Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Thus, an awkward situation had evolved in the Spies household; and Thérèse so forgot herself on several occasions, as to blurt out a stammering and intemperate reply, when Mrs. Spies spoke of Xavier Kilgarvan as mean, and mercenary, and of riffraff stock, and little better than a Communist, Anarchist, or Free Thinker, in his persecution of poor Valentine. (“Albeit,” Mrs. Spies allowed, “Valentine is no angel; nor presents himself as such. Which hardly means that he is the devil these slanderers make him out to be—!”) It must have been a peculiar breach of drawing-room decorum, the sudden display of a contradictory nature in Miss Thérèse Kilgarvan, of all persons: this most proper of young ladies, whose nunlike demeanor, and unbending standards of deportment, had long cast a chill sort of propriety over all her acquaintance—! Yet, with low quavering voice, and a decided angry flash of her deep-set eyes, Thérèse dared to assert, before teatime visitors, that her cousin Xavier was the very antithesis of all Mrs. Spies named him: not mean, but noble; not mercenary, but as chastely indifferent to wordly success as,—why, as Christ Himself had been.

  “If Valentine Westergaard is innocent of the charges made against him,” Thérèse all boldly said, “he will have naught to worry about when his day in court arrives.”

  So uncharacteristic was this outburst, it was received in puzzled silence; nor did Mrs. Spies, after a moment’s truculent stare, choose to pursue the subject. And afterward, when the sisters were safely alone, Perdita thanked Thérèse for her courage, in opposing the obese old harridan (these being Perdita’s cruel-chosen words, I should hasten to say, and not my own): the more so, in that Mrs. Spies, being of so shallow and vindictive a character, might excise Thérèse,—indeed, Thérèse and Perdita—from her will for such trifles. “So it is, I sit in cowardly silence,” Perdita nervously murmured, “while our dear cousin is traduced.”

  Being yet distressed by the contretemps downstairs, and little wishing to provoke any intimate conversation on her sister’s part, Thérèse made no rejoinder; but betook herself quietly away. Not many minutes later, however, Perdita shyly approached her with these startling words: “Love between cousins is forbidden, I believe, Thérèse?—love of a married sort, I mean?—love that necessitates touching, and fondling, and kissing, and,—ah, I know not!—save that it is offensive to good taste, and sternly condemned by many a saint?—Thérèse?—is it not so?—is it not so?” The which unwelcome outburst Thérèse declined to answer, pleading a sick headache, and badly frayed nerves.

  THOUGH, through the crowded autumn months, the lovers succeeded in meeting but infrequently, and, when at last they were alone together, found themselves stricken by a peculiar species of shyness, it must not be supposed that each failed to comprehend the gravity of the situation: or that Perdita was quite so surprised as she seemed, when at last the agitated Xavier stammered out his proposal.

  For, it seemed, he could not live,—nay, he did not wish to live—without her at his side, as his lawful wedded wife: having loved her for upward of a decade, though very often at a miserable distance: and with very little hope to sustain him. While the agitated young woman turned partly away, in a sudden paroxysm of confusion, Xavier continued in a quieter and more forcible voice, to explain how, in truth, he had fallen in love with her on the very day,—God forgive him!—of her father’s funeral; but could not deceive himself that his feeling might have been reciprocated, or even understood. For he had been but a callow youth of sixteen at the time, egregiously self-centered (or so he recalled): while Perdita had been an angelic child of twelve.

  For some strained moments Perdita could not bring herself to reply, then said, with an air of breathless gaiety, that Xavier must be mistaken,—for she never had been a child.

  “As for understanding the nature of your feeling, Xavier, if not precisely its depth,” Perdita lightly continued, “assuredly I did: and for this Georgina soundly punished me.”

  “Was she exceedingly cruel?” Xavier asked.

  “Ah, exceedingly!—but not, you know, unjustly,” Perdita said.

