Columbella

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  I glanced about the small room as if for help, searching for something of quiet to offer him—something to guard against the coming explosion. Strangely, I found it. On the wall across from where I sat hung another mountain picture, but of a very different subject from that range of majestic peaks in the scene at Hampden House. This was the photograph of a high mountain meadow, sloping gently downward from below timberline, with only the tops of two or three peaks as a backdrop. Diagonally across the picture tumbled a mountain stream, rushing over wet black rocks. The meadow itself was a mass of blooming wild flowers scattered thickly through the grass, and where grass and flowers had been pressed down in the foreground the shadow of an indentation lay across them—where a man might have lain dreaming in that peaceful place.

  “What a lovely spot,” I said softly.

  He looked around at me, startled. “What? Oh, that! We had a cabin near there when I was a boy. But it’s a spot I can never go back to. I know. I tried to go back when I took that picture on a visit a few summers ago. It seems to have changed, the way I’ve changed.”

  I studied the scene of that high mountain meadow where a small boy must once have roamed and played. It was as though the picture had something to tell me, to offer me.

  King looked at his watch. “There’s just time to make the plane,” he said. “I’d better leave for St. Croix at once.”

  I turned from the picture. “Take me with you.”

  For a moment he stared at me as though he had never seen me before, as though he could not remember my identity. All the rage that had risen so visibly in him was directed toward that distant place on the island of St. Croix, where his wife had gone against his wishes. There was nothing left of him here.

  I went to him and put my hand on his arm, gripped it almost impatiently, calling him back to the present while there was still time for the present to change the future.

  “Leila asked me to come,” I told him. “Please take me with you.”

  Slowly, almost painfully, he returned from his place of anger, from his projection into a violent future that was rushing upon him. There was a strange, quiet moment in which we looked at each other and a bond between us seemed to strengthen. For the first time in my life I stood my ground. I did not step back from what I saw in his eyes. I took the risk that involved me in living instead of in running. All reason warned me against such a stand, but I let my heart rule.

  The thing that leaped between us was no more than a flash, a kindling, that died almost at once, but I think we both knew it had happened.

  “You should never have come to Hampden House,” King said. “You were made for a different sort of life. You don’t know the first thing about dealing with evil. I hope you never need to learn.”

  Abruptly he left me and went to speak to the girl in the next office, waiting by her desk while she made a phone call. When he returned he moved quickly.

  “There’s a seaplane leaving in ten minutes. It will get me to St. Croix in half an hour, and I can take a taxi to Caprice. I’ve reserved seats for two. You can come if you want.”

  At least he had not made me stay behind. Before I followed him out of the office I cast a backward look at the photograph on the wall. There was the key to something in that picture—in the reason that lay behind his hanging it there where his glance would fall upon it every day.

  We went downstairs and crossed to a side street that led to the waterfront. We walked together through one of those pirate alleys that led us to the broad waterfront street which followed the curve of the harbor.

  Along its cement walk men from a fishing boat had spread out their catch and as we came along one of them put a huge conch shell to his lips, to blow a blast that could be heard all over town, notifying householders that fresh fish had been brought ashore for their purchase.

  We threaded our way among boxes of fruit and vegetables and huge stalks of bananas that had been unloaded from a craft with furled sail moored alongside, and reached the place where a motorboat waited to take us to the seaplane. Along with two or three other passengers for St. Croix, the boat ran us out to where the small plane floated on calm waters, and King helped me up the ladder and seated me beside a window inside. As he took the opposite seat across the aisle from me he could hardly have looked more grim and I knew that all the anger which had driven him for so long would not be held back much longer.

  In a few moments the seaplane was skating across the harbor on tilted pontoons, running toward the tip of Hassel Island on our way to the open sea. In moments it lifted from the water and I could look down at the orange-red bricks of old Fort Christian, and at Bluebeard’s Castle, and the aerial tramway up Flag Hill. Then St. Thomas was falling away behind as we flew out over the Caribbean toward the southernmost island of the Virgins.

  We made no attempt to talk across the aisle above the noise of the engines. Below us the sea rippled with tiny white-caps, and here and there the long wake of a boat carved a widening wedge on its surface. I thought of Catherine and Steve going out across that sea early this morning, on a trip that would take much longer than this one. Nevertheless, they would be there well ahead of us.

  I did not want to think of that I did not want to face what might happen when King found Catherine at Caprice. I could live only a single moment at a time and my one solacing thought was of that calm mountain meadow and the foreground shadow a man’s body had made, pressing into the grass. That picture told me a great deal. It showed me a man who longed for peace.

  9

  As our cab left Christiansted and we drove out through open country I became quickly aware that St. Croix was a very different island from St. Thomas. While there were mountainous areas, much of this larger island was made up of great flat expanses which had led to an agricultural economy. There were still occasional fields of sugar cane and pineapple, though the great plantations were long gone.

