The Eagles Gather

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Better get the top up,” said Estelle. “Come on, everybody. We’ll be drenched in a moment.” And, in fact, big hammering drops of water were falling with a sucking sound into the thick dust of the road, and splashing into the faces of the women.

  But something was wrong with the top. It would not go up, no matter how they strained and tore their hands and panted. In the meantime, the rain and wind had increased. The lightning was a continuous glare, the thunder shattering. They were lost in a universe of blazing light and crashing sound and wind.

  “It’s no use,” panted Estelle at last. Her face was running with sweat. Her hair was blown about wildly. She looked disgustedly at the others. She had to raise her voice to a shout to make them hear. “We’ve got to go in somewhere! Shelter! Anywhere! Get in the car. The storm’s getting worse.”

  They had a struggle seating themselves, for the wind almost wrenched them from their feet. Estelle started the car. And now the rain, as though the heavens had opened to vomit forth a cataract, came down on the women. They gasped and choked, trying to shield their faces and eyes. It was no use. The car rumbled forward hopelessly. The thunder stunned and deafened everyone. They felt the car lurching on an abandoned road. The lightning was so brilliant and so continuous that it seemed to them that they were driving through a wall of illuminated water. Adelaide had the impression that they drove through gates, past a small lodge, but that was all. She was too busy trying to breathe.

  Then, in a momentary lull of rain, they saw that they had driven to the door of a great gloomy house. They could see its blank shuttered windows. The door was protected by iron grillwork. There was no shelter here. The graystone walls repudiated them, ran with rivers of glistening water.

  They regarded the place with despair. They were not deceived by the sudden lull in the storm. And then Estelle shouted. They saw a bobbing but steadily approaching light on the drive. Adelaide remembered the lodge. Apparently it was occupied by a caretaker. They all got out of the car and waited earnestly.

  A middle-aged man carrying a shotgun came into view in the aura of his flashlight. With him were two police-dogs, growling, and showing their teeth. “What do you want?” he shouted. “Nobody lives here.”

  Estelle tried to assume an air of dignity and competence, in spite of her drenched hair and face and clothing. “I am Mrs. Francis Bouchard,” she said, “and these are Mrs. Emile Bouchard and Mrs. Jules Bouchard, and Miss Bouchard., Bouchard,” she repeated impatiently, as he stared, his mouth dropping open. “We’ve got to find shelter until the storm passes.”

  He stared, and then slowly removed his hat. But he was still suspicious. “Well, ma’am, if you are Mrs. Bouchard, what’s this house?”

  Estelle was nonplussed a moment, then she cried angrily: “I’m sure I don’t know.” Agnes giggled. “It’s the House of Seven Gables,” she said.

  But Adelaide had turned and had been gazing at the house. “Why,” she said faintly, “it’s Robin’s Nest. Estelle, you remember hearing about Alice Bouchard? The granddaughter of Ernest Barbour? You remember, she married Jules’ brother, François, and then he committed suicide, right in this house, too, and she took her children and went to New York and married Thomas Van Eyck—”

  “You mean Alice?” said Estelle, amazed and intrigued in spite of her misery and wetness. “The one who died in England a year ago?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. And her children still live there, you know. Edith and Henri, with their stepfather. Her parents, Paul Barbour and Gertrude, built this house. Poor woman. You remember, she was hurt in an automobile accident, and then she died. I knew her quite well. But we never heard of any of them after her marriage. They—they never wrote—”

  The caretaker now interposed timidly. “The storm’s coming up again, Mrs. Bouchard. If you and the other ladies will follow me, we’ll go to the lodge.”

  “But,” Estelle cried, “have you the keys? Good! We’ll go in and look around. I suppose there are no lights?”

  “Yes, ma’am, there are. You see, we just got word Mr. Henri and Miss Edith are coming home, to live. Here. And we put on the power this afternoon.”

