Columbella

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by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;


  He came after me along the upper hall, but when I reached Catherine’s door and put my hand on the knob he hesitated.

  “I never go into that room,” he said. “She has a right to her privacy.”

  “No one told me not to, so I went in,” I admitted. “There’s something odd here that you’d better see.”

  The smell seemed even stronger as I opened the door, and the small white unicorns seemed to arrest their dance in the midst of tumbling golden shells. King sniffed questioningly.

  “Shells,” I said, and went to the wardrobe to open the doors wider. “They’re for Alex, I suppose, but why would she put them here in her bedroom?”

  He dipped a hand into the carton, to bring up a fistful of shells and pick them over. “These look like the beach variety to me—dead shells—not the sort Alex prefers.”

  “There’s a carton of sand too,” I said, and pulled it out for him to see.

  King nodded. “That’s the way Steve and Mike pack their best finds so the more fragile shells won’t be damaged in bringing them home. But why they’d store sand or shells here I wouldn’t know. Anyway, Catherine will be out of reach by now. Let’s make use of the few hours we have left before we catch the plane for St. Thomas. We can take a cab back to Christiansted and have lunch. Then I’ll show you something of the island. I’d like to keep you with me for a little while.”

  I wanted nothing better and when he held out his hand I gave him mine without hesitation. Downstairs he phoned the nearest town for a cab, and just as he hung up Mike O’Neill came through the front door. The younger boy looked stocky and brown in his swim trunks, his dark hair water-slick, his eyes solemn and worried.

  “Where’d they go?” he demanded at once. “They haven’t come back to the boat.”

  “They’re around somewhere,” King said. “And not far, I should think. Maybe Henry will know.”

  Mike scowled. “Cathy sent Henry away for the day as soon as we got here. But I know a couple of places to look”—and he went off doggedly on his search.

  “I don’t want to go with him,” King said. “I haven’t the heart for any more right now.”

  Together we walked down the driveway toward the road and stood waiting for our cab. Beside us the undamaged stone unicorn did his endless dance, and I found myself turning to look back along the drive in the direction of Caprice, with its empty rooms, its shrouded furniture—and that one bright room where tiny golden shells tumbled beneath the hoofs of a hundred unicorns.

  10

  I would never forget the few hours we spent together in St. Croix. They were hours of discovery—of each other, and, for me, a discovery of myself. We did not speak of Hampden House or Catherine, or even of the problem of Leila. We were, I think, wholly lost in a pretense that some future together would be possible for us, though we did not speak of this. For a little while we pushed aside all that separated us and behaved as we might have done under freer, happier circumstances.

  As we talked, all that had been tenuous and uncertain began to take stronger, more painful root. We told each other of youthful experiences, and while I began to see Colorado and the Rocky Mountains as King had known them as a boy, he began to glimpse through my eyes the vast expanse of Lake Michigan, the granite towers of Chicago.

  But these few hours of pretense had to end. We boarded the seaplane for the flight home, and in St. Thomas, driving back to Hampden House, we hardly spoke. I knew King was as heavy of heart as I. Not until we were almost up the mountain did he put a last warning into words.

  “From now on you must be more careful than ever of Catherine. She’ll be more cunning the next time she tries to trap you in a vulnerable position. I’d rather have you out of this altogether, but you’ve given me your answer on that—and I need you here for Leila, whatever I do myself.”

  I promised to be careful, and that very evening he put a bolt upon the door of my room, and chains on the French windows, so that I might have air and safety at the same time. All that we did appeared a little unreal, and the interlude of the trip to Caprice began to seem like a dream to me, though there was one reality. I remembered King’s arms about me, and the longing that had built to an intensity between us at his last kiss. I remembered, too, the sight of a woman slapping a leather belt across her palm, back and forth, again and again. There were moments when this picture had the greatest reality of all.

  The days before the buffet supper passed quietly enough, although I knew that Catherine watched me, staring openly at every opportunity, a secret, disturbing smile on her lips. Whatever she might be planning, her silent scrutiny made me increasingly uneasy, though I managed to avoid any clash that could aggravate her.

  Fortunately, she was away a good deal of the time. She seldom announced in advance where she was going, but I knew from Leila that she went again to Caprice in Steve’s boat. And on the day before the party she flew to San Juan and stayed away overnight. This was not unusual for St. Thomians. Shopping trips to San Juan were almost like going downtown, since that cosmopolitan spot was only a half hour away by plane and there were frequent flights during the day.

  On the morning of the buffet supper Leila made a sudden request of me. During the days since she had flounced out of Alex’s study with her sketch of Caprice, she had surprised me by coming meekly to discuss her schoolwork with me every morning, and had even started work on some brush-up assignments I had given her. She was guarded and wary, perhaps—not really friendly—but she came, and she did not ask Catherine to aid in her release. Maud, I suspected, had talked to her, but whatever the cause I took advantage of it in every way I could. By now I knew something of where she stood in the private school she attended on the island, and we had begun study in her weakest subjects. She was quick and intelligent—and bored. Deliberately bored, it seemed to me, so that it was almost impossible to gain her interest when we stayed on the subject of schoolwork. There was an inner resistance to me that must have its source in Catherine’s influence, and I was unable to break through it, no matter how hard I tried.

