by Craig Rice
David breathed slowly and evenly for a moment, made his voice very steady and very casual with a great effort. “So one of the Telefairs was a murderer,” he said at last.
“More than one,” said old Philip Telefair pleasantly. “But he was the only one who was hanged for it.”
He indicated a small portrait in an oval gold frame. “She was Amabel, his wife.”
David examined the painting curiously. It was the face of a young girl, delicate and exquisite, with gold-brown ringlets and immense gray eyes. The artist had caught the warm glow of her cheeks, a color that might come and go with a breath, the little curve of her rose-colored mouth that seemed to be smiling to hide secrets too marvelous and entrancing to tell, the draping of pale gauze about her shoulders that hinted at the roundness and softness of the flesh beneath.
“And this was Anthony Telefair,” the old man was saying, “whom he murdered.”
David turned to the third portrait, a smiling youth with ruffles at his throat, brown hair that still waved, gray eyes that still laughed in the portrait made more than a hundred years ago. Suddenly he remembered the cross he had seen on the ride down the mainland, the great black thing against the fading light of the sunset. Had that been the spot where this smiling and handsome youth had been murdered by the man in the dark green hunting coat?
Amabel Telefair. He remembered her name from the talk at dinner. She had gone mad, the lovely, rose-lipped girl in the oval-framed portrait.
“It’s not an unusual story,” Philip Telefair said thoughtfully, “but a bloody one. David Telefair met and married Amabel Telefair—Amabel Bayne, then—when he was past fifty. He’d led a strange, wild life, a drunkard, a rake and a gambler. And Amabel was in love with Anthony when she married David.”
No, it was not an unusual story, as the old man unfolded it. A quarrel between two young lovers, a voyage to England where the portrait of the smiling youth had been made, and his return to find the seventeen-year-old Amabel married to David Telefair, and a virtual prisoner on the Island. Weeks of fear and loneliness and heartbreak, and then she had smuggled a message to him, begging him to take her away from Telefair.
To the young man who had traveled only that day through the wild and dreary mainland beyond Telefair Landing, the flight of the young lovers seemed as real as though it had taken place only the week before. There had been a storm, thunder and wind and rain, yet Amabel had managed to row herself across the inlet to where Anthony waited with a coach. Then the desperate ride through the night, always looking back to see if they were being followed.
They were followed. That other David Telefair had rowed to the mainland, saddled a horse, and ridden after them. At the spot on the hill where the Telefair Cross stood now, he had overtaken them, shot Anthony through the forehead and, mounting the box himself, driven his wife and the murdered body of her lover through the blinding wind and rain, back to the inlet, and rowed them over to the Island.
“There he locked Amabel in her room,” Philip Telefair said, “and, with only the help of a Negro slave, buried Anthony in the old graveyard. Then he washed the blood and dirt from his hands—or perhaps he did not bother—and went upstairs to his wife.”
After a little while David asked, “And he was hanged?”
“He was hanged,” said Philip Telefair gravely, as though it had taken place only two days before. “He was tried for murder and condemned to be hanged, and his one request was that he be executed here on Telefair Island. The gentlemen of the county brought him here to his house, and joined him in the toast that he proposed: To his waking up in Hell. Then he walked ahead of them through the gardens of Telefair to the old gallows, and was hanged.”
“And Amabel?” David asked at last.
“She went mad,” the old man said gently, “when David Telefair’s son was born.”
There was a little silence.
“It all seems so very long ago,” said young David.
The old man smiled. “It was, and it was not. Amabel’s son was my own grandfather.”
A little later David noticed that some time during the telling of the story, Edris had vanished from the room.
Young David Telefair leaned on the window sill of his room and looked out at the inlet, and the Island.
The carefully landscaped and tended gardens of Telefair stretched before his window, under the round moon. In the half-darkness the ancient clipped hedges and strangely sculptured trees were more blue than green, shadowy, and enchanted. Beyond them he could see a fountain in the night, its moon-touched waters falling lightly into a dark oval pool.
Past the fountain was a little grove of trees, cypress, he fancied, and tall Italian poplars; beneath them a few pale stones shone in the light. That was the old graveyard, he decided, which Philip Telefair had promised to show to him in the morning. There he would find the grave of the father he had never seen, and there too would be the grave of that other David Telefair who was hanged, and of his mad, tragic Amabel, and of the child who had grown up on the Island under the shadow of his mother’s madness and his father’s crime.
How long they had been dead, all of them! Yet somewhere in the house was the room where the exquisite, unfortunate Amabel had borne the child who had, in time, become Philip Telefair’s grandfather; where she had been imprisoned in her madness, and where, at last, she had died. There in the ancient burying place of the Telefairs was the grave of the murdered Anthony, the secret grave dug in the dark of night with the cold rain falling. And there, past the gardens where he had played as a child, past the fountain where perhaps he had once lingered to dream of Amabel Bayne, between the avenue of trees planted by the first Telefair who came to the Island, that other David had walked, straight as an Indian and with a scornful smile on his lips, to the old gallows.
