Tiny and distant as they saw him, he filled the sky for a moment. A long, rangy figure, like most of them here, in the modified local dress that made them all look like Mirek’s brigand-patriot Janosík and his mountain boys. The brief glitter like a crown on his head must be the fine chains that ringed his hat, the light streaming down his body was the sheen of his rain-soaked frieze cloak. His swinging stride carried him into the gleam and out of it without pause; and they saw clearly, bright and ominous against the dark sky, the stock of the rifle projecting over his shoulder, and the inordinately long barrel swinging momentarily into sight below his hip as he turned through the col, and vanished in a swirl of his wet cloak, leaving the stage empty.
Below, near the Riavka hut, it had not rained at all. The meadows were dry and bright, the cloud had passed, torn its skirts on the summits, discharged its rage there, and dissolved in its own tears.
They lay in the blonde grass at the edge of the paddock, half asleep, reluctant to go indoors. And it was there that they heard the far-off pipe again. The notes came filtering into their consciousness like music heard in a dream, so distant they were, and so faint. If they had not heard them already once that day, they would probably not have been aware of them now; and even as it was, they had been listening to them inwardly for some minutes before they realised what it was that was stroking at their senses.
Dominic lay stretched out at ease, the breeze just stirring Tossa’s dark hair against his shoulder, and let his mind drift with the elusive sound rather dreamed than heard. That abrupt, cascading, improvised opening, hardly loud enough to be heard at all, and yet startling, and then the full, deep, remote air. He wondered how well Christine really knew her modes? “And ever against eating cares, Lap me in soft Lydian airs.” Or Mixolydian, what’s the odds? To follow the tune you had to relax and let it take you along with it, for its progress was deliberate and abstracted, running line softly into line. Not until he stopped consciously listening did he catch the form of it, and fall into the loose, plaintive cadence so smoothly that the words came of themselves.
Curious how the simplest doggerel folk-songs have a way of making themselves applicable everywhere.
Sometimes I am uneasy
And troubled in my mind…
Like Tossa, with her tender conscience, and her sense of obligation to a man she had cordially disliked. He turned his head softly, to study through the seeding grasses her unconscious face, turned up to the slanting rays of the sun with eyes closed, half asleep, but still anxious in her half-sleep, and still vulnerable. Her eyelids, loftily arched and tenderly full, were veined as delicately as harebells, and her mouth, now that she wasn’t on guard, was soft and sad and uncertain as a solitary child’s.
Sometimes I think I’ll go to my love
And tell to her my mind.
He was leaning cautiously over her on one elbow when she opened her eyes, looked up dazedly and blindingly into his face, and smiled at him without reserve or defence, out of the charmed place of her half-sleep. And suddenly, in the same instant that her open acceptance of him made his heart turn over, the true significance of his own ramblings stung his mind. He rolled over and sat bolt upright, his fingers clenched into the grass.
Sometimes I am uneasy
And troubled in my mind…
He wasn’t mistaken. That was the air he’d been hearing now for two minutes at least, and he’d known it, and never grasped what it meant, or how downright impossible it was. The pastoral mood was right, the loose form was right, and the music was certainly modal; but how could some shepherd piper here in the Low Tatras, in the heart of Central Europe, be playing an unmistakably English folk-song called “Bushes and Briars”?
Chapter 6
THE MAN IN THE CHAPEL
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The astonishing thing was that no one else had noticed anything odd; they lay placidly chewing grass-stems on either side of him, and gave no sign. Nobody but himself had caught and identified the air; and in a moment more it was gone, and even the distances were silent.
He debated uneasily whether he ought to call Tossa’s attention to his discovery, but the decision was taken out of his hands. He had no opportunity to speak to her alone before they were called in to their early supper; and midway through the pork and dumplings Dana appeared in the doorway to announce in a flat, noncommittal voice: “Miss Barber, someone is asking for you on the telephone.”
Tossa dropped her fork with a clatter, suddenly jerked back into her private world of pitfalls and problems. Her face was tight and wild for an instant.
“Telephone?” said Toddy incredulously. “What, here? What secret contacts have you got in these parts, Operator 007-and-a-half?” Dominic was beginning to marvel and chafe at the insensitivity of Toddy; he’d known the girl for years, he should have felt some response to her unbearable tension.
“Don’t be an ass,” said Tossa with a sigh, getting to her feet with a creditable pretence of boredom and resignation. “It’ll be my mother, of course.”
No one, fortunately, thought fast enough to observe that they had come to Zbojská Dolina only on the spur of the moment, and their address certainly could not be known to anyone in England, since Tossa’s card home had been posted only yesterday.
“I never thought your fond mama was fond enough to spend a guinea a minute, or whatever it is, talking across Europe to her darling daughter,” said Christine cynically.
“Don’t be silly, Paul will be paying the bill, of course.”
Dana, hovering in the doorway, said clearly and deliberately: “It is a man calling.” She cast one brief glance at Dominic, and hoisted her shoulder in a slight but significant shrug. She was a little tired of secrecy, and not altogether disposed to go on being discreet. Dana was taking no more responsibility for anything or anyone. It was up to him now.
“What did I tell you? Paul getting paternal!” Tossa walked away to take her call, the back view almost convincing, resigned and good-humoured, ready to report faithfully to her demanding family, and extricate herself from any further enquiries. Though of course, she knew, none better, that it was not Chloe Terrell on the line, or Paul Newcombe, either, or anyone else in far-off England, but somebody here in Slovakia, somebody from whom she had been half expecting a message all this time.
She came back a few minutes later, still admirably composed, if a little tense. She sat down with a sigh, and resumed operations hungrily on her pork and dumplings.
“Everything all right?” asked Christine cheerfully.
“Oh, sure, everything’s all right. They’re home, and no troubles. Just felt they ought to check up on the stray lamb.” She wasn’t too loquacious, because she never talked much about her relationship with her mother, and it wouldn’t ring true now. “Paul mostly, of course, they’re always like that. He means well.”
When she was lying with every word and every motion of her body she could still, it seemed, keep the secret from the Mather twins, but she couldn’t keep it from Dominic. A private geiger-counter built into his deepest being started a pulsating pain in response to the rising of the hackles of her conscience, and halved her pain. And she was aware of it, for she flashed one appraising look at him, and then resolutely evaded his eyes.
But repeatedly, he noticed, his senses perhaps sharpened by the pain, she was glancing now at her watch. She had an appointment to keep? Or she was counting the minutes until she could be alone and stop lying? It wasn’t her natural condition, it hurt her badly, she might well look forward to a respite from it.