The Coral Tree (2 page)

Cary had a quick vision of Clairhill standing in its wide
p
addocks, had a quick memory of the bordering scallops of hills, ad a quick sensation of space and more space, and no
d
ded.

“Yes, there it is Australia.” From her tunic pocket she took a card and scribbled an address.

As he took it and read it, Cary felt a quick start of surprise in
herself.

Was this then, she wondered, the beginning of that “solution”, that “decision” that Mr. Beynon had promised her? She had not known she would return to Australia, she had not known what she would do, yet the card she had just handed to Jan Luknit read clearly: “Cary Porter, Clairhill, Western Slopes, New South Wales.”

“Wales,” inquired Jan frowning, “but that surely is in England?”

“Australia, too.”

He held on to the card, but handed back the little pin. “I must not accept this
personal
token,” he said significantly.

Cary, in her anxiety to give him something to express her gratitude, missed the subtle emphasis on the adjective. With a gentle thrust she pushed it on him and turned away. When he glanced up again from the fiery beauty of the dark gem she was above his head in the ski-lift and soaring upward once more.

Gallantly he pulled off his great glove, put his lips to his hand and waved the arm aloft. Without any hesitation Cary caught and returned the pleasantry with a blown kiss of her own. It meant nothing more to her than a further sealing of a very pleasing friendship. If it meant anything to the man she did not guess
...

A lone runner who had just finished the Horn descent stood watching the tableau without amusement.

He saw the instructor put the pin and the card in his breast pocket, then he turned his hard dark eyes on the ascending girl. The excellent cut of her well-chosen clothes, the grooming and the fair bloom of her seemed to displease rather than please him. Without difficulty he placed her as the young woman in the hotel lobby earlier today, the one who had talked with the elderly spinster with the too-insistent voice.

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 no
t
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. S
h
e
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, an
d
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, a
n
d 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 remember 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.