Had the lovely Amabel ever leaned on her window sill and regarded the fountain in the night, moon-colored and silver, through the hours when the songs and laughter of her husband’s drunken companions came up from the rooms below? Had she dreamed of Anthony Telefair, young and slender and smiling, and wept, perhaps, that they would not meet again? And at last when she had sent her desperate message to him, had she paced the old floors of Telefair, wondering if there would be word from him or if he had forgotten her; wondering if days and weeks and at last months would go by and she would know finally that there would be no word? But word had come, and perhaps she had watched across this garden, desolate with rain and torn with wind, for the light that would be his signal on the far shore.
He could see them now, Amabel at her window and Anthony waiting for her, watching anxiously across the inlet for the little boat that had come so perilously at last across the storm-lashed water.
He wished with all his heart that they had escaped.
It was late when he lay down in the immense, canopied bed and pulled the soft sheets up to his chin. In one instant the weariness of the long day returned to him, and Telefair Island was swallowed up in the engulfing darkness.
Yet in that last instant before he was swept away into an ocean of sleep and drowned there, he heard the faint sound of a woman weeping somewhere in the night. Was it his imagination, he wondered? Or could it be Edris who was weeping? He listened to it for a moment, and then, forgetting everything, he slept.
3
David woke to an unfamiliar and mysterious world. The mists that sometimes rose in the morning on Telefair Island had climbed up to his window and crept into his room while he slept.
It was a phenomenon to which David was never to become accustomed, the rising of the mist at early morning over the Island. It had woven a veil over everything, obscuring the room and its furniture, changing the outline of walls and windows. He tried for a moment to remember where he was, in that instant of waking in an unfamiliar room which is always like the instant of birth into a new and not too friendly world. During his sleep the entire aspect of the room had changed; daylight had altered the relationship of walls and objects and shadows, and
the pale vapor risen from the bay was like a thin white shadow over it all.
Suddenly he ran to the window and looked out. Telefair Island was lost and drowned in the feathery mist, garden, fountain, shore and inlet. Yet even as he watched, the mist began to change and disperse in the morning sun; here a hedge appeared and there a tree or garden bed, there the fountain, and there the old graveyard; one by one they emerged until only the last vestiges of mist clung to the shadowy hollows under the trees, and Telefair Island lay before the sun.
It was as though he had seen the Island rise slowly from the depths of some secret sea, as though it were a land that spent half its life submerged beneath cloudy and translucent water, inhabited by curious undersea creatures, with strange strands of seaweed entangled among the branches of the cypress trees, and enormous and unearthly blooms growing in its gardens. He had a sudden fancy that at night, when the last soul at Telefair had gone to sleep, the Island would sink quietly into those mysterious depths where its real, secret life existed, and would appear again at daybreak, moist and glistening, its greens all too bright and too deep for earthly gardens, risen up at dawn from the bottom of the sea.
David wished for a greater intimacy with this place; he wished most of all that he might be alone with it for one day. For an instant he felt the faintest and lightest shadow of resentment against Philip Telefair. It was as though he and the Island were new acquaintances, who had suddenly discovered a bond that linked them, hearts clasped, and Philip Telefair stood in the place of the mutual friend who had introduced them to each other. Now that he had served that purpose, both of them wished that he would go away and leave them together.
It seemed to David that he would truly come to know the Island best in the little spaces of solitude between people.
The inlet side of Telefair faced across a wide, unbroken lawn to the woods that lay between it and the Landing; it was this approach David had seen the night before. On the opposite side, glass doors led from the great hall that was the center of the building onto a broad terrace, from which a few shallow steps ran down to the gardens and the path to the little grove.
Now in the morning, seen from the terrace, the gardens, the fountain, even the trees were alive with sunlight, blazing with it, showing colors never seen before and never to be seen again. The Island seemed weighted with an overabundance of growth and bloom; the trees were not only tall, but too tall, too luxuriantly leafed; the blossoms in the gardens were gigantic, monstrous, drooping with their own colors, fainting with their own fragrance. The very grass was lush, tropical, curiously evil. And even while over it all the sunlight burned like a clear flame, again David had a fancy that this was a land of perpetual twilight; let the sun blaze as it would, all the Island was bathed in purple shadow, too intense to be penetrated by any sun, yet not a shadow to be seen with the eye alone.
He felt the sudden weight of Philip Telefair’s hand upon his arm.
“Shall we go down into the gardens?” asked Philip Telefair.
They walked slowly down the path between the rosebeds. The old man, his hand still on David’s arm, talked lightly of the Telefair stables, famous in their day, of the fountain which had been set there in 1763 by the father of that David Telefair who was hanged, and of the cypress trees imported at fabulous cost by the first Philip Telefair.
As they walked, the growing realization that he was at last on Telefair Island became frightening to David; not at all the fact that he was there, but the reminder of the passage of time that always comes with the change from one place to another. What seemed now like only a moment before, he had been riding in the jolting and rickety bus, booking anxiously at his watch, telling himself that in a few hours he would be at Telefair. Then he had been in the borrowed boat crossing the inlet, wondering why it seemed that he had made the same journey innumerable times before. Now all that was in the past, now he was actually on the Island, he had slept for one night in the old house, he was walking through the gardens with Philip Telefair, who seemed already a familiar and beloved friend.