  Xavier found himself rather more saddened by this playful assertion than pricked to curiosity; and thought it most prudent to pursue his former subject. Thus, for some minutes, as they walked, in a fine light drizzle, amidst the blighted and desiccated remains of summer flowers (their meeting place being Juniper Park’s lavish sunken garden, which, in more hospitable weather, is exhilarating to the eye, but, alas, on so drear and forlorn a November afternoon, cannot fail to rouse sentiments of decay, mortality, and finitude),—Xavier spoke in a subdued yet impassioned voice, setting forth his high regard for Perdita, and his worry lest that regard be misinterpreted; and his ready acquiescence to any scruples she might raise regarding a union between them (for, though not in truth very closely related as to blood, they were related, by way of the objectionable Phillips Goode; and Xavier could anticipate naught but a wildly fluctuating income, dependent upon the vicissitudes of his career; and there was the matter of Xavier’s career itself,—which, he had no doubt, struck many persons in Winterthurn as problematic; if not in fact insupportable). “I wonder, indeed, that I dare to approach a person so innocent, and so thoroughly good, as yourself,” Xavier said, “for I must confess, my mind has dwelled with dark matters, oft to the exclusion of light, for many years now; and I have so familiarized myself with the atrocities of the Devil’s Half-Acre, it sometimes frightens me, to wonder that I did not commit them myself—! For I am more conversant with certain details regarding them, I am sure, than Valentine Westergaard himself.”

  “Ah, Valentine—! He is most cruel; and indiscreet,” Perdita sighingly said.

  “And a despicable monster.”

  “Yes,—certainly,—a monster,” Perdita emended. Then, drawing slightly away from her companion, she said, with a pretty frown: “But, Xavier, must we dwell upon such matters, at this time?—for we have not many minutes together; and the subject is most distressing.”

  “I am very sorry,” Xavier hurriedly said. “I forgot myself: and should not have uttered such thoughts aloud, still less in your company. It is a measure of my obsession with our ‘Cruel Suitor,’ and his loathsome crimes, that my mind does dwell upon them without regard to,—to—well, sometimes to external circumstances: and I must forcibly remind myself that such matters are not for women’s ears; and assuredly not for yours. It cannot be wondered at that you shrink from me in disgust, at such times—!”

  As if caught unawares, Perdita laughed, and frowned, and drew the hood of her cashmere Capuchin cape more closely about her face; and murmured: “Not disgust, dear Xavier!—not entirely disgust. Nay, I am rather afraid that,—I hesitate to say,—it is hardly appropriate—well, I find that I know not: and must beg you, Cousin, to change the subject.”

  Chagrined, it may have been, by Perdita’s artful designation of him as cousin, the which seemed to frankly preclude lover, or suitor, poor Xavier walked by her side for some brooding minutes, in silence; and naught was heard but their footsteps on the damp graveled walk, and the cawing of crows overhead, and the faint melancholy rustle of leaves, stirred by a wind from the northeast. Ah, how much more akin was this day to dusk!—and the withered rose bushes ranged along the path, forlorn testimony to Time’s inexorable passing—! The bleak stilled fountains, that in summer so delighted the eye: their green-stippled basins, into which debris had been blown; the graceful, yet, it seemed, needlessly arch, postures of Grecian figures, in stone; the mute starkness of a tall boxwood hedge that essayed to enclose them; above all, the very tone, the very taste, of the air: these struck Xavier as wondrously romantic, and compelling; yet, at the same time, were they not tinged with an air of scarcely definable dread—?

  “I must make her comprehend the depth of my devotion,—its seriousness, its gravity,” Xavier thought, in some agitation, “yet, how to find the words? Dear God, I must not fail—!”

  Thus it was, the lovers continued but to walk; and to walk with some small distance between them, as if they feared brus
hing against each other. Surely it was true, as Perdita had said, they had so meager a space of time allotted to them (Perdita was supposed to be taking tea with a convalescent lady, or invalid, in town,—Xavier had forgotten the name); yet how queer, how painful, how helpless it seemed, that these minutes should be misspent—! At last Xavier forced himself to break the awkward silence, and to ask Perdita, if his words,—if his proposal—had offended her: and whether she had any answer to give him: albeit, he quite understood, the abruptness of his speech must have discountenanced her. And Perdita drew the hood of her handsome dark cape the more closely about her face, as if, in maiden timidity, she wished to hide herself from him; and for a long moment seemed incapable of reply.

