"Mary Stewart - Rose Cottage [txt]" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

nightingale; but it would take all the poets, from Wordsworth down, to
do justice to the curlew's call.

I, certainly, cannot describe it, other than to say that every time
that liquid gold pours and bubbles through the sky, my skin furs up
like a cat's and my throat tightens with tears.

This was the effect that the song was having on the young woman who sat
near the brow of the hill. She sat at ease on the heather, apparently
with no other thought than to listen to the curlew's song. She was a
tall girl in her mid-twenties, dressed in a tweed skirt that looked
expensive, and a silk shirt. Her hair was dark and fashionably cut,
slightly ruffled in the shifting hilltop air. Her eyes dark, too were
fixed on the curlew which, suddenly falling silent, was gliding to the
heather some two hundred yards away. It would land, she knew, well
short of its objective, and make a long and circuitous approach to the
hiding-place of its lurking, all-but-invisible young. It had, while
pouring out that glorious, heart-piercing song, most certainly had both
beady eyes on her, and would be watching her still.

As the thought touched her, she saw the foolish,

long-beaked head pop up against the skyline, then vanish again swiftly,
as no doubt the scuttling babies were herded away to safety. She
smiled, and with the smile her face which in repose was perhaps too
serious, too set with some sort of private effort at self-rule lighted,
as she had been told at various times that it did, to a kind of
beauty.

As she had been told. As I suppose I may not say for myself, since the
girl (who was getting to her feet and brushing the heather-dust from
her skirt, in preparation for setting off downhill) was myself.

Myself when young, some fifty years ago. Mrs. Kate Herrick, aged
twenty-four, widowed, well-to-do, and here in Strathbeg to visit her
grandmother, who was employed as cook at the House.

Somewhere deep in the heather the grouse called again, "Come back! Come
back!" And indeed Mrs. Kate Herrick, who had been Kathy Welland, and
who had helped in the kitchen and sometimes in the gardens of the
House, had at last, and after more than four years, come back.

I looked at my watch. Gran would be awake now and, after the comings
and goings of the morning, there would be time at last for that private
talk. I had not arrived till late on the previous night, and still did
not know why she had so urgently summoned me north "to have a real
talk. No, not on the phone, hell, I'll tell you when you come." Then
as an afterthought: "You do remember Rose Cottage, don't you?"

Of course I remembered Rose Cottage. It was one of the cottages on the