“Mother, please don’t commit yourself to anything until you hear the full facts.” It was Celia’s voice which interrupted—coolly, clearly and, to tell the truth, with a note of authority not unwelcome to some of her hearers.
“But I want the child to tell me what she knows. Would you—would you bring your photograph down here and show me?”
“Let her finish her dinner first,” Lady Ranmere began. But Anya, who was looking at the other woman with a sort of puzzled compassion, said,
“I don’t mind about my dinner. I will fetch the photograph, if it will please you. Though I don’t understand—”
“Nor do any of us, really,” Bertram observed. “But fetch the photograph, there’s a good girl. It will make discussion a whole lot easier.”
Anya gave him a brief, almost amused glance. And it struck David, rather disagreeably, that in some odd way she understood Bertram rather better than most people did.
She got up immediately, and David, with the curious feeling that she was still too lost and unprotected to go about the outside world alone, asked quickly,
“Shall I come too?”
“No, thank you. I know the way.”
She left them, and for a moment there was silence at the table. Then Mrs. Preston passed her hands nervously over her face and said,
“I don’t know why you’re all so calm about it. Do you realize this is the first news I have had of Martin since he disappeared over twenty years ago?”
“Teresa dear, of course we realize. And you mustn’t think us unsympathetic.” Lady Ranmere looked at her friend with genuine compassion. “But a photograph of him in the possession of this unknown girl may mean nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.”
“Her father was an Englishman.”
“Well, yes. I know that is a coincidence, but—”
“Coincidence!” Teresa Preston’s almost rudely scornful little laugh showed how excited she was and how far removed from her usual timid self.
“Lady Ranmere is right, Mother.” Celia spoke gently but coldly. “If this girl’s father was an Englishman, as David has been told, her mother may well have known several English people. It’s not inconceivable that—that Martin was one of them.”
“Oh, you all want to explain it away! But I know,” Mrs. Preston insisted excitedly. “I have a feeling about her. I had the first moment she came into the room. How can you try to talk me out of my conviction in that matter-of-fact way, Celia? Do you realize that the girl you’re rejecting may be your brother’s child? Your own niece?”
Celia flushed slightly and it was obvious that the suggestion was not a welcome one, which was understandable, David thought, for how many attractive young women would be eager to have an almost grown-up niece wished upon them?
“She may be a relation, of course,” Celia said drily. “On the other hand, the probabilities are rather against it.”
“Feelings apart, it is an extraordinary situation,” Bertram remarked, in the awkward little silence which succeeded Celia’s final protest. “If you put it on a stage, no one would believe it. Unless that girl herself acted the part. Then one could believe anything, I suppose.”
“Could one?” Celia looked at him in slightly hostile surprise. “She seems a nice inoffensive little thing. But hardly a personality.”
David was glad Bertram immediately replied, or he himself might have spoken in unsuitably emphatic terms.
“It’s a wonderful stage face, Celia.” Bertram spoke almost carelessly, but his eyes narrowed very slightly, as they did when he was excited.
“That’s just a phrase.” Celia shrugged scornfully. “It doesn’t really mean anything. Anyway, I don’t see how you can look at this rather undistinguished, shabby girl across a dinner-table and pronounce her to be suitable for the stage.”
“I didn’t say that.” Bertram was good-humoured but unmoved. “For that one needs other things beside a stage face. What I did mean was that she has beautiful bone-structure—which gives underlying significance to any makeup; complete repose of features—one of the rarest things on earth; and a natural power of expression which mirrors her thoughts even before she has put them into words.”
“She can look secret and enigmatic too,” David said, before he could stop himself.
“I think you both exaggerate,” observed Lady Ranmere a little repressively, while Celia looked as though she thought they had both gone slightly mad.
There was silence again, and then Anya came back.
She went straight over to Teresa Preston’s side and laid the singularly unfaded photograph on the table before her.
To David, watching, there was something both dramatic and touching about the way the older woman hung over the photograph, while the girl stood, quiet and unknowing, beside her.
“There’s no possible mistake.” Mrs. Preston spoke in a choked voice and she passed the photograph to her daughter. “There’s no possible mistake. It is Martin.”
Lady Ranmere and Bertram both craned forward to see.
“Yes,” Celia agreed quietly, “it is Martin.” Then she turned to the waiting girl and said, “Do you mind telling us how you came to have this photograph?”
In much the same words as she had used to David, Anya explained about the two young men being friends of her mother years ago, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she added the fact that her mother had owned to being very fond of one of them.
At this there was a pregnant silence, until Mrs. Preston asked rather huskily, “Which one?” And when Anya once more shook her head and explained that her mother had refused to say which one, Mrs. Preston gave a slight moan.
“Almost as though she foresaw today,” Bertram remarked. And, when his mother gave him a glance of reproof, he whispered, “I can’t help it, Mother. It’s so extraordinarily piquant this way.”
