Impasse …
Then through the silence tramped the capably shod feet of Miss Shell-Pratt and Miss Moon, as they left their table and proceeded, still talking busily, towards the lounge.
‘How were they bedded?’ Miss Moon’s eager query rang out almost directly above Stephen’s head as they passed his chair. ‘Horizontally or vertically?’
Miss Shell-Pratt was brusque. ‘Vertically, Moon, vertically. And the bedding was much disturbed.…’
The dining-room door clashed behind them. Stephen had swung round and was staring after them, with a bemused expression that made Jennifer begin to laugh.
‘What in the wide world was that about?’
‘Geology, Stephen, just geology! I’ve been listening to it the whole of lunch-time. You can have no idea of the excitements of geology!’
‘So it would appear.’ He got to his feet. ‘It sounds an extraordinary science. I suppose they do it at Cambridge. Come on, Jenny, let’s get out of here; I want to stand you a liqueur.’
2
Prelude
The lounge was crowded, but they found two chairs in a cool corner, and Stephen ordered drinks. Around them the conversation surged in an exciting hubbub of languages and accents. Three Frenchmen just beside them were absorbed in a passionate discussion of a recent bank robbery in Bordeaux, a party which had visited the Cirque that morning was showing off to a party which was to visit it that afternoon, two Swiss climbers were comparing experiences with a French boy, while, still at Jennifer’s elbow, the troctolites were having it all their own way.
‘… Not been up to the Cirque yet? Then don’t hire a mule from the man with—’
‘– A colourless amphibole—’
‘– Who murdered the bank clerk. It was the Dupré gang all right. They got Marcel Dupré, but the woman – his sister, wasn’t it? – she got away—’
‘… I tell you the wretched mule tried to trot—’
‘– Up a sheer face of four thousand feet—’
‘– With a red-spotted troctolite—’
‘– But they’ll catch her, you mark my words … unless she’s over the frontier already …’
‘Thank God,’ said Stephen at last. ‘Here come the drinks.’
The waiter, with a tray laden with drinks, was weaving his practised way between the tables, managing with the expertise of the French professional to waste no time whatever and yet appear to take a vital interest in the subjects dear to his clients’ hearts. He threaded his way swiftly through the conversation, shedding the drinks as he went, with a technique that bespoke much practice in this kind of inverted potato-race … Pernod, messieurs? Yes, it was a disgrace, that robbery. The papers said one of the criminals had hanged himself in his cell. Tant mieux … Madame? Cinzano? Indeed yes, Paul Lescaut should keep his mule under better control. It was the grandmother of the devil, that one … Messieurs? Your Dubonnet – a guide? The best was Pierre Bussac, but he was not often in the village; in fact, he had not been down with his mule since – let me see, yes, it was the night of the bad storm, three weeks ago; but if monsieur wished to arrange for a guide there was Robert Vrillac … Mesdames? Vichy water … ah, yes, there were rocks hereabouts, no doubt; he had certainly been told so …
He escaped with some relief to Stephen’s table, and set down the benedictines with the air of one who had brought the good news to Aix against considerable opposition. Benedictine, monsieur … merci, monsieur … and he hoped the pictures were going well? With an air of subdued triumph he slid away.
‘How in the world did he know that?’ demanded Stephen.
‘What did he mean?’
‘Only that I mess about with water-colours as a hobby. It’s rest and recruitment of the spirit, and what you’d probably call comic relief.’
‘I wouldn’t! I might even admire them. I know all the right things to say. I never knew you sketched, Stephen!’
‘I’ve never dared to tell you, my dear. Well, I’ll await your expert judgment. … And meanwhile, I gather, you’ve come to see your cousin?’
She nodded, but a shadow touched her face, so that he said quickly: ‘What is it, Jenny? Is there something wrong?’
‘N-no. That is, yes, Stephen. I’m worried about her.’
‘Would you like to tell me?’
