Thunder On The Right Read Free Page B

Now you're here, there's an easy way of finding out."
    Jennifer finished her drink and got to her feet. "I know. I'm going up to see her now."
    She spoke with such determination that he looked at her quizzically. "To pry her loose?"
    "Of course, if I can." She met bis look, and laughed. "Why not?"
    "You versus the Holy Roman Church? Why not indeed? What d'you suppose the College of Cardinals would say?" "
    "They can say what they like," said Jennifer calmly, picking up her handbag and making for the door. "I'm thinking of Gillian."
    Stephen, with a fleeting memory of Mrs. Silver, grinned and followed her.
    They made their way through the little village and began to climb the hillside road that winds through the valley of the Gave d'Ossoue, the first and loveliest tributary of the Gave. Behind them the houses seemed to sink and dwindle into the sunny hollow, till the colored roofs and the church spire and the little curved bridge appeared as a huddle of small bright toys at the end of a white ribbon of road.
    It was a golden afternoon. The road lifted its length before them along the hillside, the valley unfolding itself in curve after curve. The road was, to begin with, narrowly enclosed, with steep green meadows falling sharply to the stream bed on the right, to rise again beyond the water in sheer pastures where cattle grazed with slowly tolling bells. The valley twisted toward the south, and before them the great barrier of dim-green peaks which barred it had, miraculously, parted, and now valley and road were cupped between pine-clothed slopes roaring, rich in sunlight, toward still more distant crests of blue that brushed the sky. And these, faint with distance, etched in with snow and shadow against the long fingers of cloud that clung to them were, unbelievably, but the first ridges of the greater barriers beyond.
    It did not seem so very far to the Valley of the Storms. This ran from the south, a narrow green cleft springing from the Spanish range, and its icy rush of water, the Petit Gave, tumbled into the Gave d'Ossoue some three miles above Gavarnie.
    'There you are. That's the Vallee des Orages," said Stephen. "You'll see the convent as soon as you pass that bluff." He looked down at her. "Would you rather go on by yourself now?"
    "Yes, please. And thank you, Stephen."
    "The pleasure was mine," he said formally, and smiled. "See you tonight."
    She turned off the road into the track—it was little more —that climbed the smaller valley. She walked steadily, and soon, as she rounded a curve of the track, she saw, some distance ahead of her, set back against the mountainside to the left, the high white walls of the convent. A small square tower jutted up to catch the sunlight, vividly white against a rampart of pines beyond, and, even as Jennifer glimpsed it and guessed its nature, she heard, floating out of the thyme-laden wind, the silver sound of a bell.
    She tilted her head to listen, smiling, her whole being pierced, rinsed through, tingling with a keen delight. But presently the very beauty of that pure passionless note, insisting beat by beat upon the strangeness of the place, took her with a new sensation, part pleasure and part fear, and wholly dreamlike. To her, suddenly, in that high haunt of bells and tumbling waters, the mission on which she was bound seemed to lose reality. With the remote white walls of the convent, backed against that single sharp wedge of pinewoods, Gillian could have no connection. Even to think of Gillian living in Bordeaux, a Frenchwoman among the French, had been fantastic, while to imagine her here—slim, blond Gillian, with the Northumberland sky in her gray eyes— to imagine her here, quiet and cloistered among the Sisters of Our Lady of the Storms, was just not possible. Gillian, shut away in this lonely valley, perhaps forever. . .
    Her steps faltered, and stopped. She found herself staring up at the distant convent walls as if they were a prison, an enchanted fortess to