The journey was yesterday. He was on the Island, and suddenly there returned that sensation of being in a well-remembered scene, as though he had lived there all his life.
He wanted to speak of it to Philip Telefair, and somehow he could not find the words.
“You feel as though you have been here before,” said the old man softly.
David nodded, startled. He hadn’t spoken, yet Philip Telefair had known what was in his mind. He had a curious feeling that he should say nothing more of what he thought, that to do so would be, in some remote way, dangerous. Then he told himself furiously that he was an imaginative idiot.
“It is like that,” he said, nodding again. “And yet I know that I never have been here.”
“Is it so strange?” said Philip Telefair, smiling. “Can the memory of a place be inherited? I do not know if it can be so, nor why it should not be so. But if it is, then surely Telefair should seem as a home to you, a home that you had left for only a little while, and now have returned to again.”
David turned, and looked back at the house. It was white as a stone beneath the sun, its long, low wings reaching to the shadowy trees. He thought suddenly that all houses took on characters of their own with the passing of years and generations; that some were friendly, embracing, some cold and unloving and disinterested, some dark with an old accumulation of sorrow. Telefair, he felt, was a friendly house, but it was not the friendliness of the heart. It welcomed that it might devour and destroy. Its beauty was a malevolent beauty; it had resented the men who had built it and their sons and grandsons, and it would continue to hate them evilly to the end.
“Tell me,” David asked very lightly, “is Telefair haunted?”
“Only by ourselves,” said old Philip Telefair.
For the first time David saw that the windows on the second floor of the old, unused wing were barred, and tightly curtained.
“Those windows,” Philip Telefair said, his eyes following David’s, and speaking as though he had heard the unasked question, “were barred over a hundred years ago. Those rooms were Amabel’s, when she was mad. The bars have never been taken away.”
In that moment David realized that the story of Amabel Telefair was something that had actually taken place. The night before it had been a romance, moon-touched, and half dreamed. Now, in the sunlight, he saw the bars on the windows, dark and ugly against the whiteness of the house, and became terribly aware of the reality.
He turned back, and saw that Philip Telefair had become extremely pale. But in the next instant the old man had taken his arm and was leading him through the gardens.
They lingered one moment by the fountain, iridescent now in the morning sun, singing an endless little song it had taken nearly two hundred years to learn. It was a small fountain, its pool oval and shallow, with a broad, low wall where one might sit to draw idle fingers through the riffling water. There was no figure, only a succession of tiny basins narrowing toward the apex, over which a gentle spray of water fell and forever arranged itself in shapes of its own fanciful devising. Beyond it, David could see the old house, Telefair, through the transparent and sun-spangled mist, and again imagined it submerged, seaweed replacing the ancient vines, curious, evil blooms appearing in its carefully tended gardens.
Ahead, the old poplars and Tuscan cypress moved softly in the wind that came up quietly from the inlet, and among them David could see the graves of the Telefairs. There was one very ancient stone, forever in the shadow of a great tree, its lettering dim, its carving eaten almost entirely away, discolored, and darkly stained. Kneeling beside it, David could make out a date, and part of the name, Telefair.
“Sir Philip,” the old man said, looking across three hundred years to the discolored stone, “the first Telefair who came to the Island.” He paused, and stared at David, seeming to see through him and beyond him. “He was the kind of man who would want to live on an island. And so have been all his descend
ants. Or has it been that living on an island has made them so?”
“What do you mean?” David said, half curious, half knowing, and almost afraid to ask.
Philip Telefair turned to him suddenly. “Haven’t you ever felt that there is something about living on an island which makes men different from all other men?” he asked vehemently, almost harshly. One pale and graceful hand moved in a circling gesture that took in all of Telefair Island and separated it from the world beyond. “The man who lives on an island is his own law, his own conscience, and his own court of justice. Oh yes, I know, it was the outside world that hanged a David Telefair for murder. But if he had not lived on an island, he might not have done murder at all. An island is always apart from the rest of the world; it sees the world, but it does not touch it. It exists of itself, magnificent in its isolation, until it is not the island, but the rest of the world that is alone.” He drew in his breath sharply. “The man who lives too long on an island becomes not a king, but God.”
He paused, looked at David, and suddenly smiled, warmly and affectionately. “Forgive an old man who talks far too much.” But his eyes were dark and very thoughtful, and he added slowly, “Your ancestors have always lived on the Island.”
They walked on through the grove. Here an inscription read: “David Telefair, born 1754, hanged in 1810.” Close by it was a small stone, saying only: “Amabel, wife of David,” and beside it the grave of Amabel’s son, Edmund, who had been Philip Telefair’s grandfather. A little apart from the others was the grave of Anthony Telefair, the grave that had been dug in the dark of night with the cold rain falling, with only the help of a Negro slave.
Young David remembered that other monument, the dark, curiously menacing cross on the desolate and sandy hill.
“You will want to see your father’s grave,” said Philip Telefair quietly.