‘Yes. You never met Gillian, did you? She married Jacques the year the war was over. He had something to do with the wine trade; they had a nice house in Bordeaux – I once stayed with them there – and they were very happy. Then a few years ago Jacques died, and as there were no children and Gil was on her own in Bordeaux we rather hoped she’d come back and make her home in England. She hadn’t been left very well off, either. But she wouldn’t come. She seemed to have some silly ideas about being a burden to us, or something. Later we heard she’d taken a job teaching English in a local convent school. Then, last spring, she was ill – oh, not seriously; I gathered it was a kind of ’flu, not dangerous, but weakening and depressing. At any rate, she seemed to take a long time to get better. We wrote again and tried to persuade her to come to England – she’d had to give up her job – but she finally said she was coming up here, into the Pyrenees, to try and recuperate.’
‘Here? In Gavarnie?’
‘Not exactly. She’s staying at a convent in the next valley. It’s called the Convent of Notre-Dame-des-Orages, and it’s also an orphanage.’
‘I’ve seen it. It’s in a wild little valley a few miles from here.’
‘Well, that’s where she’s staying. She wrote to tell me all about this last month, and suggested that I might come up here for a holiday. I said I would, and then I got another letter from her.’
He was watching her. ‘And just what was wrong with that other letter?’
She said slowly: ‘She told me she was glad I was coming because she very much wanted to talk to me, to discuss …’ Her voice tailed off, and she looked up at him, her eyes shadowed. ‘Stephen, Gillian says she’s thinking of becoming a nun.’
She stared at him with a sort of horror, and in spite of himself, Stephen laughed. It was apparent that to Jennifer, aged twenty-two, a convent was about as normal a habitat as the palace of the Dalai Lama.
‘What a hidebound Protestant conscience!’ he said. ‘Why shouldn’t she?’
Jennifer laughed too, a little ruefully. ‘I know. It’s silly of me. But, Stephen, that’s not all that I’m unhappy about. I’m beginning to think she must have been taken ill again, up at the convent. I told you she wrote to me again. It was the night before she left for Gavarnie. Look, here’s the letter …’
She groped in her handbag and gave it to him.
It was dated June 12th … ‘I’m awfully glad you’re coming. I want very much to see you, and talk to you about this thing. By the time you get this I shall be at Notre-Dame-des-Orages, and, I hope, feeling a good deal better. I hope that up there I’ll come a bit nearer to finding the answer … you know what I mean. I haven’t time now, and anyway I’m not clear enough in my own mind yet, but I’ll try and write more to you about it when I get up to the convent. I’m beginning to look forward to the drive up. The old car’s still going strong, and we’ve arranged to start early tomorrow … Try the Hôtel du Pimené; I believe they do you very well there, and it’s reasonable. But I’ll see if it’s at all possible for you to stay at the convent – these places usually take guests, and it’ll be pleasanter, as it’s some way from Gavarnie (and much cheaper too, I expect!). I’ll let you know when I write …’
Stephen looked up to find Jennifer’s eyes fixed on him with the same shade of anxiety in them.
‘But she didn’t write to me again,’ she said. ‘That’s three weeks ago, and I haven’t heard another word. I didn’t write back, because I was waiting to hear from her by every post. I don’t even know if she’s arrived.’
‘Well,’ said Stephen reasonably, ‘I should stop worrying. Now you’re here, there’s an easy way of finding out.’
Jennif
er finished her drink and got to her feet. ‘I know. I’m going up to see her now.’
She spoke with such determination that he looked at her quizzically. ‘To prise her loose?’
‘Of course, if I can.’ She met his look, and laughed. ‘Why not?’
‘You versus the Holy Roman Church? Why not indeed? What d’you suppose the College of Cardinals would say?’
‘They can say what they like,’ said Jennifer calmly, picking up her handbag and making for the door. ‘I’m thinking of Gillian.’
Stephen, with a fleeting memory of Mrs. Silver, grinned and followed her.
They made their way through the little village and began to climb the hillside road that winds through the valley of the Gave d’Ossoue. Behind them the houses seemed to sink and dwindle into the sunny hollow, till the coloured roofs and the church spire and the little curved bridge appeared as a huddle of small bright toys at the end of a white ribbon of road.