  While they exclaimed about him, intrigued, he opened the grilled door, and then the other. In the meantime the storm had renewed its fury. They were literally blown into the cool dark mustiness of the reception hall. The caretaker touched a switch, and lights flooded on. They saw the dim polished mirrors of the reception hall floor, mirrors repeated in vistas of distant rooms, all glimmering in the lightning. A graceful and delicate spiral staircase flowed and curved upward like a ribbon, losing itself in the darkness of the high upper floors. The ceilings were exceptionally high, almost vaulted, with pale plaster relief work touched with gilt. The wide entrances to the drawing rooms were flanked with slender white pillars. White marble fireplaces were visible in these and other rooms. But the dining room, broad and deep and high, was panelled and beamed with dark red mahogany.

  All the great pier mirrors were shrouded; the furniture, shrouded also, looked like misshapen monsters, crouching. The pictures were down from the walls and packed in canvas, on the floor. Gertrude Barbour’s beautiful old grand piano, which her father, Ernest, had imported for her from France, was a dinosaur of canvas, lurking in a corner of the immense “music room.” The bookcases in the library were glassed and dark. No rugs were on the floors, which echoed gloomily to the tread of the intruders.

  And everything was thick with dust and silence and death.

  As she walked with the others through the rooms Celeste had a most profound and terrifying impression. She felt that someone else was walking with them besides the caretaker. She could feel the presence of a young woman, restless and despairing, someone, perhaps, who had died a long time ago. She kept glancing back over her shoulder, expecting every moment to see some shadowy figure, some unearthly face. No other house in all her life had impressed her so extraordinarily. The glimmering lightning, the detonations of the thunder, which shook the walls and the floors, the spectral silence, the dust, the shrouded furniture, the waiting coldness and darkness in hall and corner, all contained a somber meaning for her, which she could not as yet translate. She glanced up the stairway and could not keep herself from waiting to see someone descend.

  “It was one of the most beautiful homes in Windsor,” said Adelaide sadly. “It still is.”

  “Oh, heavens,” said Estelle, shrugging her damp shoulders. “They haven’t built such square rooms as this for ages. Just huge boxes, with no atmosphere, no styling. No imagination anywhere.”

  “I don’t agree with you,” replied Adelaide. “This house is Georgian, and built for the ages.”

  “I don’t like middle-age,” said Agnes. “A thing, or a house, for me, has to be truly ancient, or right up to the minute. Houses like these are just stuffy. Too formal and forbidding.”

  But Adelaide was musing aloud: “I came here only twice. It was very beautiful. The grounds were laid out like a park. The furniture is exquisite. Alice’s mother, Gertrude, was known for her taste.” She added, sighing: “There is a very mournful story about this house, too.”

  But the others were not interested in the story. So Adelaide, sighing again, went alone up the stairway and glanced down the wide panelled halls of the second floor. Here a girl had passed half a dozen years of torment and grief and despair. She had died in her father’s house, not here, and yet Adelaide felt that her death had really occurred within these walls. How many hundreds of times she had gone up and down these stairs, her hand slipping along these very banisters, her small narrow feet touching these boards, her eyes directed somberly ahead. Adelaide shivered. She turned to go down, and almost screamed. It was a moment or two before she realized that the small figure behind her was Celeste, and not some sorrowful young ghost unable to find peace.

  “My dear, you startled me,” she exclaimed, in a lull in the thunder.

  “I don’t like this place. I wish the storm would stop and we could go ho
me. I’m soaked,” said Celeste, shivering. “I think this palce is haunted.”

  Adelaide did not smile. She took Celeste’s chilled little hand and went downstairs with her again. At the bottom of the stairs she remembered that Alice’s first husband, François Bouchard, had killed himself in this house. Yet it was not he who wandered invisibly and so disconsolately through the corridors.

  All at once she had the strangest impulse to tell Celeste the story. She stood there at the foot of the stairs, tightly holding to Celeste’s hands, earnestly listening to some mysterious compulsion in herself. The thunder was retreating, and the lightning was wide sheets of baleful glimmerings. The others were exploring back-rooms, and Adelaide could hear Agnes’ hard light laughter. The caretaker had disappeared.

