Thunder On The Right (3 page)

A little shiver touched her, and was gone like the fleeting shadow of a bird's wing.

She found herself glancing around 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 around 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 toward the stream. The two following horses, riderless, swung after him. wShe 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 around 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.

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 bellpull, 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 pinewoods beyond the far wall of the buildings was dark and aromatic, spellbinding, 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 doorkeeper, "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.

Nor, indeed, was the courtyard across which the orphan now began to lead her even remotely suggestive of flagellations, of nuns walled up alive, or of the other commonplaces of fictional convent life. Heat and light beat back in tangible waves from the beaten dust of the floor, and from the white walls where hanging creepers, partly masking the glare, drooped heavily around the arched windows. The yard was unbelievably still and hot, a little well of stillness where you almost had to push through the palpable heat of the air, and, at its center, like a symbol, the well itself stood ankle-deep in parched grass, the bucket hanging motionless, bone-dry, from the rope.

The two wings of the convent building formed the south and east walls of the courtyard, and at their junction stood the chapel, with its square tower jutting up above the roofs. The girl led the way diagonally across the yard toward this corner, where an archway gave on to a stone passage, a kind of tunnel which skirted the end of the chapel, and led straight through the south block of the building into the gardens beyond.

Inside the tunnel it was dim, and beautifully cool. Jennifer paused a moment, gratefully, as the chill of the stone poured over her like a cold breeze. To her left a shallow flight of steps led upward into a flagged hallway; farther along the tunnel a heavy door, with a bellrope looped up beside it, suggested an entrance to the chapel.

Opposite the chapel door was another which, she found later, gave on to the refectory and kitchens, with the dormitories of the orphans and lay sisters above.

Her young guide led the way quickly up the steps into the hall, which was apparently the center of the main offices of the building. Here the sunlight met them again, but this time mitigated by the lovely traceries of stained glass, which laid its peacock train of gold and green and amethyst along the flags, to where the treads of an imposing staircase barred them.

"I suppose," began Jennifer, as her guide started in a great hurry for the stairs, "I suppose—"

But the girl, with one vide apprehensive glance at her, plunged ahead, her bare legs twinkling rapidly through the jeweled light; vermilion, amber, emerald. . . . Stop, Caution, Go, thought Jennifer wildly, thrusting Mrs. Radcliffe back into the limbo from which she was irresistibly peering once more. She hurried after her guide, the variegated light flickering over her dress, and swimming into shadow on the paneled wall of the staircase, where saint after saint peered dimly from the brown varnish of small and undoubtedly mediocre canvases. St. Sebastian, of course, abundantly transfixed by arrows; St. Teresa on a cloud, miraculously suspended; a third and dimmer figure, withdrawn into the darkness of the varnish, but still indubitably surrounded by a flock of pigeons, geese, storks, bullfinches, and what looked remarkably like a cockatoo. ... St. Francis and his friends slid back and down the shaft of the staircase as Jennifer, chasing after her guide, emerged into a long upper corridor, abundantly lit by the afternoon glare which struck now through plain windows against a white wall and a row of light-wood doors. And here, in niches between the windows, stood the saints again, triumphantly emergent from the obscurity of their canvases, little statues brave in the brightness of red and blue and gilt, with the varied gaiety of flowers around their feet.

Mrs. Radcliffe, defeated, dwindled and faded in the superfluity of light, and Jennifer spoke with a decision that brought the scurrying orphan to a halt halfway along the corridor.

'Tell me, please"—the girl turned and faced her—"shall I be able to see my cousin today?"

But here the orphan, to Jennifer's amazement and growing exasperation, suddenly clapped her hand to her open mouth, not quite in time to stifle a shrill nervous giggle.

Over her hand the blue eyes stared with the same fixed and disconcerting look. She gulped and said nothing.

"Now look," began Jennifer. Then, as the uneasiness of the girl's demeanor communicated itself to her yet again, she said in a voice sharpening with apprehension: "Is anything wrong? Is my cousin ill? She is here, isn't she—Madame Lamartine?"

Then, to her embarrassment and dismay she saw that, though the child still gulped nervously into her hand, there were tears of real distress in the round blue eyes. But as Jennifer moved toward her, the orphan ducked back and, turning, scurried away down the corridor as fast as she could. Her steps slithered and rattled down the staircase, receded rapidly across the flagged hail below, and were gone.

Jennifer, thus marooned in the empty corridor, stared after the child for a moment in amazement mingled with uneasiness, then, with a mental shrug, began to look about her.

The doors on her right were all closed; the saints on her left remained uniformly silent; but at the very end of the corridor's bright avenue she saw facing her another door whose carved lintel and elaborate scrolls of ironwork held a suggestion of importance. This, surely, must be the Mother Superior's room, toward which she had charged the orphan to lead her. Jennifer hesitated for a little, further oppressed now by the silence around her; it became, momently, less and less possible to walk up that length of corridor and knock boldly upon a door. The out-of-the-worldness of the place pressed heavily upon her and she remembered all at once that from first to last the orphan had said no word. Perhaps, thought Jennifer, hovering miserably in mid-corridor, this was the sort of convent where nobody ever spoke? Trappist, that was the word. Or were Trappists always men? And could one teach------?

And here, like a hair-prickling draft on the back of the neck, came the feeling that she was being silently watched. From behind.

She turned her head over her shoulder, to meet the bright brown stare of St.

Anthony, smiling down at her from his niche with its immortelles and its nest of dead candles; St. Anthony, who found that which was lost . . . there was nothing in that fixed and plaster smile which could have caused the little
frisson
of goose flesh a moment ago. She turned further, and met the gaze of a still, black figure standing, like yet another statue, in an open doorway. But the door had been shut when she passed it a moment ago. And the eyes of this statue were alive.

So effectively had the silence and the strangeness of the place done their work that, for half a moment, Jennifer's mind failed to register the simple fact; that here at last was one of the inmates of the place who could tell her what she wanted to know.

Instead, at the sudden sight of the black-robed nun standing behind her, she experienced a sharp sense of shock; that sickening contraction of the stomach muscles, the swift, chilly emptying of the blood from the heart that momentarily cancels normality of reason and action. Here, in the sun-glaring corridor of the convent, one might surely expect to meet a nun, robed as this one was robed? But such had been the magic of the high valleys, the charged strangeness of the silence and the inexplicable demeanor of the girl at the gate, that Jennifer stared at the black-habited figure before her with all the horror and apprehension that she might have accorded to a supernatural being fresh from the medieval mysteries of the Inquisition.

Then the figure spoke, and moved from its doorway, shedding as it did so its ghostly anonymity, and becoming instead a tall woman with a coolly authoritative voice.

"
Buenos dias, senorita.
The Reverend Mother is at present occupied, but perhaps you can discuss your business just as well with me? Will you please come in?"

The room into which Jennifer followed her bore the same evidence of poverty as did the rest of the convent. It was small and square and, beyond the scanty furnishing provided by the flat bed, single chair, chest of drawers and
prie-dieu
, it held nothing. The floor, of scrubbed white boards, was innocent of polish, and the plain uncarved
prie-dieu
was placed, deliberately it seemed, so that the kneeler's gaze was turned away from the sun-drenched prospect of meadow and mountain, and directed toward a crudely carved crucifix—an effigy that made it only too plain that the cross was an instrument of torture. The odor of sanctity here, thought Jennifer, as she passed into the sterile sunlessness of the room, was too clearly the odor of sackcloth. If this was the rule that directed the Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Storms, then less and less could it be the place for Gillian. The owner of the room closed the door softly, and turned.