So Dear to My Heart Read online

  SoDeartoMyHeart

  SUSAN BARRIE

  The visit to Switzerland was an important one for the Holt sisters, for Lisa was to undergo, at the hands of a famous surgeon, an operation the success or failure of which would decide her whole future. Virginia, accompanying her, did not guess that her fate too was to be decided at the same clinic between a calm, beautiful lake and the snow-capped mountains; and by the same commanding, inscrutable man.

  CHAPTER ONE

  When the time came for Virginia to say goodbye to Lisa in the wide cool hall where the smiling nurse looked on at them, it was as much as she could do to maintain her determinedly cheerful expression. Lisa looked so small, almost as if the tiredness resulting from the journey had caused her to shrink a little, and her dark eyes looked larger than ever in her wan, pinched face. But there was no sign of giving way to weakness or undergoing any change of mind about the set of her lips.

  Virginia experienced a sudden tightness around her heart and her last words came in a rush.

  “I’ll come and see you tomorrow. And I’ll bring you some magazines,” she promised. “I’ll be seeing Dr. Hanson in the morning but I expect they’ ll let me in to have a look at you in the afternoon. ”

  “Have a good dinner tonight,” Lisa said, smiling at her. “And wear your blue dress for the benefit of the other people in the dining room.”

  Virginia tried to smile back.

  “I’ m so tired I’ ll probably have something sent up to my room on a tray. But you must eat everything that’s set in front of you! Good night, Liz. ”

  Outside in the splendor of the evening she drove back to her hotel. It overlooked the lake, which had an appearance of unreality in the sunset light, with scarcely a ripple on its surface and a flawless sky above—a clear spring sky in which the first stars were already appearing. It reminded her of a drop scene at the theater, and despite her preoccupation with Lisa, when she had been whisked up in the elevator to her bedroom on the third floor, she stepped out onto her little balcony and continued to gaze at it all with admiration.

  For, after London and Cromwell Road, it was something to give the heart a lift. At Heathrow Airport, when they had left, a cold rain had been falling and spring had seemed far behind. But here there was every evidence not only that it was well on its way but that summer was actually around the corner. A summer of alpine flowers and scents and indescribable sweetness. No hot dust or gasoline fumes or sidewalks retaining the heat of the day. Only the lake and the white-walled villas running down to its edge and the eternal snows capping the guardian chain of mountains.

  Virginia lifted her eyes to the mountains and gripped the balcony rail. If only Lisa was all right! But she was going to be all right! Dr. Hanson would see to that....

  Funny, Virginia thought, that they had had to come all the way from England to find a surgeon who could make life bearable again for Lisa.

  She stared at the lake and recalled that the nurse had said that Dr. Hanson would see her in the morning. At eleven o’clock he would have a talk with her. And, presumably, he would also have a talk with Lisa before that hour arrived.

  Virginia wished unreasonably that he could have made an exception in her case and see her tonight, only for a few minutes, so that she could sleep and feel more assured in her own mind that Lisa was really in good hands and that whatever else happened nothing could go wrong with her. Although if the operation failed and Lisa had to return home with no comfort for her future, and with no promise that in time the ill effects of her accident would be completely wiped away and she would again play her piano, which had stood silent for so long—then life for Lisa would be the death-in-life she had been enduring for nearly ten months now and which so frightened all the members of her family.

  For Lisa didn’t simply take music seriously. It was her life. At fifteen she had made up her mind that the concert platform was her aim, and at twenty-one she had stood firmly dedicated to nothing else. Even her father and mother had recognized that they had produced a musical genius in their younger daughter. They had given her every encouragement and been proud of the way she had worked—her acceptance of the fact that it might be years before that dreamed-of first recital which would set her on the road to success and give prominence to the name of Lisa Holt. But as it happened those years of painstaking devotion to only one object and that fanatical disregard of all lesser pleasures and diversions had brought their reward far earlier than had been expected, and Lisa’ s first recital had been given and had attracted such favorable notices that her future seemed assured. She was like a star that would shoot across the sky with nothing in its path to stop it. She was brilliant, she was remarkable, she was completely happy!

  Until the night when she was involved in a collision and the taxi that was carrying her to her home on Cromwell Road crumpled up like a concertina with Lisa inside it. And when they knew that she would live they waited anxiously to learn how soon, and how completely, she would recover. She did recover the use of all her limbs, save her slender right hand, which remained paralyzed. And a paralyzed right hand was a hopeless right hand for a girl consumed by a burning ambition, a girl such as Lisa Holt.

  At first the doctors suggested treatment, and one treatment gave place to another, but without result. Lisa felt there was little point in her having made a recovery at all if this was to happen to her. If it had been her leg she could have borne it—if it had been any part of her save her hand she could have borne it!

