The Coral Tree

by Joyce Dingwell

  He turned away.

  But Jan Luknit did not turn. He watched Cary until she was out of sight. Then he caught a downward sleigh back to the nursery slopes and his class of twenty beginners.

  Cary alighted from the chair at the summit and descended a second time. When at last she returned to the inn for lunch all she could say ecstatically to the beaming maid was: “Hilde, oh, Hilde!”

  “You run again this afternoon, Miss Porter?” Old Hilde’s eyes were twinkling. She, too, had once loved the descent from the Horn. Many years ago now, of course.

  “Again every day until I leave.”

  “That will be—?”

  “Soon. Too soon.”

  “Never mind.” Hilde was philosophical. “Another year, perhaps, for the other season.”

  Cary hesitated at her words, suddenly jerked back to reality, suddenly remembering the address she had handed to Jan.

  Australia, she thought soberly, is a long way from here.

  She had not believed she would ever go back. The Marlow will had stipulated it, but she had felt she could not consider it, not when it entailed Clairhill.

  Clairhill, she remembered rather drearily, that ugly stone house with its unhappy associations; no, I could never return there.

  And yet, she thought, I gave Jan that card with that address.

  The decision, the solution ... Mr. Beynon had promised she would find it in these mountains; but was it, could it be Clairhill?

  Cary did not want it to be that answer. She did not want to go back to Australia. She preferred to remain in England—Kent, perhaps; have tea sometimes with the kind Whitneys; invite them, when she found a little flat, to tea with her.

  She did not want to return to that place.

  The lunch gong was clanging. She went slowly in. The radiance she had known an hour ago seemed to have diminished, and she sat down feeling strangely depleted and dulled.

  The man who had stood in the hotel lobby considering Lannwild Mountain, who had just watched stonily the little tableau between Cary and the young instructor at the foot of the Horn, now regarded her from across the diningroom with the same frigid antagonism.

  Fortunately Cary was unaware of the cold stare. She had taken up the menu ostensibly to study it, but instead of the print her grey eyes saw a big old house, not at all beautiful, even a little repelling, a loneliness about it, an air of unloving and of being unloved.

  And that, she shivered, is Clairhill.

  She ordered hastily, and when the tray came she ate as quickly as she decently could. As soon as I can, she thought, stifled, I’ll go back to Lannwild, to the calm and solace of the summit. She yearned to cast off her sudden unhappy mood.

  Against his will the man’s eyes turned again and again on Cary.

  Why was it, he wondered, then he remembered one of Gerard’s letters, and how he had spoken of Julia as fair. Had she been fair, he brooded, watching, as this girl was fair?

  At the thought of Gerard, the dreamer Gerard, the man’s long hands involuntarily clenched.

  It was five years since his twin had left Australia for England. Gerard was the constant student, continually seeking, forever climbing yet another intellectual height. One of the heights had been literature. During his ascent he had published that book of verse.

  Richard Stormer glanced down on his hands, remembering other hands—Gerard’s. Thin, delicate, he recalled achingly, not firm practical surgeon hands like his own; but then he, Richard, had never been a dreamer. He had pursued one path to an end.

  The waiter was hovering. Composing himself, the man ordered. I must stop all this, he thought rather hopelessly; I must not let myself become obsessed.

  Professor Hastings had first mentioned that word obsession. He had said it when Richard had returned to the faculty after his brother’s funeral and burst out the bitter things he did.

  “Gerard is dead, Stormer,” Hastings had said with emphasis, “whether by accident or by his own design we don’t know. What is more, we shall never discover. Don’t let it become an obsession, my man.”

  “But it’s with me all the time.”

  “That’s natural in such a short while. You were twins.”

  “If only I knew more—”

  “What good would it do? He is dead and you are alive—and you are needed, I’ve been told.”

  “You mean my new findings in—” Richard Stormer the doctor had spoken of his recent studies in Australia in medical after-care.

