroom each day. The Riordans took their baths in the old hip-bath in front of the kitchen fire, and Adrian could sometimes hear the shrieks and laughter which proceeded from the kitchen at these times. He in his more chilly privacy often envied them their fun, remembering the rare occasions when such incidents had upset the normal dull routine of his own nursery at home.
For other matters he had the freedom of Nonie’s kitchen, now. He would sit by the stove cleaning his shoes, or give Sarah a hand with the evening wash-up. They all took him for granted as one of the family, and when Sarah said: “I don’t know why we take your money when you do half the work,” he replied with a twinkle: “I’m paying for the home comforts. Now I see what you meant by them.”
“It’s queer how he fits in when you think what a fuss he made about his rights when he first came,” Aunt Em said wonderingly, and Nonie replied:
“Sure, it was just his stiff English way. He knows now there’s more to be got out of life than strummin’ the piany.”
He was late down for tea one afternoon after a few hours of typing in the nursery and found the family had nearly finished.
“Where’s Sarah?” he asked, wondering for the first time why she and Kathy could not take it in turns to shut the beasts up for the night.”
“She’s gone to see old Paddy,” Aunt Em said, handing him his tea. “He’s not quite right in the head, you know, and she thought he might be getting low in provisions.”
“But that’s right down the far end of the lough,” said Adrian quickly.
“Yes, above the bog. A very tumble-down little place. I hope the roof has stood the weight of the snow.”
“But, Miss Emma, surely the south road’s impassable?”
“Oh, yes, for cars. But one can walk.”
“In the dark? There’ll be drifts six feet or more on those deep bends.”
“Only where the banks shelve to the lough, Sarah says. She knows the road very well.”
Adrian put down his cup and stared at her.
“But, Miss Emma, don’t you realize that conditions are quite different now? No one in their senses should have allowed the child to go all that way alone in this weather.”
Aunt Em’s eyes under the curled fringe were surprised and apologetic.
“Well, I did suggest it was foolish, but you know what Sarah is. She’s always gone her own way.”
“She’ll be all right,” Kathy said, smiling at him. “Sarah can always find her way home.”
“I’m not afraid of her getting lost, except in a six-foot drift,” he said shortly.
He suddenly felt extremely angry. They were complacent, irresponsible. They sat there smugly by the fire and had no thought for possible danger. “I’m going to meet her,” he said abruptly, and they stared at him.
“But you don’t know the road at all,” Kathy protested.
“Nonsense! I can take a torch and follow her tracks. How long has she been gone?”
Aunt Em glanced at the clock.
“Oh, about three hours. But it would take her much more than that to get there and back in the snow.”
“Adrian, really it isn’t necessary,” Kathy said, distressed. “Sarah can look after herself.”
“I think it’s very necessary,” he replied sharply. “I don’t want to be rude, Kathy, but it sometimes strikes me that you all take it a little too much for granted that Sarah can look after herself.”
Kathy’s lips trembled as he went out and shut the door.
“Do you suppose he thinks we’re callous, Aunt Em?” she said. “I didn’t—I didn’t think he took much notice of what Sarah does.”
“I’m afraid he does.” Her aunt sighed. “And I’m afraid we do take the child for granted. I—I shouldn’t have allowed her to go, I suppose, but I was thinking of
something else at the time. You know how it is.”
“I know a lot of unnecessary fuss is being made,” Kathy said crossly. “Adrian’s much more likely to fall in a drift than Sarah.”
Adrian filled a flask with whisky, pocketed a spare muffler, and, turning the collar of his overcoat up to meet the brim of his hat, started out down the drive. He was still angry. As Miss Dearlove had long ago suspected, he possessed a good healthy temper underneath that cool exterior he presented to the world and it was roused now. That silly old aunt with her vagueness and dim-wittedness; Kathy with her poses and her lovely, uncomprehending face ... how had they come to let themselves be ruled by a foolhardy child?
It was bitterly cold but there was no wind. Sarah’s tracks in the snow were plain and crisp in the strong light of his torch and he followed them easily, careful not to diverge from the crown of the road. Snow was banked high to his right where it had slipped down the mountain-side, and to his left the unbroken surface was nearly level with the road, where normally there was a steep drop to the water. Had he not had the line of footprints to guide him, he would soon have gone off the road, and he thought grimly of Sarah unknowingly blazing the trail for him, careless that one false step would lead her into a drift.
Here, he remembered, was the bad bend that curved like a corkscrew; this must be the thorn tree which grew out of a jutting rock. He glanced at his watch. He had been walking for over an hour and there was still no sign of her. The single line of tracks went on before him, wavering a little, now. Once they disappeared altogether in a small drift where she must have fallen, but he picked them up again further on. A long-forgotten verse of poetry jumped into his head and made a jingle for his steps.
They wept—and turning homeward, cried
“In heaven we all shall meet!”
When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy’s feet.
Who wrote it, Tennyson, Wordsworth? Kathy could tell him.
They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks one by one...
Something, something, something, something,
And further there were none.
“Oh, curse the thing!” he said aloud and quickened his pace.
He could see now the far outline of the end of the lough. Paddy’s shanty must be about a mile down the road; he should have met her long ago. All at once he stopped. He had been walking mechanically, a little hypnotized by the perpetual glare of the beam of his torch on the unchanging whiteness, but he realized now that he had been following two sets of tracks, one going and one coming back. He turned and retraced his steps, alarm rising quickly in him, and a little farther back where the road took a sudden turn, the returning footprints ended. And farther there were none ... and farther there were none...
He began to shout, directing the light in a circle about him, but there was no reply. He scouted again, and his voice echoed back to him from the mountains. The third time he thought he heard a sound. He called again and this time he was sure. It was the small, sleepy response made by someone trying to wake up! He moved the torch slowly and then he saw her. She was lying half in a drift behind a large rock; there was a little trickle of blood on her forehead and she must have uncovered the snow from the rock as she fell.
He knelt beside her at the extreme edge of the road, and felt for her pulse. It was slow, but not unduly so, but her lips were blue with cold.
“Sarah!” he cried sharply. “Wake up! Are you hurt?”
She opened her eyes and blinked at him. “What are you doing here?” she asked drowsily.
“I came to look for you, and it’s a good thing I did, it would seem,” he said grimly. “Put your arms round my neck and I’ll pull you out.”