Three Bright Pebbles. Leslie Ford
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a suitable income for each of you. And Rick does marry, and Mother doesn’t like Cheryl, or whatever her name is, so she doesn’t arrange the suitable income.”
“And now it’s your turn?”
He shook his head. “Wrong, darling.”
“I thought that was why you’d come back after all these many years,” I said. “In fact—”
“I know. She’s got her heart set on a gal named Natalie something. But that’s not why I came home. I’m not getting married. I came back because . . . Mother’s getting married.”
I stared at him in the blankest amazement.
“Darling—are you out of your mind?” I gasped.
“No. Mother is.”
“Who’s she going to marry?”
“Sidney Tillyard.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“I mean, it’s all right. Old friend of the family, good-looking, nice fellow.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s O. K. with me. I don’t like it. I don’t suppose children ever like seeing somebody else . . . come in. But we aren’t children, and Mother has a right to her own life and all that. What I mean is, there’s no reason for Rick to chuck his weight about. He’s never home. And Mara’ll get a break. Mother’ll probably give her money enough to go to New York or some place.”
“That’s not what Mara wants, is it?” I asked.
“Lord knows. It won’t help with Alan Keane. It was Tillyard got him out of the mess at the bank, of course. I’d guess that’s the sort of thing you can’t forgive anybody.”
Somewhere in the distance a low deep roll of thunder moved the background of the silence that had fallen between us there in the garden. Dan was right, of course. None of them were children, even if they acted it from time to time. Rick was thirty, Dan twenty-seven, Mara twenty-one, and Irene Winthrop had been a widow for eight years. For seven of them everybody, including me, had wondered why she didn’t marry again . . . and now, probably, everybody, including me, would be amazed that she was going to marry.
I glanced at Dan, sitting there, hunched forward, poking the grass back over the hole he’d made in my lawn.
“You’re not going to marry Natalie?”
He shook his blond head, almost tow-colored above his sun-bronzed face.
“You’ve never seen her, have you?”
He looked around at me suddenly, shaking his head, a smile on his lips, but in his eyes something else . . . not pain exactly, but something not far from it.
“You remember those guys at King Arthur’s court that spent all their time hunting the Holy Grail?” he asked, pretty casually. “Well . . . that’s me.”
“Really?” I said. “Who is she?”
He shrugged.
“That’s what I don’t know.”
He got up abruptly, his broad white linen-clad back turned to me. Then he turned around and sat down beside me.
“I’ve never told anybody this, Grace. It was two summers ago. A couple I knew were going to a chateau down near Dijon. I was going along until it came out there was an eighteen-year-old daughter in the house. I’d had a couple of narrow escapes before I learned that if you dance twice with a nice French girl you’re as good as married. So I dropped out, at a place called Vezeley. It’s a crazy little sort of hill sticking smack up in the middle of a plain, with a little cathedral on the top of it. They were going to pick me up two days later.”
He was silent for a moment, staring down at the grass . . . back there in a cathedral town in Burgundy. The vague distant thunder and the oppressive heat of Washington were no part of his present.
“Only it happened to be the eve of the Fête de l’Assomption, and everybody from the countryside was in the town, and there wasn’t any place to stay . . . the little inn at the foot of the hill was jammed. Well, I walked up the cobbled street to the cathedral place. There was a girl there, an American. We got to talking. All of a sudden she looked at her watch. It was half-past seven, and she had to meet two other girls at Avalon.
“She had a rattletrap of a French car. She tried to start it, and couldn’t. So I offered to help.”
The twinkle came back in his eyes for an instant.
“The trouble was she’d left the ignition on in the first place, so every time she tried to start it she turned it off again. She tried to get a mechanic, but the mechanic had gone to bed and his wife wouldn’t get him up.”
He grinned at me.
“It wasn’t spring in Paris, Grace, but it was August in Vezeley, and the oleanders were in bloom. I had to spend the night there, so . . . well, I didn’t start her car. We had dinner at the inn, outside under the oleanders, and we sat up all night on the cathedral steps. The patron offered us his own room, and couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t take it. We talked all night, and we watched the sun come up. The patron brought us a jug of chocolate and a bag of croissants at half-past four—walked all the way up the hill with them—and at five the mechanic got up and turned on her ignition and started her car.
“I watched her drive down the hill, and waved at her, and she waved back at me. Then she was gone . . . and it wasn’t till two days later that I found out I was in love with her. And I didn’t know where she lived, or even her name. All I knew was that her hair was the color of wheat in the sun, and her eyes the color of faded hyacinths.”
“Pink, or . . . white?” I said.
“Blue, Grace. Gray-blue with streaks of dark. Well, I couldn’t get her voice out of my ears. I went back to Vezeley. I went back to Vezeley fourteen times. Once she’d come, alone, just the day before, the patron said. I stayed a week . . .”
We sat there a long time, saying nothing.
Dan grinned.
“I see her everywhere I go. I’m always getting arrested for following girls about. I see a plane flying, and I think of her . . . or ice on the edge of a pond in the woods, or lilacs in the spring, or a branch of yellow mimosa. In fact, Grace, I’m quietly going nuts. And I never so much as touched her, except when we shook hands saying good-bye.”
All effort to be debonair and nonchalant had stopped some time before. I had the curious and rather awed feeling that it was the first time in Dan Winthrop’s life that anyone had seen behind that casually cheerful and good-looking façade . . . and that what was seen was good.
He reached out suddenly and took my hand in his big brown paw. “We’d better get going if we’re making Romney by dinner,” he said—just as Lilac put her black head out of the door and rolled her eyes balefully up at the threatening sky: “You-all bettah get sta’ted if you goin’ get down to th’ country befo’ this here ol’ storm break, Mis’ Grace.”
And because Lilac has dictated my goings out and comings in since I came to the house in Georgetown to live, long before I was left a widow with the two small boys she’s practically raised, I got up obediently. Besides, she was right—as always. Dan and I had sat there much longer than either of us had thought, and we were supposed to be at Romney by seven.
Dan looked at his watch, then at me.
“Let’s forget it, shall we?”
I nodded.
“I wish to God I could,” he added abruptly.
2
So it was already getting on toward seven when we crossed the bridge over the Anacostia by the Naval School of Music, where a lone