  She then said, in a low, somewhat hoarse voice, that she had not been offended by his words,—nay, not offended,—nor entirely surprised: for he had written of such matters, had he not? And she in turn,—ah, how boldly! how shamelessly!—had written to him in similar wise: and, for the most part, in sincerity. However—

  Here, she again paused; and Xavier saw with a pang that her eyelashes were beaded with tears; and that her plump lower lip trembled. How vulnerable, and how surpassingly beautiful, Miss Perdita Kilgarvan was at that propitious moment!—her profile sweetly graceful, yet, withal, Grecian, save for the charming Kilgarvan “crook” in her nose,—and her remarkable eyes, though deep-set, and so shadowed as to appear bruised, yet ablaze with feeling. Was this not the selfsame girl who had, as a child of twelve, gazed upon Xavier most overtly, at her father’s very gravesite; had she not,—unless memory was beclouded by mere whim—penetrated the walls of Xavier’s night-time slumber, and walked, barefoot, and innocently déshabille, across the floor of his boyhood room—? Ah, Perdita!—his Perdita!

  Of a sudden,—coterminous, it seemed, with the eruption of some small fracas amongst the crows in the boxwood hedge nearby—the impulse came to Xavier, communicating itself through the nerves and sinews of his being, that, to make Perdita assuredly his, he must lay hands upon her, forcibly: that so forthright an action was but what Perdita herself craved: and the purpose for which, indeed, they had conspired to meet, in the November desolation of Juniper Park.

  (“A beastly notion,” Xavier chided himself, with pounding heart, and an uneasy shifting of his gaze, “worthy more of the ‘Cruel Suitor’ than of me.”)

  Fortunately, the young lady at his side sensed not a whit of this impulse, nor the abashèd distress that followed; and began, at last, in the selfsame lowered, hesitant, guileless voice, to speak; and to speak in so uncalculated,—indeed, so breathless and rambling—a manner, as to quite surprise her suitor. So far as he could recollect, Xavier had never heard any young lady of his acquaintance speak in so frank a wise: yet that which might have gravely offended, if not repulsed, another young gentleman, bewitched Xavier no less than the actual substance of her speech—! For Xavier imagined (with what justification, I cannot say) that, at last, Perdita in her truest self deigned to address him, and had cast aside all factitious drawing-room repartee. All blushing, she averred that she did, she believed, reciprocate his sentiment,—that is, to speak frankly, she did love him,—however,—however—(And here she broke off for the space of one or two agitated breaths, the while Xavier stared blinking at her,—with what incredulity, and slow-dawning triumph, the reader can well imagine.) However, Perdita continued, scarcely daring to glance at her companion, it must be revealed that she, as an object of his love, was not altogether,—how to phrase it, how most simply to explain?—not altogether worthy: nay, not worthy in the slightest: as her own wretched mother had not been worthy, at the time of her marriage, or afterward, of her father.

  “Why, Perdita, what on earth are you saying?” Xavier burst out, with not an instant’s hesitation, “your mother not worthy of your father?—of Erasmus Kilgarvan? I should rather have thought,” he said, with an annoyed laugh, “the converse was true: for it would have required quite a search, up and down the Valley, to locate a woman even his equal.”

  But Perdita, dabbing at her cheeks with her gloved hands, and blinking helplessly, seemed not to have caught the drift of Xavier’s meaning; and murmured emphatically: “Ah, yes,—yes,—you are quite right: his equal was not to be found,—is not to be found—and I fear I am but the blighted offspring of that union, Thérèse and I both; and that any good-hearted and decent young man, like yourself, dear Cousin, should be warned against me,—albeit my heart must shatter, to pronounce such deathly terms.”

  Xavier stopped in his tracks, to stare blankly at Perdita. His pale brow lifted itself in perplexed creases; and his gray gaze took on a harsh, steely quality. “‘Warned against you’!” he exclaimed. “My darling Perdita,—for you are, you know, my darling,—I have never heard such nonsense, unless it be the fantastical explanations Valentine Westergaard has advanced, as his defense: yet you speak, it seems, sincerely: and mean not to jest, or to mock, or to toy cruelly with me.”

  Perdita succumbed to a minute’s noiseless weeping; then, brushing the tears from her blanched face, said, with an air of faint reproach, that she assuredly did not jest or mock at this painful juncture: nor, certainly, did she toy with him. “Indeed, Xavier, you are behaving in a fantastical manner, to suggest such things,” she murmured, shrinking slightly back, as if, in maidenly trepidation, she feared what she saw ablaze in his face. “You are strange. You are obtuse. You jest and mock: why, are your lips not laid back from your teeth, in a sort of snarl—?”