  Her eyes, which were naturally enormous, seemed to grow lifeless in her face, and all their brown and youthful sparkle might never have been. She had had a kind of elfin beauty that had charmed when she had taken her place before a piano, and the rippling movements of her fingers had delighted her audiences; but now the beauty had become wan and faded and her tight little smile was full of bitterness. She had been cheated—so badly cheated that she felt she could not endure to go on unless some hope of some kind was sent to her to make existence bearable. And the hope was provided when a specialist pronounced his opinion that an operation performed by a certain Swiss surgeon might—and he would go so far as to say that he felt it was almost a certainty—restore life and flexibility to her fingers.

  Virginia returned to her bedroom and slowly started to change her dress for dinner. Although she had said that she would have something on a tray she knew now that it would be impossible to spend the evening alone in that room with nothing but the vague noises of the hotel to distract her, the knowledge that she was in a country new and utterly strange to her to cast a kind of additional loneliness across her spirit, and the vision of Lisa’s hollow-eyed face reappearing constantly before her eyes. And because Lisa had wished it she put on the blue dress that was her one and only evening gown. It had been bought for a tennis-club dance and suited her very well indeed.

  Virginia had none of the striking, essentially vivid type of beauty that had once been her sister’s. For one thing, she was four years older, although sometimes she actually looked much younger for her gray eyes were peculiarly guileless, and there was a gentle uncertainty about her smile. She was rather like a picture viewed through gauze, the tints subdued, the imperfections barely noticeable. Her skin had the pale flush of a drift of opening apple blossom; her brown hair looked as if it had been powdered with gold dust.

  But her nose was not classically straight like Lisa’s, and her mouth had a happy upward curve to the corners and found it difficult to compress itself into lines of determination or unshakable firmness.

  She would not willingly have consented to go through all that Lisa was willing to go through in order to realize an ambition. She was singularly without ambition, although, like most young women when the signpost of twenty has been
left five years behind them, she did sometimes wonder a little about her future. She didn’t dream dreams about her future, but she thought about it occasionally, and— wondered....

  Although Lisa was in a sense the invalid, it was she who had worked out all the details of this trip abroad—the first either of them had ever made unaccompanied by their parents—and who had insisted that Virginia stay at one of the best hotels, if only for a few days, until she could find less expensive accommodation. For less expensive accommodation was going to be essential when one took into account all the other mounting expenses that the unfortunate Mr. Holt had to meet on his younger daughter’ s account. The expense of the operation itself, in a country where there was no health service, as well as the support of his two daughters, since Virginia had had to give up her job as secretary in a lawyer’s office in order to accompany her sister.

  And then at home there were two younger brothers still at school. It was all rather a financial drain on the head of the family.

  But if everything went well with Lisa, no one was going to raise any objections concerning this rather staggering expenditure that her health and her career had made necessary. Certainly not Virginia, who was going to remain near to her as long as it was at all possible and who had made up her mind to seek cheaper lodgings at the very earliest possible moment—just as soon as she had her talk with Dr. Hanson and her mind and her thoughts were at liberty to cope with less vital matters.

  She was intensely conscious of her strangeness and her isolation in that splendid hotel when she descended to the brilliantly lighted lounge where, despite the fact that it was out of season, a large number of people seemed to be enjoying the many amenities. They were such smartly dressed people, too—especially the Americans, whose voices mingled with the flow of continental tongues around her, and gave her a feeling of confidence because they were after all speaking her own language.

  A waiter found her a small table for one in the dining room and Virginia sank gratefully onto the chair he pulled out for her, thankful for the protection of a huge palm in an ornamental brass-banded tub beside her.

  The waiter understood English far better than she was able to express herself in. her schoolgirl French, and she colored rather delightfully when he smiled and suggested, with scarcely any accent at all, items on the menu that he thought would be likely to appeal to her. Although she did not realize it, the blue dress—deep, midnight-blue georgette with a finely pleated skirt—worn with a tiny bolero of silver brocade, made the most of her typically English fairness, and combined with the shy charm of her smile it was sufficient to set her a little apart from the rest. Even the waiter found the task of looking after her a pleasant one.

  At a table close to her a party of four people had just taken their seats and from the extreme deference of the waiter attending to them-—to say nothing of the bows and smiles of the maitre d’hotel from the moment they appeared in the dining room—they were visitors of distinction whose patronage was much appreciated.

  From where she sat beside the palm Virginia could study them without being observed herself and she noticed that of the two women one was quite spectacularly lovely, wearing a confection that breathed Paris in every line, while of the two men the younger had grave good looks that made him a most fitting escort for his exotic companion. She directed her smiles brilliantly at him and Virginia was almost dazzled by the perfection of her milky even teeth and the spun-gold wonder of her hair, which was wound in a coronet of braids about her regally poised head.

  A fascinating display of jewelry winked at her ears and about her rounded throat and arms, and that it was costly jewelry Virginia never had a doubt. One had only to look at the dark, slightly austere face of the man with the sleek head who bent toward her—the chiseled perfection of the straight nose and the mouth and the clearly defined jaw made the English girl think of fine pieces of sculpture she had seen—and to recognize his attentiveness, and the fastidious attention to detail where his own grooming was concerned, to be very sure of that. And the elderly couple who made up the party looked opulent and expansive, but just as unmistakably well bred.