  We followed good roads on which there was little traffic, and King seemed to relax a little, as if he too postponed the moment of confrontation that lay ahead, and ceased trying to live it ahead of time. He spoke to me quietly of the island and its history—a dark and restless history that made St. Thomas’ seaport days seem tame by comparison. Pirates might have visited St. Thomas and dipped into its tills on occasion, but the Negroes there had been made freedmen early and they had become the businessmen, tradesmen, professional men that their descendants were today.

  In St. Croix the story was a different one. Great plantations had required slaves and freedom had come later than in St. Thomas. Thus there had been uprisings of the same sort that had swept bloodily across many a Caribbean island, and there were old resentments that still smoldered. The St. Thomian was a happy, democratic fellow. In St. Thomas everyone was color-blind. There might be prejudices, but they were more apt to be of a geographic nature, with the native islander looking down his nose at the continental, of whatever race. In St. Croix a white skin might still be met with faint distrust.

  It seemed as I listened to him talk that King was deliberately avoiding what lay ahead at Caprice, and I dared ask no questions. His mood seemed quieter, but since he often masked emotion, I couldn’t be sure how long such calm would last.

  The taxi turned off the highway down a side road and King spoke to the driver. “Stop at the gate, please.”

  When we were out of the car and he had paid the fare, King led the way toward two high stone portals with double iron gates sagging half closed between them.

  “The first caprice,” he said and gestured toward a stone post.

  On top of the right-hand post the dancing figure of a unicorn had been carved in stone, forefeet pawing the air, horn jauntily atilt. There had been little wearing away of the stone and the figure was nearly intact, observing the visitor with an eerie mockery that seemed to evoke the past and scorn the present. On the opposite post, however, the partner unicorn had fared much worse. It
s head was gone, and one pawing forefoot had been broken off, so that only its body and the hind legs on which it danced were clearly defined.

  “That fellow was smashed during a slave uprising long ago,” King said as he pushed the rusting gates further ajar to let us through. “They tried to burn the house, but it was saved by workers loyal to the Hampdens. Until young Roger died in Korea, the house has always come to a male descendant.”

  Rain fell more often in St. Croix than in drought-ridden St. Thomas, and it must have rained some hours before, for the earth of the sandy driveway was damp in places and reddish in color wherever water stood. We followed as it curved between what must once have been a double row of fine mahogany trees, many of which had been cut down, so that only a few giants were left to lend dignity and beauty to the approach to the house. King moved without hurry, as though we had all the time in the world, with no disastrous meeting threatening when we reached the house.

  We could see the ruins of the mill off to our right, roofless, but with its great stone chimney intact. Its arches and peaked walls, its hollow windows overlooked a considerable area, and within the shelter made by its wings grew a garden of tropical plants and trees. Beyond, unprotected, offering a naked windbreak against the gales that blew out of the Caribbean, ran a hedge of such giant philodendron as I had never seen, thrusting upward in a rugged tangle, for all that some of its leaves were blackened and curled where the salt blasts tunneled in from the sea to shrivel them.

  As we rounded a sudden turn King put a hand upon my arm to halt me. My breath caught in alarm, but no green-eyed woman stood at the end of the drive—it was Caprice itself he wanted me to see.

  Not any photograph, not even Leila’s sensitive drawing, could have done justice to this lovely old house. It had been built of stone and ballast brick brought over in the holds of sailing ships during another century. Its walls had been painted over and over in the past until they now boasted an ingrained rosy color that would be impossible to imitate. The style was Georgian, with a recessed, white-columned doorway and ornamental white fan above. Brick steps made a half circle at the entrance and the even rows of windows on either side were closed by long white shutters—except for a single upstairs room in one of the wings of a bracket, where a window stood open. As my eyes noted the fact, King saw it too and stiffened at my side. Was someone watching us from up there? Had I caught a flicker of movement?

  His hand tightened upon my arm. “Come—we’ll go in. If we meet anyone, you’re here because I offered to show you the house.”

  I had sensed before this how very close to the surface his rage against Catherine simmered, and suddenly I was afraid of the house.

  “Wait,” I said. “Before we go in, there’s something I’ve wanted to say. You told me something back at your office that I couldn’t accept.”

  “Yes?” he said, impatient now, wanting to get on with what he had come here for.

  “That photograph of a mountain meadow and a stream, with the peaks behind—you said you couldn’t go back there. I have a place like that too.”

  He was looking at me in surprise and I made myself go on.

  “Mine is a place beside Lake Michigan where I used to play as a little girl. Not as beautiful a place as yours, but a quiet place that still helps me sometimes. I can close my eyes and cut myself off from everything else. I can go there and sit in a spot I know where trees run down to the lake and water laps over a pebbly beach. It doesn’t exist any more. Not really. There’s a motel there now. But no one will ever take it away from me. When things are very bad I can go there and think. Afterward, it seems as though I can handle everything a little better.”