It was a golden afternoon. The road lifted its length before them along the hillside, the valley unfolding itself in curve after curve. The road was, to begin with, narrowly enclosed, with steep green meadows falling sharply to the stream-bed on the right, to rise again beyond the water in sheer pastures where cattle grazed with slowly-tolling bells. The valley twisted towards the south, and before them the great barrier of dim-green peaks which barred it had, miraculously, parted, and now valley and road were cupped between pine-clothed slopes soaring, rich in sunlight, towards still more distant crests of blue that brushed the sky. And these, faint with distance, etched in with snow and shadow against the long fingers of cloud that clung to them were, unbelievably, but the first ridges of the greater barriers beyond.
It did not seem so very far to the Valley of the Storms. This ran from the south, a narrow green cleft springing from the Spanish range, and its icy rush of water, the Petit Gave, tumbled into the Gave d’Ossoue some three miles above Gavarnie.
‘There you are. That’s the Vallée des Orages,’ said Stephen. ‘You’ll see the convent as soon as you pass that bluff.’ He looked down at her. ‘Would you rather go on by yourself now?’
‘Yes, please. And thank you, Stephen.’
‘The pleasure was mine,’ he said formally, and smiled. ‘See you tonight.’
She turned off the road into the track – it was little more – that climbed the smaller valley. She walked steadily, and soon, as she rounded a curve of the track, she saw, some distance ahead of her, set back against the mountain-side to the left, the high white walls of the convent. A small square tower jutted up to catch the sunlight, vividly white against a rampart of pines beyond, and, even as Jennifer glimpsed it and guessed its nature, she heard, floating out on the thyme-laden wind, the silver sound of a bell.
She tilted her head to listen, smiling, her whole being pierced, rinsed through, tingling with a keen delight. But presently the very beauty of that pure passionless note, insisting beat by beat upon the strangeness of the place, took her with a new sensation, part pleasure and part fear, and wholly dream-like. To her, suddenly, in that high haunt of bells and tumbling waters, the mission on which she was bound seemed to lose reality. With the remote white walls of the convent, backed against that single sharp wedge of pine-wood, Gillian could have no connection. Even to think of Gillian living in Bordeaux, a French-woman among the French, had been fantastic, while to imagine her here – slim, blonde Gillian, with the Northumberland sky in her grey eyes – to imagine her here, quiet and cloistered among the Sisters of Our Lady of the Storms, was just not possible. Gillian, shut away in this lonely valley, perhaps for ever …
Her steps faltered, and stopped. She found herself staring up at the distant convent walls as if they were a prison, an enchanted fortress to be stormed – the Dark Tower itself, circled by its watching hills. And she had come alone to storm it, a stranger, a resented intruder … alone. Alone. The very word, in this wild valley, sounded colder, thinner, more forlorn.
A little shiver touched her, and was gone like the fleeting shadow of a bird’s wing. She found herself glancing round quickly, even apprehensively, an involuntary reaction that annoyed her even as she made it. The hills waited. The sun beat down steadily on the empty valley. There was no movement but the rush of the white water; no sound but the distant chiming of the bell and the thud of her own heart …
The sound that had been steadily gaining on her senses through the rushing of the water was not, after all, the beating of her heart. It was a swift beat, accelerando, that thudded behind her, up the turf of the valley-track, bringing with it that faint crawling sense of excitement, that slow apprehensive prickling of the skin that is our inheritance from countless long-dead men to whom the sudden sound of galloping hoofs spelled danger.
The thudding grew, swelled, and burst into the open valley, as the three horses swept round the bend and came on at a gallop, manes flying, chestnut necks outstretched.
