And then, almost before he knew what was happening, a magical transformation had taken place. She was no longer the attractively dressed, properly fed girl who had been in Lady Ranmere’s charge for a week or two. She was cold and wet and hungry, and she was moving slowly along the gutter, singing in a husky, heart-searching little voice.
Perhaps, with her special experience, it was not surprising that she knew so well how to portray hopeless appeal to an indifferent world. But what chilled the heart and misted the eye was the impression of physical wretchedness which she managed to convey. The hands she held out were cold and capped. The feet which shuffled in the gutter were icy from the water that seeped into her broken shoes. She was not attractive—only unbearably pathetic, as she wiped her cold, damp nose with the back of a colder hand.
The song went on in its touching, monotonous repetition, and one could count the people who passed without noticing her by the number of times a mechanical, hopeless smile flickered on to her face and was gone again. Then the music trickled away into silence and that was all.
Anya glanced at Bertram a trifle anxiously this time. As though it had suddenly become important that his first good impression should be confirmed.
But he said nothing as he got up from the piano and came slowly across to where she was standing. Then, to her immeasurable astonishment, he took her face in his hands and kissed her.
“And we very nearly didn’t find you!” he said, with a sort of rough seriousness quite unlike his usual manner. “I wonder how many other artists of rare quality are living and dying in squalor, while the world writes them off as forgotten people.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
That scene in the music-room when she acted and sang for Bertram was ever after to remain for Anya one of the highlights of her life. Until then, accepting him at his own face value, she had found Bertram amusing, charming and a trifle superficial. Certainly she had never thought of him as likely to have any significance for her.
But now she saw him transformed by the real passion of his life—his love for the theatre—and he became an entirely different person, with a weight and value she had never suspected.
To be the cause of this sudden revelation was both thrilling and moving. And, at a moment when she was very near to despair, it was almost intoxicating to find that he regarded her as a discovery more precious than gold, more radiant than diamonds.
Caution might hold him bade from raising too many hopes, but it was beyond him to hide, not so much his excitement in his discovery, as his enchanted delight in her art.
“You shall do other things for me presently,” he told her. “For the moment that will do.” And then, as an afterthought, “I don’t think you need worry about your future now, Anya.”
“What do you mean, exactly?” She looked faintly apprehensive, for she still did not know quite how to assess the fact that he had kissed her. In Anya’s experience men did not kiss you for mere academic pleasure in your powers of entertainment.
He looked at her without sentiment, however, as he said,
“I mean that I’m willing to gamble on my judgment and put money into training you. In one sense, there is little to teach you, and your natural gift must in no way be obscured. But you’ll need some training and disciplining before we can put you on to a full-sized stage or expect you to project that extraordinary gift of yours into a large audience.”
“A large audience?” Anya passed her hands over her face, as though she would clear away some mist from before her eyes. “Are you seriously suggesting that I should be trained for a—a stage career?”
“Of course.” He dismissed any doubt of that almost carelessly. “You don’t suppose I am going to keep that light under a bushel, do you?”
“But then—I should earn money—be independent—?”
“With reasonable luck, most certainly.”
“I can’t believe it!”
“I couldn’t believe it either, when I first saw you do that act with the bonnet,” he retorted with some humour.
“You’re not teasing me?”
“Of course not. This is deadly serious for me. And for you too, I take it?”
“Oh—if you knew!” For a moment she closed her eyes, and, in imagination she saw David looking at her as a personality—someone in her own right—no longer the wait he must pity and protect.
“All right. Perhaps I do know,” Bertram said curtly, but be patted her shoulder with a kindly hand. “Don’t pin too many extravagant hopes to this, will you? It isn’t often that heaven answers all our prayers at one and the same time.”
“No. I suppose not,” agreed Anya soberly. But nothing could quench the hope that had been lit in her heart. At lunchtime, Lady Ranmere regarded the absorbed expressions of her son and her problem guest and enquired of Bertram if he had “heard the news.”
“No,” said her son absently. “What has happened?”
Lady Ranmere raised her eyebrows. “I thought I saw you talking together in the garden. Didn’t you tell Bertram then, Anya?”
“Of course.” Anya smiled slightly. “He has forgotten.”
“Forgotten!” Bertram’s mother looked incredulous.
At which he obligingly searched his memory and said carelessly,
“Oh, yes, of course. You mean about Martin Deane turning up, don’t you? Anya’s quite right. She did tell me, but it had slipped from my mind.”
“Really, my dear! That’s an odd thing to slip from one’s mind.” Lady Ranmere looked rather displeased. “It does affect us all quite considerably. And it is certainly going to make a great difference to Anya’s future.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Bertram smiled and shrugged. “Something else will turn up.”
Lady Ranmere, however, was not a believer in things turning up. In her view one directed events, instead of waiting for them to overtake one.
“I don’t know quite what you think might ‘turn up’,” she said drily. “We shall have to do some serious thinking about Anya’s future.”