  On the morning of the party she did not appear at her usual time for our lesson period, and Alex dropped by to tell me that she had gone to the airport in a cab to meet her mother and that I would probably see her later.

  I sat in the empty study, waiting for Leila to return, and fell at once into the dreaming state that now came to me so easily. I was like a girl enraptured by first love. Indeed, I suppose that is what I really was. The long-ago feeling I’d had for Paul seemed pale by comparison to my feeling for King. If Helen had been here now, and if she had made so much as a coy gesture in King’s direction, I knew I would have proved myself a very different woman from the girl who had watched her flirt with Paul.

  I was a different woman. And I was faced by far more insurmountable obstacles.

  Leila came into the study to find me musing. She looked solemn and worried and did not sit beside me at the table, but roamed the room restlessly, playing with Alex’s shells as she often did when something had upset her.

  “Did your mother have a good trip?” I asked, trying for an opening.

  Only then did she cross the room and drop into a chair beside me. “No—she had a horrid time. Somebody broke into her hotel room last night and stole those darling diamond earrings Grandfather bought her when she was a young girl.”

  I remembered seeing the lovely stones shining in Catherine’s pierced earlobes.

  “Of course she reported it to the police,” Leila went on, “but I don’t suppose she’ll ever get them back. There was a lot of red tape, since the thieves got into other rooms too, and she almost missed her plane this morning. I’m glad there’s a party tonight to cheer her up. Cathy loves parties.”

  “You haven’t seemed very excited about the party yourself,” I commented. “You’ve been acting as though the whole idea depressed you.”

  She reached for a p
iece of notebook paper and picked up a pencil. Absently she began to draw small neat figures across the paper. I looked over her arm to see that she had drawn a shell and a small horned animal. Over and over, with quick expressive lines, the same two figures—a columbella and a dancing unicorn.

  “Cathy has invited Steve to the party,” she said suddenly, her pencil still.

  I understood the connection her mind had made. I took the pencil from her fingers and touched its point, first to the shell, then to the prancing unicorn.

  “Catherine—she’s the columbella, isn’t she? And Steve is the unicorn she dances with? Yes, he might play that role, though I can better imagine him with the pipes of Pan.”

  She flashed me a look and promptly tore up the paper. I did not mind. Now I was getting close to what troubled her.

  “And Mike?” I asked. “Is he coming too?”

  “Oh, of course Mike,” she said with indifference. “He’s supposed to come so there’ll be a young person for me. As if I cared!”

  “I suppose you and your mother will be wearing your two red dresses tonight?”

  She came to life and flung the scraps of paper away from her. “On the way back from the airport Cathy told me about seeing you at Caprice that time last week. She told me she gave you a fright—with that brown leather belt of hers.”

  “She was upset about finding me in her room,” I said. “She was excited and I had no right to be there.”

  “She might have hurt you. I wouldn’t have liked that. I—I don’t think she ought to play such tricks.” Leila hesitated, then faced me squarely. “I don’t want to wear that red dress tonight. Uncle Alex is going downtown in a little while and he says I can exchange it if I like. So will you come with me and help me pick out something else?”

  I could not have been more pleased. Catherine’s story of the belt had affected Leila in a way she had not foreseen. Besides—there was the matter of a young unicorn who would be coming tonight, and because of whom Leila wanted to look pretty.

  “Of course I’ll help if I can,” I told her warmly.

  She jumped up to look out a window. “There’s Uncle Alex now, getting his car out. I want to return some library books at the same time. I’ll go get the dress and my books and be with you in a minute.”

  I was dressed suitably enough for town in a blue denim skirt with deep side pockets that I found handy, and a blue cotton overblouse. I had only to get my straw handbag from my room, and I was ready. We met in the upper hall and as we started downstairs together Catherine came in from the terrace with a basket of flowers in one hand. Her quick glance noted the red dress flung over Leila’s arm, and she guessed at once what her daughter intended.

  “I’ll come too,” she offered. “If you really don’t like the red, darling, I can help you find something else. Though I’m disappointed that we aren’t going to look like sisters tonight.”

  Her words were intended to make Leila feel guilty, but there was no way in which I could prevent Catherine from coming with us if she wished. Leila’s resistance was already weakening before her mother’s reproach and she flung me a pleading glance. It was Alex Stair, however, who rescued her.

  He had come to the front door and was in time to hear Catherine’s offer. “Let the child pick out her own clothes once in a while,” he said.

  Catherine turned angrily away and as she did so a spray of yellow cassia flew out of her basket and dropped to the parquet floor. She did not pause to pick it up, but went swiftly out to the terrace.

  Leila looked after her in dismay. “Now her feelings are hurt. Now she’ll be even more upset.”

  “She’ll recover,” said Alex shortly. He retrieved the spray of flowers from the floor and presented it to me with mock gallantry.

  We went outdoors and Leila dropped her books and the red dress in the back seat and got into the car, sitting between Alex and me. He turned out of the driveway quickly, as if he sensed her uncertainty and wanted to prevent any change of mind.