  The Professor had nodded encouragingly. “Gerard often talked about you. He was proud of his brother. When you received that high appointment in Sydney there was no holding him. I know he would want to be proud of you now. Are you going to Europe as the medical board has requested, Richard?”

  The younger man had sat unmoved, not even interested, and the Professor had gone on:

  “The child is gravely ill, I believe. A boy of six, belonging to the proprietor of an inn in an alpine village called Mungen.”

  “Isn’t there local skill?”

  “Excellent skill, but not the type in which you have chosen to specialize.”

  Richard Stormer had stood up and gone to the window. Only a fortnight ago he had flown from Sydney. He had been planning a reunion with Gerard for years, but always something had stopped it—study, a new project, a ticklish case like the one Hastings was triumphantly trotting out now. Finally they had agreed, he and his brother, on the following summer, but now that could never happen. Gerard, the dreamer, his twin, was no more.

  The dead must wait—drearily his mind had accepted that fact. This child was still living, he needed his knowledge. He needed him.

  “All right,” he had promised, “I’ll go.”

  He had arrived two days ago. The case was grave, more grave than he had anticipated. There had been several bad nights. This morning there was a slight improvement, however—or had it been simply that the position was no worse? He had done all he could, then gone out for quick exercise. Examination half an hour ago had revealed still no adverse change. At this stage it was only a matter of waiting and praying, and Richard Stormer thought of the mother who was doing this now upstairs.

  His meal arrived and he forced himself to eat it, hoping that for once his sickened mind would not go harping back to Gerard again. But it was too much to ask; he kept remembering odd fragments of his brother’s letters. He remembered: “You, too, will love Julia”—“Richard, when you meet my Julia”—yet when they had picked up Gerard dead there had been a letter in his hands, and it had been hers.

  Why had she started it all if she had not intended to finish it? the doctor thought angrily. Gerard was so finely drawn, so vulnerable; couldn’t she have seen that? Couldn’t she have sensed that he would believe her every gesture, every word? Why had she lured him on?

  Again his eyes turned on Cary. He remembered with sharpened distaste her laughing kiss, her friendly encouragement of the young instructor at the foot of the mountain this morning, and suddenly and unreasonably to him she was Julia herself.

  The meal choked him, and he pushed it aside abruptly. He rose from the table, left the dining-hall and went back up the stairs.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE RUN from the Horn was becoming easier now. Cary did not have to give it the same nervous concentration as she had given her first descent. Skimming between the trees, she found she had time for other thoughts. She had time for the inevitable thought that was Clairhill.

  Once again she was sitting in the book-lined London office of Mrs. Marlow’s solicitor, Edward Beynon, and he was reading to her the extraordinary Marlow will. But before he had started reading it he had looked at her shrewdly.

  “Miss Porter, tell me what it was you expected from your late employer.”

  “Expected—?” Cary had flushed at the frank question, and then, meeting the sincere eyes, had answered in an equally sincere manner.

  “I did expect something, Mr. Beynon, and I’ll admit it, I mean, most employers re
member their employees, and Mrs. Heard, who was the Clairhill housekeeper, and I rather anticipated a few pounds—”

  “Mrs. Heard will receive a few hundred.”

  Cary had inclined her head in satisfaction for the woman. “I’m glad of that. Mildred served Mrs. Marlow well. I don’t know if you understand how hard it was to serve Mrs. Marlow. No domestic help would stop except Mildred Heard. I’m pleased she was remembered.”

  “You,” said Mr. Beynon deliberately, “will receive five hundred.”

  There had been a pause from Cary. “That was very good of Mrs. Marlow,” she had murmured at last. She wondered what else one said when one received an inheritance. She hoped she was not omitting anything.

  Mr. Beynon did not appear to notice any omission. He resumed carefully: “Five hundred pounds—or Clairhill.”

  This time Cary did not speak at all. She seemed to have no breath left in her. She simply sat and stared.