  All hastily, Xavier made an effort to compose his heated features; and, daring now to grasp his companion’s arm, albeit gently, at the elbow, he assured her that he meant not to criticize, still less to cause grief, only that, in declaring his untrammeled love for her, he could scarcely bear her to oppugn it; and so groundlessly. “To suggest that you are unworthy of me, of all persons,—to suggest that you and your remarkable sister share, in some improbable wise, in your mother’s unworthiness, vis-à-vis your monstrous father,” Xavier said, in a quavering voice, “why, it is, you know, intolerable to hear: it makes me quite upset: very like a wire, or a weather cock, that has been struck, of a sudden, by an electrical charge from the sky,—and possesses not the wherewithal to discharge it.”

  A fresh gust of chilled air, heavy with moisture, caused Perdita to shudder, despite the warmth of her long cashmere cape; and Xavier had to check himself that he might not, with precipitant rudeness, fold her roughly in his arms. For did not her delicate frame call out for solace, and protection?—did not her startled lips call out to be kissed? Instead, Xavier essayed to explain, once again, with a display of manly patience, that he loved her; nay, adored her; worshipped her; wished to marry her; and therefore could brook no opposition in his estimate of her worth,—for to suggest, as she did, even in girlish hyperbole, that, in some mysterious wise, she shared in her mother’s piteous degradation (though not in her mother’s “degraded character,”—that Xavier would not accept), was grossly insulting: not only to Perdita, but to himself.

  Hearing this, Perdita fixed her suitor with a markedly queer look; and said, in a sharp tone, that she found it an unlook’d-to development in their friendship that, in declaring the motive for her own lack of pride, she should, all unwittingly, insult his.

  “Why, you are overbearing in this,” she said, essaying to wrest her arm from his grasp. “You are rude; and intemperate; and irascible; and have no more my own best interests in mind, than you have your own.”

  “Because I declare that I love you, and wish to marry you, I am accused of being rude?” Xavier cried out in exasperation. “Why, it is no less a fantastical species of ‘defense’ than Valentine and his attorney have concocted: and were you not so fragile, and so precious to me, I should like to shake such nonsense out of your head—! Is this the teasing manner, Perdita, with which you tempt all your suitors?—the bemazed stumbling little army of us, from balding old Goshawk to,—I know not whom: the insipid Bunting, or the drunkard Shaw? Ah, and even now, you cannot forbear l
ooking at me in a most nettlesome and provocative manner,—as if you meant to entice yet more reckless words from me—”

  Perdita did at last wrench her arm free of Xavier’s grip, and, in a childish gesture, delivered, against his chest, a blow with her small gloved fist: the which was assuredly harmless, yet quite surprised her companion. She cried: “I see that, in loving you, and in confessing my love, I have but proved myself a true daughter of my mother: a low, sinful, damn’d creature, of no more value in God’s eyes than one of those cawing crows overhead,—or a piece of mere trash!”

  “‘Mere trash!’” Xavier exclaimed. “How dare you speak so?—you? Of all persons blessed by God,—in beauty, in grace, and in unparalleled charm—”

  “Because you know me not! Because you gaze upon my outward form!” Perdita said hotly.

  “As you gaze upon mine!” Xavier rejoined. “And hear but the outward substance of my poor groping words,—and twist them, and torture them, until they are unintelligible—”

  “And I am most offended, Cousin,” Perdita said haughtily, with a just perceptible inflection of disgust at the word cousin, “that you should speak ill of my father,—for, rest assured, I heard what you said of him!—indeed, how should Perdita not have heard! ‘Monstrous,’ is he!—when you are the monster, to malign him thus,—and to bully me, to entice me to sin: nay, to have seduced me, as a child of twelve, at Father’s very gravesite: for do not deceive yourself, Xavier, I grasped, even then, the significance of your unchecked, lawless, lascivious gaze, and sensed how unsparingly brutal would be your touch,—as, precisely, it now proves to be!—albeit you disguise yourself as a lover, and a suitor, who wishes me only well.”