An Unexpected Song Read Free Page B

tall, spare frame was now growing thinner every day,she noticed uneasily. The feverish energy he was injecting into his work was taking its toll.
    “Was it?” He added a little gray to the cobalt of the bowl containing the fruit. “Well, I’m sure I had something.”
    “I’ll make some soup for us.” She threw her purse on the couch and moved toward the tiny kitchenette across the room. “And then we’ll go to bed.”
    “After I finish.” He hesitated. “I thought maybe, if you weren’t too tired, you’d pose for a little while for me. The portrait has something—it
feels
good, Daisy.”
    “Then why won’t you let me see it?”
    “It’s a surprise.”
    “I’m not tired, but you have to rest. You know what the doctor said about—” She stopped. He had turned to look at her and was smiling gently as he slowly shook his head. They both knew it was only a matter of time, but he had made her promise to tell no one and live each minute to the hilt. She didn’t have the right to lecture him about how he should spend his last days simply because she wanted to keep him with her a little longer. She felt the tears rise to her eyes and quickly turned away so he wouldn’t see them. “We’ll talk about it later. I’ll make the soup.”
    Charlie worked on her portrait until after three in the morning and stopped then only because Daisy firmly sent him off to bed on the pretext that she was too tired to pose any longer. He carefully draped the portrait before he left the room. After the door of his bedroom shut behind him,she got up and returned to the canvas of the still life her father had been working on earlier.
    It wasn’t really a very good painting. Just a still life like a dozen others that were displayed by hopeful artists in the colony. It wasn’t fair, dammit. Air Charlie had ever wanted was to create something wonderful. He had worked hard all his life to achieve that goal. Why couldn’t the muse have blessed her father with just one work that he could be justifiably proud of before he died?
    She wearily turned away and switched off the lights before moving toward her own small bedroom. Life wasn’t always fair, but one had to make the best of it. They had these last few months together, and maybe tomorrow Charlie would paint his masterpiece.
    She took off the sky-blue eighteenth-century gown in which Charlie had insisted on painting her and carefully hung it in the closet. The first time he had seen her play Fantine he had said that she was born to wear a period costume, and when he had decided to paint her portrait, nothing would do but that she buy this gown from the company.
    She put on her nightgown and went to the window and threw it open. There was no use trying to go to sleep until she wound down a little. Too many things had happened tonight, and the adrenaline was still flowing. The Alps looked austere in the moonlight, and she shivered a little as she gazed at them. She much preferred the view in the sunlight, when she could see the lush grass on the foothills. Then she was always reminded of that wonderful scene in
The Sound of Music.
Now all the softness was gone and themountains seemed only to exude hard, craggy power.
    Like Jason Hayes, she thought suddenly. He possessed the same air of bold, irresistible power as the mountains. Yet there was nothing cold about the man. She had been conscious of volcanic heat underlying his rugged exterior.
    Night Song.
    Her throat tightened painfully and she swallowed with difficulty. She couldn’t let herself think about Jason Hayes or his play. She had turned down other offers in these last few years. The pain would go away in time. It was the joy of singing that was important, not her career itself.
    But, dear heaven, how she would have loved to be the first one to sing his songs for Desdemona.

Two
    At two-thirty the next afternoon there was a knock on the front door of the cottage.
    “I’ll get it.” Daisy stood up from the huge thronelike