  Virginia wondered whether the young, attractive couple was an engaged couple, with the older pair being the parents of the girl. This might easily have been the case, judging by the almost fond looks the elderly pair bestowed on the young woman and the interested manner in which they occasionally studied the young man.

  Virginia noticed that champagne in an ice bucket had been brought to their table; they seemed to be having some kind of a celebration. Was it an engagement party, she wondered.

  As soon as she had finished her dinner she rose with the intention of spending half an hour in the lounge before retiring to bed. As she neared the tall swinging doors a couple of athletic blond young men, who looked as if mountain climbing might be among their hobbies, walked carelessly through them. Without noticing her approach one of them let the door through which she was about to pass swing back in her face, so that it caught her a glancing blow on one side of her head that caused all the lights in the dining room to whirl madly around her for a moment, while she clung to the handle for temporary support.

  The blond young man who had inflicted the punishment uttered a guttural exclamation and looked horrified. His companion, more practical, inquired anxiously whether she was hurt.

  “We did not see you. Fraulein!” he exclaimed, his German accent very noticeable. “And my friend here is of a clumsiness to be despised! I trust that you are not hurt—?”

  “No; only a little—a little dizzy!” Virginia answered, trying to smile and make light of the incident, although she was feeling almost deathly sick; she had gone very white and was still clinging to the handle of the door. “I—I’ll be all right in a minute. I’ll take a seat in the lounge—”

  “Here—take my arm,” said the concerned giant, offering it somewhat belatedly; but he was firmly put aside by the grave-faced, dark-haired young man who had been dining at the table close to Virginia’s own, and who did not wait to offer her his arm but put it around her and guided her to a discreetly placed couch just inside the door. He sat down beside her as she collapsed rather weakly onto the cushions, and putting out a hand encircled her wrist with his fingers and looked keenly into her face.

  “I’m afraid that the door hit you on the head, did it not?” he asked, his voice very quiet and almost as English as her own.

  Somehow the feel of his firm fingers around her wrist was as soothing as a sedative to her just then, and whether it was his touch or some quality in his voice that acted like a stimulant, as well, she was unable to decide. She did know, however, that the lights all at once stopped whirling, her inside stopped being revolted, and the color swept back into her cheeks in a rush as she said, “But it was my own fault! I—I should have looked where I was going.” Actually she had been wondering whether there would be many people in the lounge and whether much of their attention would be diverted to her, alone and unattended in such a big hotel. “The young man was not to blame. Really, he wasn’ t—”

  But the young man was bowing in front of her and apologizing afresh in a flood of mixed German and English. He looked very red and uncomfortable and his friend, who was standing beside him, looked just as red and just as uncomfortable. The dark man beside Virginia on the couch ignored them, however, and stretching forth his hand received something from a waiter who had not wasted any time. Virginia found that she was expected to dispose of a small glass of something that looked and smelled like neat alcohol. She hesitated, received an order to “Drink it up!” and obeyed—choking over it a little—and then felt surprisingly much better than she had felt before.

  “Good girl! ” exclaimed the quiet voice beside her. He ceased holding her wrist and began to run his fingers lightly through her hair, feeling for the bump that had already risen under the soft brown curls. He looked at her with a little smile in his eyes, “I’m afraid it is going to be rather painful for a day or two, but
it will subside quite soon. I will send some stuff up to you that, if you follow the instructions and paint it over the bruise will help to mend matters even more quickly. And now I think you would be wise if you went up to your room.”

  “Yes,” Virginia said, adding meekly, “I will.”

  “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  “I hope so,” she murmured.

  “You feel better already, don’ t you?” he asked, raking her with that keen look.

  “Much better,” she admitted.

  She realized that she was not being very bright, but although she was almost completely restored to normal there was something about the whole affair, coming as it did on the top of a day devoted to travel and emotional upheaval, that had shaken her right out of her natural composure. And with his dark eyes resting on her—so reassuring and yet so inscrutable, so strangely penetrating and yet kindly and understanding at the same time, she felt as if her wits had temporarily deserted her and speech simply would not come easily,

  “If you like I’ ll take you up to your room?”

  “No, thank you,” she answered. “I can manage.”

  She was about to add thanks for his prompt attention—dimly it occurred to her that he must be a doctor or at least he was capable of dealing with an emergency such as the one she had presented him with—when a shadow glided gracefully in front of them and a voice as delectable as ice-cooled wine inquired softly, “Is there

  anything I can do? is your patient responding to treatment, Leon?”

  Virginia looked up at her vaguely. She recognized the slim form, the expensive and cloudy gown of black net scattered like stardust with sequins, and the gold-crowned head above it. She remembered that she had sat studying this woman with interest while she was eating her dinner. But now that the clear eyes of extraordinarily deep and translucent blue were looking directly at her they confused her a little and she began to stammer awkwardly, “Thank you, I—I’m quite all right now! It was just an accident. I—I’ ll go upstairs to my room, if—if you would be so good as to direct me to the elevator?”