  Just as well she was struck silent, for Mr. Beynon had more to say. He said it at once, for fear the girl seated before him got any wrong idea of the bequest, in case she believed she was the heiress that she was not.

  “The house is entailed, however, Miss Porter. You cannot sell it; you cannot let it; you must live in it yourself.”

  “Live in it—live at Clairhill—!” This time Cary did find words, and the tone in which she uttered them was revealing.

  “Why do you speak like that?” Mr. Beynon had asked curiously. There was a kindness in his inquisitiveness, though. This was a strange inheritance, but there was nothing strange about this girl, he was thinking. She was sweet and wholesome and kind, and obviously she had character—all that Mrs. Marlow, he recalled frankly, was not, and had not possessed.

  “Can you tell me about it?” he asked.

  Cary had sat silent, groping for the right opening. How was she to tell him? What really was there to tell?

  Falteringly, she had edged around her story at last—her family’s emigration from England, her mother’s death in Australia, her own unpreparedness to earn a living, the advertisement for a paid companion, her success in attaining the post.

  “I was quite pleased with myself. I did not realize then that I was the only one who would stay.”

  “Why did you stay and why did others leave?”

  “I stayed because I had nowhere else to go, Mr. Beynon, and others left because—because—”

  “Yes, Miss Porter?”

  “Because it was an unhappy place.” The words had come out in a rush. “Mrs. Marlow was—well, she was just impossible. First Ian left—”

  “Her son?”

  “Yes. Then Megan; then Alison soon after Meg.”

  “Why did they leave?”

  Cary had looked down at her fingers.

  “It’s hard for me to tell. Have you ever been in a house and felt frustration and contention and—and joylessness, Mr. Beynon? Have you ever felt that?”

  “Go on, Miss Porter.”

  “Well, that was Clairhill. I don’t know its story. I do believe it might have been happy once, but it must have been many years ago. Not while Mrs. Marlow was there.”

  “You mean Mrs. Marlow was the frustration, the contention, the joylessness?”

  Cary had hesitated. “She was—difficult,” she admitted, determined to be generous, and again she looked down on her hands.

  “Mr. Marlow—” suggested the solicitor.

  “He had left his wife before I went to her. I know that later he died. Perhaps that was what had narrowed her. The failure of their marriage, I mean. I could never tell. I only knew that she was an embittered woman and that her bitterness drove her children from Clairhill.”

  “You say it drove employees away, too?”

  “Yes, in the end there were only Mrs. Heard and myself.”

  Cary had sat remembering the housekeeper who had put up with the selfishness and cantankerous moods as she had. “She’s promised me a remembrance,” Mildred Heard had admitted honestly, “and with Joe not so strong and only able to potter around as a handyman, and young Maysie still to rear, I must stop on. Besides, in a way I’m sorry for the old lady.”

  “In a way” Cary had been sorry, too. She knew that even had she been equipped for another position she could not have deserted Mrs. Marlow. Loyalty is a strange thing. It gives no choice, it simply binds you, and there is no breaking the bond.

  So she had stayed on in that big unhappy house, and when Mrs. Marlow had decided to come to England she had helped Mrs. Heard close the house, travelled with Mrs. Marlow from the house, but all the time Clairhill had been with her because Mrs. Marlow, she had soon realized, was the house, she was the frustration, the contention, the brooding joylessness, she was Clairhill itself.

  Then Mrs. Marlow had died, and she was released at last.

  She told all this to Mr. Beynon, hoping he understood even a little. It was such an odd, unsatisfactory story. He did. He was a shrewd man. He also had understood many things as he had listened to Mrs. Marlow telling him what she wanted in her will. He had sensed what Mrs. Marlow had left unsaid.

  Now he told the details to Cary.