“But don’t you know anything about him? Can’t you remember your mother saying anything else at all?” Mrs. Preston looked helplessly at the girl, as though she hardly knew whether to embrace her as a granddaughter or reject her as an imposter, albeit an innocent one.
“I am so sorry.” Anya frowned in an effort to remember. “I never knew him, you see. He was never more than a photograph.”
“He—died before you were born?” Mrs. Preston forced herself to say that.
“One of them did,” Celia corrected. “The one that Anya’s mother was fond of. We don’t know which of the two that was.”
Again Anya looked from face to face, and immediately David realized what Bertram had meant about her expression mirroring her thoughts. As though she had spoken aloud, one could tell that she was puzzled, a little afraid of annoying someone, acutely conscious of some drama in the air, and yet unable to associate herself with it.
“I do not really understand—“ she began, and her glance rested on David, with a relief which was as patent as all the other emotions, and which drew him to her like a magnet.
He came round to her side of the table, and only the presence of the others kept him from putting his arm round her. As it was, he took her hand and said,
“We didn’t mean to involve you in a family scene this very first evening, Anya. But the fact is that Mrs. Preston’s son, Martin, disappeared somewhere in Europe many years ago. Nothing further was ever heard of him. And now she finds that your mother knew him and that you have a photograph of him. You will understand that she is very upset—very—”
“Oh—” The girl turned and, with a completely unselfconscious gesture of compassion, put her arms round the other woman. “You poor mother! I thought people like you were all secure and happy. But you lost your son, and never knew any more—That’s almost worse than having no place in the world.” And she kissed Mrs. Preston with a simple feeling beyond anything Celia could have achieved.
“Oh, darling—” Poor Mrs. Preston burst into tears. “I know you’re his. Nothing else could make you so sweet and understanding. They’re all trying to tell me—But they don’t understand
—”
“Mother, don’t!” Celia went round to her mother then, but more to shield her from the curious glances of the few other diners left in the room. “I think you’d better come upstairs, and we can discuss this in private. But do remember that—Anya—” she seemed to have some difficulty in saying the girl’s name—“has had enough excitement and emotion for one day. Don’t try to add what may be quite incorrect details.”
“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Preston recovered herself surprisingly quickly. “Only, it’s so strange—so incredible—and yet so right.”
“I am sorry, too,” Anya said, as though she knew that, in some way, Celia was blaming her. And then, to Mrs. Preston, “Don’t cry any more. I will try hard to remember anything my mother said about him.”
“Don’t try too hard,” Celia warned her drily. “One is apt to draw on one’s imagination then.”
The other girl drew back sharply. And Celia took her mother’s arm and led her determinedly from the room.
“Well, shall we finish our meal?” suggested Lady Ranmere. And they all four resumed their dinner, though with somewhat diminished appetite.
Conversation was not easy. But Lady Ranmere did her best, and it was not until the end of the meal that she began to look really uncertain. David guessed that she was longing to go and have what she would no doubt call a quiet and sensible talk with Mrs. Preston. At the same time, responsibility for Anya weighed heavily upon her.
Not quite sure whether he were helping his aunt or merely pleasing himself, David turned to the girl and said,
“If you aren’t tired still, would you like to come for a walk with me?”
“Oh, please!”
The light which flashed into her eyes was indescribably gratifying, and, before his aunt could demur in any way, he said,
“You talk things over with Mrs. Preston, Aunt Mary. Anya and I will try to finish the evening without further drama.”
“Very well. But don’t keep her out late.”
“I won’t,” David promised, while Anya looked surprised that anyone should be concerned about her goings and comings or, indeed, her welfare in any form.
As they left the hotel together, he had the curious feeling that they made some sort of escape. He was aware then that there had been a degree of strain about sharing her with other people. At any rate, with the people who made up his own conventional world. Now there were just the two of them again, and everything was inexplicably simpler.
By common impulse, they turned away from the town and began to follow the winding path which led to the top of the hill where they had first met. For most of the time they walked in silence, and, when they did speak, it was only to make some comment on the scene around them. But it was not a strained silence, and neither seemed to feel the necessity for conversation.
Only when they came out at last into the open space where he had first seen her did she turn and look down on the town, very much as she had the first time.
“Well, here we are—back at our first meeting place,” he said, and he tried to make his tone light and casual.
“Yes.” Her tone was thoughtful and not at all casual. “Here is where it all began.”
“All, Anya?” he queried a little teasingly. But she did not echo his lighter mood even then.
“My knowing you,” she explained seriously. “And my father dying—and the meeting with the poor lady down there in the hotel who lost her son.” She stopped, frowned consideringly, and then said, “Tell me—what did she mean when she said I must be his?”
David, who was not over-anxious to do more explaining just then, looked nonplussed.
“That’s another story, Anya. Suppose we leave it for tonight, shall we?”
She did not answer that at once. Instead, she looked away from him across the town, and he was certain she was seeking the roof of the barracks, indistinct now in the twilight, but still perhaps representing some sort of reassuring familiarity for her.