  They stood in the uncertain well of light and shadow at the foot of the stairs, in the reception hall. Through various doorways they saw the hard bright electric light shining on the dusty polished floors and the shrouded furniture. Everything was motionless and silent.

  Adelaide began to speak, gravely yet with quiet emphasis, the compulsion growing stronger within her. And Celeste listened as intently, as though impelled to give all her attention.

  “It was very sad,” said Adelaide. “Jules—your father— told me the story, a long time ago, long before you were born. You see, he had an older brother, Philippe, a very religious Roman Catholic, your Uncle Philippe, who died many many years before you were born, before your oldest brother, Armand, was born. A long, long time ago. Before I even married your father.

  “You know that Ernest Barbour, who—who built up the whole family—was the brother of your grandma, Florabelle Barbour. He had just one daughter, Gertrude. They say he loved her very, very much, perhaps more than he ever loved any other of his children. But he was very ambitious. He had a nephew, his brother Martin’s son, and he thought Paul a very remarkable young man, fit to continue the dynasty he had begun. He wanted Gertrude to marry her cousin. But Gertrude loved some one else, your Uncle Philippe.”

  She sighed. She could not tell all the story, it was too cruel! But she said: “I—I’m not certain about all the details, but in some way Ernest Barbour prevented his daughter from marrying her cousin, Philippe. I think he considered the marriage unsuitable. Any way, Philippe went away to become a priest, and then he—he was sent on some missionary work. Gertrude married her other cousin, Paul, then.” “Did she mind, terribly?” asked Celeste, listening with painful interest.

  Adelaide hesitated. If she evaded, the whole point of the story would be lost. It seemed terribly important that the point should not be lost. She said in a low voice: “Yes, she minded, terribly. They—they say it broke her heart when Philippe went away. But she married, and she and her husband built this beautiful house. Then, then she was to have a baby—your Aunt Alice.

  “Everyone thought she had forgotten Philippe. But she hadn’t forgotten, they discovered.”

  Adelaide’s tired eyes filled with tears. She had wept when Jules first told her the story. It never failed to affect her even to this day.

  “And then, just when it was about time for your Aunt Alice to be born, Gertrude heard that Philippe had died, off on some island.”

  She paused. She was silent so long that Celeste touched her arm quickly. “Hurry, Mama. Estelle and Aunt Agnes are coming back.” And indeed their footsteps were heard approaching down one of the first-floor corridors.

  “There is not so much more to tell, darling. You see, it was such a shock to poor little Gertrude. No one had realized that she had not forgotten, and that she had just been living a life of misery and suffering since her marriage to Paul. Oh, he was very good to her! Your father said Paul was devoted to her. But that was not enough. She did not love him at all.

  “And so—and so, when she heard Philippe was dead, she collapsed. They say she never recovered consciousness, even when your Aunt Alice was born. She died when Alice was not more than an hour old.”

  Celeste said nothing. Adelaide could see her eyes shining in the gloom of the hall. She waited a long time for her daughter to speak, and then what the girl did say astounded her mother:

  “I don’t know all the circumstances, Mama, but it seems that Uncle Philippe and Aunt Gertrude were very weak. Nothing in the world should have sent him away from her.” “But, darling, he was a Roman Catholic, and it was considered sinful for a Catholic to marry his cousin.”

  Celeste shook her head slightly. “I don’t know. I have never had any real religious training. But I cannot imagine how any superstition could ever truly affect a thinking person. I know it would not affect me. I know that nothing would ever have kept me from Uncle Philippe, if I had been Aunt Gertrude.”

  A mysterious weight on Adelaide’s heart suddenly dissolved. The compulsion had gone. Something beyond herself was satisfied.

  “Celeste, dear,” she said gently, “superstitions do not come nicely labelled. They come in the most acceptable forms! Even in the form of ‘reason.’ They have a thousand names, and among their names each one of us finds a favorite. It is almost impossible to live a single hour without believing in some superstition.”

  Estelle and Agnes appeared, damp but restored to good humor. Their amiability was due to the discovery of the antiquated plumbing system.