  Sitting opposite to her in his London office he told her that if she so wished she could refuse the money and accept, instead, Clairhill—but not to be sold, not to be rented, but to be lived in and to be ... At that juncture he had stopped. The next part, he thought troublously, would be difficult to express to her in detached legal phrasing. To recite to this girl: “To be devoted morally and beneficially, to be rebuilt in soul and spirit, with sufficient finance available but only if used for the purpose as defined,” would have been cold and uninspired and not as Mrs. Marlow had meant it. Instead, then, he had handed Cary the personal letter. Mrs. Marlow’s last letter. The letter to her young employee that was to make the reaching of a decision for Cary so doubly hard.

  For up to this moment Cary had known no doubt of her future moves. She would accept the money, but never Clairhill, of course. Nothing on earth would have induced her to return to Clairhill, she had thought. Nothing on earth—and yet as she read the opening lines she had known the first faint unrest.’

  “Dear Cary”—that alone was unsettling, for never in their five years of close proximity had Mrs. Marlow permitted herself anything but a coldly correct “Miss Porter.”

  “Dear Cary, This is the last request of a selfish, bitter old woman. If you refuse it you cannot be reproached. Clairhill can mean nothing to you but ugliness and disenchantment, just as it has meant nothing but spite and tyranny to me. I should say from me, for spite and tyranny are all I have given it—first to Ian ...”

  Ian, Cary had thought quickly, that tall, blue-eyed boy with his heart on the sea but financially compelled by his mother, who held the purse-strings, to take law instead, until at last he had rebelled and left.

  “... then Megan...”

  Megan—lovely, lissome-limbed Megan; Megan the dancer who had run away because the career she wanted was denied her—and Megan who later had died in another state without ever coming back.

  “... Allie.”

  Alison, the baby, who soon followed Megan, who had married against her mother’s will, who had gone to live in America. They knew nothing more of her after that.

  Cary looked again at the letter.

  “There is the sum total, mine and Clairhill’s, unhappiness, despair, the end of all dreams. Yet the old home, if not Ellen Marlow, deserved better than this. All trees are made to blossom, so a roof-tree should blossom as well.

  “I am asking you to bring the flowering to it, Cary, the harvest, to open its windows and let out the bad years, to usher the new years in.

  “I have set aside money for this purpose, for the rebirth of Clairhill. If you cannot face the task, I do not blame you. I only beg you at least to consider the thought.

  “I have nothing to suggest regarding its moral rebuilding; it is entirely your own prerogative, under certain supervision, of course. Mr. Beynon can expla
in all that.

  “I have nothing more to say either, Cary, except—God bless you if you can do this for me. E.M.”

  Cary had put the pages down and looked at the solicitor.

  “You know about this letter, Mr. Beynon?”

  “Yes, Miss Porter. Mrs. Marlow gave it to me to read before she sealed it. She wanted me to understand why she had instructed me to draw up that curious will.”

  “Then you agree it is curious?”

  Mr. Beynon had paused. “I mean curious in the sense of being unlike other wills.”

  Cary had wet her dry lips.

  “Mr. Beynon, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do what is asked, not if Mrs. Marlow had written a hundred letters, not if there was a fortune waiting for the reopening of Clairhill.”

  “There is no fortune,” had said Mr. Beynon evenly, “but there is a sufficiency. Even then, the sufficiency would depend entirely on our carrying out what Mrs. Marlow stipulates—living in the house, bettering it, ‘developing it morally and beneficially’, as the will says.”

  “What exactly does that mean?” Cary remembered asking.

  “Your interpretation would be as good as mine, Miss Porter,” Mr. Beynon had returned.

  The girl before him had not replied for a thoughtful moment.

  “I would interpret,” she had murmured in a low voice at last, “that Mrs. Marlow would wish it to be reopened in some charitable capacity—perhaps as a convalescent or even a children’s home—something like that.”

  “Exactly,” nodded the solicitor, and he had waited significantly.

  “If—I really mean when I refuse this appeal,” broke in Cary on his thoughts, “what will happen to Clairhill?”