“I wish you would tell me,” she said gently. “Why does she look at me as though she could love me? While the other one—Celia—looks at me as thought she could hate me?”
“Oh, nonsense, my dear!” He was shocked and, for the first time, slightly annoyed with her. “You exaggerate. Celia is a good deal taken aback by the situation. She’s afraid her mother will do something impulsive. That’s all.”
“Something impulsive about me?”
“Well, yes.” He hesitated. And then he saw that the present time was probably as good as any for telling her the rest of her own strange story.
“Let’s sit down here for ten minutes, Anya. I think, after all, perhaps I should explain things further.”
Obediently she seated herself beside him on the short, dry grass. But she sat up straight, and a little removed from him, as though she were very much aware of the slight reproof contained in his protest about Celia.
“I hope it won’t upset you to hear about it.” To his surprise he found that he was oddly nervous about explaining. “But when your—father sent you out of the room—out of the cubicle, I mean—yesterday, and spoke to me alone, he told me something vital about you.” He paused and looked at her. “Have you any idea of what it was?”
She shook her head, and looked back at him with such innocent, limpid blue eyes that he wondered, passingly, why he had ever supposed there was something enigmatic about her glance.
“Briefly, my dear, he explained that you were not his child in reality. That your father had been an Englishman, who died before you were born. Beran then married your mother and, after your birth, took you both to Prague.”
He stopped speaking and there was a long silence. Then she said very softly, as though to herself,
“Then I am English?—like you.”
“Yes.” He was, he discovered, strangely moved as well as amused that this should be her first consideration. “You are English. Like me.”
“And because of the photograph, and what my mother said about it, Mrs. Preston thinks I might be the child of her lost son?”
“Yes, Anya. And one must admit there is some ground for the belief.”
“Then what,” asked Anya slowly, “is going to happen?”
“That, my dear, remains to be seen. And now,” said David, getting to his feet. “I must take you back to the hotel, or my aunt will scold us both.”
She rose obediently at once. But, although he started down the hillside, she paused for a moment longer and looked across the shining river to the wretched place which had been all she had known of home for so many years. And suddenly she made a peculiar little gesture with her hands, as though she took leave lovingly of someone.
“Good-bye,” she whispered, so low that David could not hear it, “good-bye. You were my dear and loving father always, whatever they say. But now I must go with him.” Then she turned and followed David down the hillside.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was morning, and the sunlight, filtering through the slatted blinds, picked out the faded pattern of the carpet on the floor of Anya’s bedroom.
She was not used to a carpet, any more than she was used to a room of her own. But then she was not used to anything which had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours.
She turned on her side and looked at her own thin, lightly tanned arm. It was like the arm of someone else. Someone to whom she was half a stranger. And, not for the first time since David had brought her away from the camp, she had the odd feeling that she was living another person’s life.
Yesterday she had been one of a vast number of featureless, rootless, indistinguishable people who shared a common lot. What happened to one of them more or less happened to all. They were without individuality to those who dwelt in the outside world. They were almost without identity.
But now it was all different. She was the girl to whom something had happened. Not just minor, day-to-day events or experiences. But events which were fast building up into a composite whole—creating a new sort of exist
ence.
And it was from David that all this strange drama and development flowed. He was the core and inspiration of her new existence. From the very first moment he had smiled at her, that evening on the hillside, she had felt as though her heart reached out to him. She had managed not to show anything of the feelings which both frightened and enraptured her, of course. She had stood beside him, answering his questions quite calmly. But even then, she thought, her world had begun to change.
Other men had smiled at her in her short life. In affection, in amusement, interest or desire. But none of it had been important. Just something one accepted gratefully or rejected contemptuously. But after that first short encounter with David, she had gone back to her wretched room knowing that nothing else in the world was more important to her than that she should see him again.
And that was why, in her hour of anxiety and distress, it had seemed natural to turn to him. Just as his response had seemed inevitable.
If David had not spoken to her that first evening—If he had not agreed to come with her to the man she had known as her father—If he had not insisted on bringing the English doctor—If he had not taken her back to the hotel when it was all over—But he had done all of these things. And so her life had changed. It was even David, in the end, who had told her the strangest part of her own life-story. True, he had, characteristically, told it quietly and unemotionally. But, in some strange way, he had made her feel that, though the ground had been cut from beneath her feet so far as her old life was concerned, she was not to be alone in the strange paths she was now to tread.
He had spoken of other, unimportant, things on the way back to the hotel the previous evening, and she thought he had probably intended that the dramatic disclosure should not be enlarged upon until she had had time to absorb it quietly.
But when they had arrived back at the hotel, Lady Ranmere had met them, with that dry, closed-in look which meant she was not pleased about something. Anya knew a lot about the way people looked when they were not pleased about something. When you lived in close proximity to your fellows for years on end, there were few glances or words or even silences which you could not interpret accurately.
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