  “Roseville is such a decayed and abandoned old suburb,” said Estelle. “Why, there’s a chemical factory half a mile from here. We opened a window, and the wind was just right. The stench! Not a soul for miles around, and only these old deserted houses. How those two children could bear to think of coming back here!”

  “Remember, they haven’t seen this place since they were brats,” said Agnes. “I give them a month here. That’s all. Why, they’re immensely rich, aren’t they? They own practically sixty per cent of the bonds in Bouchard, Emile told me.”

  “Yes, they are very rich,” agreed Estelle. Her eyes brightened. Young Henri ought to be around twenty-five or six. Now, if Rosemarie— Her florid cheek flushed with excitement. And that dear child, Edith. She was a year or so older than her brother. Strange that she had not married.

  “The poor things,” said Estelle aloud. “Orphans, too. We must do all we can for them.”

  Adelaide smiled palely. “I have a feeling they don’t like us. I know that Alice and Jules had a terrible quarrel before she went away. She wrote to me, poor girl. She seemed to like me for some reason, and I was always so sorry for her. And then she and her husband and children went to England, and we stopped writing. But she always expressed herself as detesting the whole family.”

  Agnes laughed. “Bright girl! However, I suppose we owe a duty—to their bonds. Of course, they won’t live here a month when they realize what they’ve returned to.”

  She walked idly into the drawing room. A very large picture stood against the wall, shrouded like the others. Something about its size struck familiarly on Adelaide’s memory. She followed her sister-in-law. “I believe that’s Gertrude’s portrait, by Sanger,” she said with excitement. “Celeste, I’d like to have you see this portrait. Can we get the wrapping off?”

  “Oh, let us be going,” said Agnes indifferently. But Adelaide and Celeste were eagerly unfastening the canvas wrapping. Estelle, scrubbing her face with her damp handkerchief, scowled impatiently. The wrapping came off. The full force of the raw electric light struck upon the portrait leaning against the wall.

  Celeste saw that it was the portrait of a young girl or woman in the grotesque clothing of the early eighties. She was very thin, the smooth gray satin of the basque bodice hardly rising over small breasts. About her throat was a necklace of yellow gold and violet amethysts. In her little ears were smaller amethysts also set in yellow gold. Her cloud of lusterless dark hair was drawn back in a chignon at the nape of her neck. In the midst of this cloud was a narrow little face, the color of pale ivory. There was no red on the somber young mouth, and no smile; its expression was grave and mournful and inexpressibly weary. The delicate nostrils
flared above it. Under a smooth low forehead were wings of black brows, and under the brows, eyes so dilated and yet so heavy, that it was impossible to guess if they were dark or gray. It was not a pretty face, but a delicate and patrician one, full of breeding and sadness and spirit.

  Agnes smiled at it critically. “I diagnose tuberculosis,” she said. “Did she die of it? She looks imminently on the brink of coughing her way to a better world.”

  “No,” said Adelaide sorrowfully. “She died in childbirth. Alice’s mother, you know. Grandmother of Henri and Edith.” She added in a low voice: “I think someone told me this was painted three months before she died.”

  “She looks as though the world was too much for her,” said Estelle. “What incompetents women were in those days!” And she felt vaguely comforted at the thought of Rosemarie, who at least was competent and knew what she wanted.

  “The world,” said Adelaide in a still lower voice, “was indeed too much for her. Just as it always is for the innocent and the pure of heart.”

  But she had spoken so softly that no one heard her. Agnes and Estelle were going towards the door. Celeste was absorbed in the portrait. At last she looked at her mother.

  “She does not look weak,” she said. And that was all.

  When they reached home they found the men seated before the fire in the drawing room. The air had become chilly after the storm. The women entered, shivering and damp, and went upstairs to change into dry clothing. Much laughter ensued because of misfits. Estelle and Agnes were quite restored to good temper when they all went downstairs again.

  The men, thought Agnes, appeared as complacent and as pleased with one another as though they had been dining on the proverbial canaries.

  “You don’t seem worried about us,” remarked Estelle, puffing at a cigarette. She stood before the fire, like a man, warming her back.