“Anya’s future is settled,” Bertram replied, with such conviction that his mother was, not unnaturally, suddenly visited by the horrifying possibility that he had said altogether too much to Anya while he was in the garden.
For a moment she gazed at her son in wordless, stupefied alarm. Then Bertram added coolly, “Anya is going on the stage.” And Lady Ranmere shut her eyes for a second and found some difficulty in resisting a desire to shake her son violently for the fright he had given her.
“The stage?” She recovered herself with an effort. “But we don’t know if she has any talent in that direction. And, anyway—”
“I know,” Bertram said quite gently. “It’s all right, Mother. I have tried her out.”
“Really?” Lady Ranmere was still displeased at the amount of personal interest which her son was choosing to display, and instinctively she sought to minimize the whole thing. “Well, we mustn’t attach too much importance to what may be a small drawing-room talent.”
“We shan’t—if you mean me,” Bertram promised with a smile. But he good-humouredly let it go at that, perhaps because he felt confident of getting his own way at the proper time.
Anya, however, suffered a small tremor of fear and disappointment, lest Lady Ranmere’s low assessment of her gifts should, after all, be nearer the truth than Bertram’s enthusiastic predictions.
“Teresa is coming over to tea,” went on Lady Ranmere, returning to something which really mattered. “I’d be glad if you would be there, Bertram. And please don’t forget about Martin again. This is naturally the most important thing that has happened to Teresa—to our old friend—in years. You will show some sort of pleasure and interest, won’t you?”
Bertram good-humouredly promised that he would, and there the matter rested.
In spite of the excitement and exhilaration of the morning’s events, Anya anticipated Mrs. Preston’s visit with some trepidation. For in no circumstances could she now be anything bu
t an embarrassment to the woman who had enthusiastically—and incorrectly—claimed her as a granddaughter.
However, she tried to appear tranquil and composed as their visitor entered the drawing-room. Though this was made the more difficult by the fact that Celia accompanied her mother—possibly to make sure that on this occasion, at any rate, she did not involve them in some fresh emotional crisis.
“Darling Mary!” It was a flushed and radiant Teresa Preston who advanced to embrace Lady Ranmere, with a fervour which that lady took very well on the whole. “Isn’t it the most wonderful news?”
“It is indeed,” Lady Ranmere agreed warmly.
“I always knew he was alive. I had a feeling that he was. You can’t argue with these things.”
“No,” said Lady Ranmere, resisting the sore temptation to argue, and to point out that for weeks Mrs. Preston had been sure Anya was her granddaughter, even though this must imply that Martin was dead.
“To think that I shall actually see him again, and in a matter of weeks! I can hardly believe it, even now.” Mrs. Preston flung out her hands in a gesture of happiness and glanced round as though to include everyone in the orbit of her joy. As she did so, she noticed Anya.
“Oh, my dear—” She came over and took Anya’s hand. “I’m afraid my joy is, in some sense, your disappointment.”
“No, Mrs. Preston.” Impulsively Anya kissed the happy face that was raised to hers. “Don’t think of it like that. I am very happy that you have found your son alive, even—” she smiled slightly—“if he is not my father. And I never counted too much on that possibility, you know.”
“Didn’t you? I did,” Mrs. Preston confessed naively. “But there is one thing—” still holding Anya’s hand, she turned to the others—“Martin will be able to tell us who Anya’s father really was. He must know who the other man in the photograph was.”
No one, it seemed had thought of this possibility before, and for a moment they all turned their gaze on Anya, as though once more she impinged on their consciousness as a sort of mystery girl, with a story which might presently unfold before them.
“But they may not have known each other particularly well,” Lady Ranmere objected doubtfully. “Martin may not even remember who he was.”
“Of course he will!” Mrs. Preston seemed to take this as a slight reflection on her darling’s powers of memory. “And there is the photograph, to aid his memory.”
“That’s true,” Bertram said. “One should show him the photograph, without saying anything about its significance, and he’ll probably say, ‘Why, that’s old So-and-so! Haven’t thought of him for years’.”
“But I don’t know,” Anya said quietly, “that I want to know who he was.”
“Not want to know who you really are, darling?” Mrs. Preston voiced the astonishment of them all. “But that’s impossible. Of course you want to know.”
“Why?”
Anya spoke quite gently, but the unvarnished monosyllable seemed to shock Mrs. Preston.
“Why?” she repeated, nonplussed. “Because—everyone wants to know who they are, what their roots are. If you have a family you can trace, surely you would want to know them?”
“But they might not want to know me, Mrs. Preston. My father has been dead very many years. No one has ever been able to say even that he married my mother. If he has a family we could trace, Im afraid I might well present an even greater embarrassment and problem to them than I do to all of you.”
“You’re not a problem or embarrassment to us, darling,” Mrs. Preston insisted quickly. But the assertion lacked complete conviction. Possibly because, at that moment, she met her daughter’s eyes.
“Anya is right, Mother. I shouldn’t be too eager to try to solve mysteries which no longer concern you, if I were you.”