Jennifer stepped quickly off the path, but her care was unnecessary for, before the cavalcade reached the point where she had been, the leading horse, checked by his rider, swerved sharply and plunged from the track, down the steep meadow towards the stream. The two following horses, riderless, swung after him. She caught a flying glimpse of the rider, a youth of perhaps eighteen, with a supple, wiry young body, and a dark, Spanish-looking face. He sat easily in the saddle, the effortless response of his body to the horse’s movement conveying a sort of fierce pleasure in the great brute’s plunge down the slope. Near the bank she could see him take hold of its head to steady it, seeming, as he did so, almost to grow down into the body of the horse; the wild gallop checked, steadied, and the beast gathered itself at the stream’s edge and leaped the wide rush of water. The loose horses, saddleless, and with reins knotted high on their necks, took the jump after him, and the sunlight flowed and glanced from their bodies as they flew.
Boy and horses – they were so beautiful that they made the eyes sting and the throat ache. It was like watching a faultless flight of shining arrows going into the gold …
Then, with a heave of quarters and a scramble of hoofs and a rattle of stones, they were gone round a far bluff of the bare mountain.
The bell had stopped. The dust swirled and fanned and began to settle.
A peasant lad had taken his horses home from the village hiring; that was all.
Jennifer shrugged off the mountain magic, and quickened her pace up the valley.
3
Demande et Réponse
The convent gate, set in the high, blind white wall, was of dark wood, with an arched top and heavy wrought hinges. Jennifer, having pulled the old-fashioned bell-pull, waited in the hot silence. A grasshopper, leaping across her shadow, spread parasol wings of palest powder-blue, and the tiny lizard that flicked across the baked stone seemed part of the same enchantment that hung around her in the stillness. The smell of the pine-woods beyond the far wall of the buildings was dark and aromatic, spell-binding too in the drifts of memory it cast across the clear air.
But the rosy-cheeked girl who at length opened the gate dispelled the last wisps of magic. She was, presumably, one of the orphans housed by the good sisters; she was very young, not more than fourteen, and her solid sturdy body was clad in a dusty-blue cotton smock. Her face shone round and country-fresh as an apple, and her bare legs were brown as a nut. She grinned shyly at Jennifer, her round blue eyes curious.
Jennifer spoke in French.
‘My name is Silver. Jennifer Silver. I believe I am expected: I have come to visit my cousin who is staying here – Madame Lamartine.’
The effect of this simple gambit was unexpected. The smile vanished from the cheery apple-face as quickly as a shadow wipes a high-light from a pippin’s cheek. The child said nothing, but hugged herself a little nearer to the edge of the gate, very much as if she would have liked to shut it there and then.
‘I hope,’ went on Jennifer politely, ‘that I haven’t come at an inconvenient time? Am I allowed to come in?’
The girl, still staring round-eyed, opened her mouth as if to speak, then shut it again, and shuffled her rope-soled slippers in the dust.
Jennifer, a little taken aback, began again. ‘If it’s convenient’ – then a thought struck her, and she asked – ‘you are French, aren’t you, not Spanish?’
The girl nodded, hovering now, it appeared, on the edge of a nervous giggle.
‘Then have the goodness,’ said Jennifer firmly, unable to imagine why a tongue-tied child should be appointed door-keeper, ‘to take me to someone in authority. Take me to the Mother Superior, please.’
At this, to her relief, the girl stood back and pulled the gate wider. But her eyes, still staring as if fascinated, held in them some element of uneasiness that Jennifer by no means liked. Under that childish china-blue brightness it was as if dismay lurked – yes, and some obscure horror. Something, at any rate, that was not just mere shyness and fear of strangers; something that was beginning to communicate itself to Jennifer in the faintest premonitory prickling of the spine. Something, Jennifer told herself sharply, that was being dredged up out of the depths of the subconscious, where half a hundred romantic tales had contributed to feed the secular mind with a superstitious fear of the enclosing convent walls. This, she added with some asperity, as she stepped past the staring orphan into a tiny courtyard, was not a story in the Radcliffe vein, where monastic cells and midnight terrors followed one another as the night the day, this was not a Transylvanian gorge in the dead hour of darkness. It was a small and peaceful institution, run on medieval lines perhaps, but nevertheless basking quietly in the warm sunshine of a civilized afternoon.