  My words came haltingly, awkwardly. They were difficult to speak because I was afraid he might think me silly and naïve, perhaps a little maudlin, afraid he might laugh at me. There was no easy way to tell such things to another person. I stared at Caprice and did not meet his eyes.

  He was silent for what seemed a very long while. Then he said, “Thank you for telling me that.”

  I could look at him then, and he was not laughing. There was only kindness in his eyes—a wondering, tender sort of kindness that seemed rather grave and did not mock me at all.

  He held out his hand and I put my own into it easily, feeling the way his fingers closed over mine in a light clasp. Together we crossed the broad carriageway and approached the fan of brick steps.

  “A second caprice,” he said and gestured to the right of the door.

  A plaque of white stone had been set against the brick and there, carved in bas relief, appeared the same dancing unicorn that graced the outer portal.

  “The Hampdens were addicted to unicorns,” King said, and added wryly, “Catherine likes them too.”

  Of course she would, I thought—since the unicorn was a magical beast and Catherine fancied herself as something of a witch.

  At the top of the steps the door stood ajar, and King went ahead, as if to meet first whatever awaited us inside. But the great house was silent and the gloom seemed deep after brilliant sunlight, the air gratefully cool. I stood blinking for a moment in a small antehall before King led the way over a raised doorsill into an enormous central room that ignored the square outlines of the house and formed itself about us in the shape of a lozenge. I was beginning to understand why the house had been given its name, for it must have taken a good deal of architectural caprice to achieve this room.

  Toward the rear the shutters on a single tall window had been opened and enough light penetrated the gloom to let me view the enormously high ceiling with its intricate plaster decorations, and the beautiful crystal chandelier which hung from its center. King stepped to the wall and touched a button so that the chandelier came brilliantly to life with an electric fire that struck rainbow colors from every tiered branch and glass teardrop.

  “We’ve kept our electricity,” King said. “And the place has a telephone, so it’s not isolated. There’s a caretaker, but he doesn’t seem to be about at the moment.”

  No one seemed to be about and I began to breathe more easily.

  “How beautiful it is.” I spoke in a hushed voice.

  King nodded. “It is beautiful—almost perfect of its kind. What I wouldn’t give to have a hand in the building of a house like this. But it belongs to the past.”

  He moved around the room as he spoke, circling the bare floor, studying sheet-shrouded furniture as if he searched for some special sign. Of Catherine’s presence? I wondered.

  “This morning,” I told him, “Leila assured me that Caprice would belong to her someday—that her mother had promised her that.”

  “More mischief-making!” King said. “Promising the child what can’t be fulfilled.”

  “Leila said her mother was going to restore the house just as it used to be.”

  “Absurd!” He flicked a sheet back from a lovely rosewood sofa, its gold damask upholstery faded and shabby, then turned it back again. “The house has become a white elephant. There’s no money for its upkeep.”

  “I told Leila that the best way to preserve the house for the future might be in the way you suggest. But she was angry with me. I’m afraid this is the second time I’ve made her angry.”

  “And when was the first?” he asked, still moving about the room, noting its details.

  “The first was yesterday when I asked if she had ever really considered your viewpoint or your feeling toward her.”

  He was bending over a cabriole desk, but his head came up at my words. “You said that to her?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I wanted her to grow up a little and begin to think of someone besides herself and her mother.”

  His eyes were shadowed in the dim room. “Thank you,” he said. “I didn’t know you were on my side.”

  “I think I’ve always been on your side, really,” I told him. “It’s just that we want the same thi
ng in different ways.”

  He turned from me almost abruptly and moved toward the stairs. Though our footsteps echoed on bare floors, the house was still quiet about us, and no one came to offer us either welcome or objection to our presence.

  “There’s a room upstairs from which I can see the beach,” King said, moving ahead to lead the way.

  The stairway with its polished mahogany rail curved gracefully upward in an oval curve to complement the room below, satisfying the eye in a way that modern angles never seemed to do. Upstairs the house was more conventional in shape, with a long central hall that turned at either end into the two ells of the bracket in which the house was built.

  Our footsteps roused echoes along the bare hall as we moved away from illumination cast upward by the stairwell and toward the gloom of the far ell. There King went to a room on the seaview side and opened a door upon darkness. Here there were no shrouded shapes to bar our way, and King went quickly to a window and flung the shutters wide, admitting a cool breeze from the sea, as well as a bright shaft of sunlight that set dust motes dancing visibly.

  Caprice had been built on somewhat higher ground than the rest of the area, and as I stood at the window beside King I could see out over the barrier of the philodendron hedge, and beyond it to a sandy ridge where sea grapes grew. A portion of this weedy growth had been cut away and through the gap we had a clear view of a stretch of sand rimming the green waters of a cove.

  “The beach belongs to Caprice,” King said. “There’s good swimming here, though only a little way on the coast turns rocky and there’s no place for a boat to put in.”

  “Do you suppose Steve’s boat is down there now?” I asked uneasily.