“But Anya does concern me still.” Mrs. Preston spoke up boldly about that. “I am deeply interested in her problem.”
“Well, it is a problem we can solve at our leisure,” put in Lady Ranmere, who believed she had reduced the situation to sensible and manageable terms and was not going to have Teresa Preston upsetting it all again. “Let us have tea now, and you shall tell us some more about Martin.” This was a conversational bait which Mrs. Preston could not possibly resist. So she returned to the absorbing topic of her son, and the others listened with genuine interest while she explained afresh how it was that no earlier enquiries had ever brought any news of him to light.
“I still don’t see why he made no attempt to find you again during the war, when he was apparently over here,” Lady Ranmere said. “After all, Teresa, there was no difficulty about tracing you.”
“But he’s very proud,” Mrs. Preston explained fondly. “And I’m afraid we had quarrelled badly.”
Lady Ranmere looked as though she considered this a quite inadequate explanation for what she thought to be a piece of gross selfishness.
“It was about my second husband. They didn’t get on. I never told you about it, Mary, because I felt so terrible over the thought that I had almost driven my own son from home.”
No one seemed able to feel much conviction over this picture of Teresa Preston gently driving anyone forth into the world, and Bertram said good-humouredly,
“I expect he was something of a roamer by nature. And, once he had made the break, he probably rather enjoyed being on his own and free to do all the unconventional things one can’t do at home. Then when he found how much time had passed, he was probably ashamed to come home and not too sure of his welcome. I think I can see his point.”
“Well, I can’t,” Lady Ranmere declared, with some energy. “And I hope you would never treat me in that manner, if we were to quarrel over anything.”
“But do we ever quarrel over anything, Mama?” Bertram smiled at her winningly.
“We have not done so yet, I suppose,” Lady Ranmere agreed. And then was annoyed with herself because, quite without her meaning to do so, her glance strayed to Anya.
In a quiet, self-effacing way, Anya sat near the door listening gravely to all that was said, but taking no part in the conversation. And this perhaps was why it was she who heard the sound of another car driving up to the front of the house.
Prompted by an instinct far stronger than any statement that David would not be home that day, she felt her heart begin to beat faster. And, since no one was paying any particular attention to her, now that Lady Ranmere had glanced quickly away again, it was not difficult for her to slip out of the room unnoticed.
She stood there at the back of the big panelled hall, breathing quickly. If the new arrival rang the front door bell, she would know it was a visitor and would make herself scarce. But she had only a few moments to wait before the front door opened and David came in.
“David!” She ran across the hall to him, with a little cry of welcome.
“Startled, he turned and held out both his hands to her, and then, as she came up to him, he picked her right up off the ground and kissed her lightly before he set her down and said,
“Hello. That looks as though you’re glad to see me back.”
“Terribly glad!” She stood there laughing and flushing because of the unexpected warmth of their greeting. “But you said you wouldn’t be home for some days.”
“I found I could manage it, after all, and I wanted to see how you got on during your first day in England. How have things been? All right?”
“Oh, yes!” Everything was all right, now that David was home.
“Nothing much happened?”
“Well—yes.” She suddenly recalled the day’s events. “Rather a lot of things have happened. For one thing, Martin Deane is alive, after all. He has been found—in America.”
So she repeated the news and, briefly, described what they knew so far.
“Mrs. Preston and Celia are here now,” she added, with that curious feeling of regret which so often visited her when it became obvious that she and David could not remain happily isolated from th
e day-to-day affairs of other people.
“Are they? I must go and see them.” He immediately made a move towards the drawing-room. Then he paused and put him arm round her.
“This makes a great difference to you, Anya.”
“In a way, yes. But it doesn’t matter, really,” she assured him.
“Doesn’t it?” He looked at her, half puzzled, half amused. “How is that?”
“Well, it’s a long story, and I think I’ll have to tell you later. But it’s something lovely—wonderful!” And her eyes shone as she recalled Bertram’s glowing prophecies about her and she thought how relieved and delighted David would be to find he no longer had to regard her as a pressing and heavy responsibility.
He still looked amused, and rather curious.
“Can’t you tell me now? You excite my curiosity.”
“No. Besides Bertram will explain it better.”
“Bertram?” Something quite indefinable very faintly chilled the atmosphere. “What has he got to do with it?”
“You’ll hear presently. But come into the drawing-room now. I’m sure Mrs. Preston will want to tell you her news herself. And Celia—I mean the others—won’t like it if I keep you waiting out here so long.”
He made no query about the accidental inclusion of Celia’s name. But he came with her then, without further comment, into the drawing-room.
Everyone exclaimed, in varying degrees of surprise and pleasure, at the sight of him, and Celia made room for him on the settee beside her. It was a perfectly natural gesture, completely in keeping with their relationship, but Anya felt a frightening little stab of jealousy as he took the seat offered.
Then, as soon as he had explained his unexpected return, Celia began to tell him the news about Martin, and, although Mrs. Preston joined in at various points, somehow the story now became a touching version of a reunion between brother and sister.
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