  As we started down the hill my fingers moved along the brown stem of the cassia spray and suddenly I held it to Leila’s cheek.

  “Cassia yellow! Do you have a yellow dress, Leila?”

  She shook her head. “Cathy says yellow’s wrong for us. It washes us out. It points up yellow tones in the skin.”

  I sniffed the flowers absently and said nothing, but I was aware of the turning of Alex’s head. When I looked at him he gave me a slight nod that Leila did not see, and I knew I would find a yellow dress in her uncle’s shop.

  As we started the zigzag drive down the mountain Leila tensed beside me and turned her head to look behind.

  “Cathy’s following us,” she said.

  Alex flicked a glance at the rear-view mirror. “Yes, I know.”

  “It’s just that she wants me to look right.” Leila was too quick, too earnest. “She’s always doing things for me, helping me.”

  I felt a tightness in my throat. Never had I detested anyone as I was coming to detest—and fear—Catherine Drew. She held too great a power in her hands because of Leila—power not only over the child, but over King as well, since, through Leila, she could hurt him so dreadfully. Old doubts engulfed me. What could I do to change any of this? My position was one of no real authority and all the strength of the situation lay against me. Yet I had to try, and the dress was a beginning.

  The car behind hooted derisively.

  “We’ll let her pass,” said Alex, and slowed to the side of the road, just as King had done the week before when I had first come up this mountain.

  The white car went by with a last toot of the horn and was gone around the next turn.

  “She’ll break her neck in that car one of these days,” Alex said, and I sensed as great a tension in him as in Leila.

  At once the girl sprang to her mother’s defense. “Oh, no! Cathy’s a wonderful driver. She’s always in control of her car. The things I’ve seen her do!”

  “The things you haven’t seen her do!” Alex snorted, and I glanced at him curiously.

  He still puzzled me, leaving me always uncertain as to his true motives and his feeling about Catherine. Often he spoke to her sharply, cuttingly, and yet there had been times when his eyes were upon her, when he thought no one was noticing, and I saw the pirate in them again, covetous, perhaps ready to take—yet vindictive when she held him off? As he had been the day he had sent King off to Caprice? What was the play between these two? And what was Edith’s role?

  Certainly Edith had hurried to warn her sister that King might be coming to St Croix, yet there was a conflict between the two women more often than not. Lately Edith had seemed even more on the verge of hysteria than usual. She had been shutting herself into her room for hours on end, coming out only to attend her mother, or to work on her husband’s shells. For the rest of the trip to town I puzzled over these matters, while Alex too seemed lost in thought and had little to say.

  When he dropped us off in the downtown area Leila picked up her books and the red dress, and we walked along Dronningens Gade, passing perfume and curio shops, stores where African carvings were sold, a place where Brazilian gems were displayed at free-port prices. But it was toward an area of alleyways cutting through to the waterfront that Leila led me.

  Here were long stone buildings stretching at right angles to the street—buildings that had been the original warehouses and slave markets of the town when St. Thomas was a thriving gateway to the Caribbean. Now they housed shops and offices in picturesque surroundings, with narrow passageways between, and cross-alleys connecting one with another.

  Leila turned through an opening of concrete arches into a long passage shadowed by leaning palm trees, where a cool wind from the sea funneled through. Set upon the cobblestones were small tables and chairs where people sat drinking coffee and eating refreshments brought out from an adjoining restaurant.
We walked past a graceful flight of brick stairs, rimmed with handsome iron grillwork, and went on toward Alex’s store. Palm Passage, they called this alley now, but once it had been a place familiar to the buccaneer and the old legends came close to one here. Where pink stucco had cracked away, the original foundations could be seen—built of stone and brick ballast brought over in sailing ships, and often put together with molasses for mortar.

  We followed the cobblestone walk until Leila turned again through an arched doorway. Apparently Alex’s shop ran through to front on Dronningens Gade, but this side entrance let us into the rear section given over to women’s dresses. I had been half afraid to find Catherine waiting there, but when I looked down the long aisle she was nowhere in sight.

  A pretty young Puerto Rican woman came to wait on us, eager to help as Leila began to slide dresses aimlessly along the nearest rod. I moved to another rack, fingering, searching, discarding. Yellow—I must look for cassia yellow. I still carried the sprig of blossoms and I held it up for comparison whenever yellow appeared in the pattern of a print. But it was not a print I searched for, though apparently visitors to the island indulged recklessly in Caribbean prints.

  The frock, when I came upon it, hung so slimly to itself, so well hidden by flashy neighbors on either side, that I almost missed it. A mere pencil line of yellow caught my eye and I pounced and pulled the dress out, holding it up on its hanger.

  Leila turned unhappily toward me. “I don’t know how to choose. I keep seeing Cathy. I keep picking what would look right on her.”

  I held up my dream of a yellow frock. “Try this one on, will you?”

  She rejected the look of it at once, shaking her head. “Oh, no! Not a babyish thing like that! Besides, it’s the wrong size—too big. I take the same size as Cathy. And it’s the wrong color too.”

  I hung it promptly back on the rack. “It’s up to you, of course. Pick put whatever you’d like,” I said indifferently.

 

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