by Craig Rice
From his day of wandering about and observing, he knew now where the outlines of objects were; there were the Tuscan cypress, there the rose beds, there the old gallows, yet in the shadowing of mist Telefair Island seemed to hint darkly of secrets that were hidden from sight, forever unseen, unguessed and unknown. Was that only the little fountain, the faint, almost indistinguishable glimmer of light? Were those the cypresses, those strange, tall, black shapes against the sky? Or were the mist and the Island conspiring to mock and confuse him?
For one strange moment David felt himself not alone on the Island, but alone on the earth, the last being left alive under the unfriendly sky, and it was in that moment that the soft knock came at the door, startling him. He wondered at first if he had imagined it, or if the small sound was another creation of the mist, but no, there it was again, a faint shade louder.
He opened the door quietly and saw the housekeeper, Zenobie, her ugly face curiously pale in the dim light that came in through the window. She slipped into his room with an incredibly silent movement for one so awkward, and closed the door behind her, making barely a ripple in the stillness of the night air.
“What do you want?”
He knew that surely no one in the sleeping house could hear, yet he found himself whispering.
“Believe me,” the woman said, “believe me, I am your friend.” Her heavily accented voice was a strained, hoarse whisper. “You must go away, young Mr. David, you must go away, and at once.” She gave a terrified glance around her, as though some hideously malignant being might lurk in the dark corners of the room. Her breath seemed to come in choked, interrupted gasps. “There are things of which I may not speak even to you. But you must go away, and at once, do you understand?”
They were almost the same words that Edris had used.
“Look here,” he began angrily, and aloud. She laid a finger on his lips.
“Listen, you young fool. No one must know that I came here and that I spoke with you. Try to believe me.”
There was a sharp edge of desperation in her harsh, guttural voice.
Suddenly he remembered the look of hatred the woman had directed at Philip Telefair.
“What is it?” he asked, in a low, incredulous whisper. “What do you mean? Why must I go away?”
“To save yourself,” the woman whispered. He fancied that he saw tears glistening in the deep furrows of her cheeks. “I cannot tell you any more than this, believe me. I would, if it were possible. Only this much I can tell you: Go away.”
“But I cannot,” David told her; “this is my home.”
She made an impatient, half-despairing gesture. “If it is simply that you need money, I will give it to you. I have my savings, all my wages for twenty years. You may take what you need of it, take all of it, take everything, if you will only go away.” She paused and caught her breath sharply.
“Why are you doing this?” David whispered.
Zenobie stared at him. “I tell you so much, I do this to wipe away the great wrong I have done.”
“Wrong? What wrong?” he demanded, half angrily.
She did not answer or, indeed, seem to hear his question. “I beg you,” she said again, “on my knees I beg you, to go away while you can.”
Again, they were almost the very words that Edris had used. All at once David was furious with the woman, with her maddening secrecy, with her insistence that he go away; furious with her ugliness, her broad, masculine face, her coarse, misshapen hands; furious with the look of hatred he had seen her turn on Philip Telefair, old Philip Telefair who had been so kind to him. In a sudden burst of rage he seized her by her square, muscular shoulders, shook her violently, and said through his clenched teeth, “Tell me the truth, tell me everything, now, this minute, and do not leave out one word.”
Then he felt his voice dying away in his throat, he felt his hands grow limp and helpless and slip from the woman’s shoulders; he saw her little eyes darken and grow wider, saw her mouth sag open, a thin line of saliva moving slowly down from one corner of it to her brutal jaw.
There it was, the sound he had heard the night before, the sound of a woman weeping somewhere in the old house, weeping in hopeless and incurable sorrow.
“What is it?” David whispered. “Do you know? What is it?”
Zenobie’s face suddenly grew expressionless. Without a word, and before he could say more or make a move to stop her, she had slipped away from his grasp, opened the door in an unbelievably swift and silent movement, and vanished down the hall like a shadow.
It was hard for him to believe that she had been there at all.
But after that one moment, the sound of weeping had ceased. David stood listening for it, wondering. Could it have been Edris? But why had it stopped so suddenly, as though, somewhere, a hand had been laid swiftly over a mouth?
He listened for it, while his mind moved on to what Zenobie had been saying to him.
Was the woman mad?
What had she meant? Why had she come and begged him to go away from the Island? “To wipe away the great wrong I have done.” What was she talking about? What wrong did she mean?
First there had been Edris, and now Zenobie. Why did they want him to go away from Telefair? Had Edris sent the housekeeper here tonight, having failed in her own attempt to be rid of him? First they tried to frighten him away, and then to bribe him. Well, let them try. He was going to stay. This was his home. After all, was he not heir to Telefair?
That was it of course, he realized suddenly. That explained everything. Edris’ strange behavior, her obvious dislike and avoidance of him, Zenobie’s black look directed at old Philip Telefair that afternoon, the two attempts to make him go away. It was easy to understand it now. Were he to go away, without explanation, Philip Telefair might change both his mind and his will. That was the motive behind everything.
But the sound of weeping?
Edris, of course. It could have been no one else.
David decided that in the morning he would tell old Philip Telefair of the strange sound he had heard, and ask him what it could have been.
But in the morning, facing Philip Telefair, he found himself curiously reluctant to speak of it, put it off from moment to moment, and finally ended by saying nothing at all.
After that night, he did not hear the sound again—not for a long time.
5
On the first morning that the mist over Telefair Island did not disperse, but wrapped itself around the old house like a pallid, opaque mantle, David lay awake in his bed for an hour, watching the white substance piled against his window, waiting for the first delicate thinning of the vapor to reveal the distant outlines of trees and the dark, smooth curving line that was the horizon far beyond the inlet. He watched so closely for that earliest dispersal of the morning mist that time and again he imagined that he could see its beginning, but at last as the minutes lengthened into quarter-hours, he looked more intently at the window and realized that in truth the mist had not changed at all, but still blanketed all the house, shutting off trees, gardens, sky, and the far shore.
His earliest waking, a drowsy, half-conscious waking that had been like the continuation of a dream, had been occasioned by Jonas coming in to light a blaze in the fireplace. He had roused ever so little, become only barely aware of the presence of the old Negro and of the soft snapping of kindling wood as the flames leaped from one stick to the next. Then the dark waters of the dream had closed over his eyes again.
Now, fully awake at last, he saw that the fire had become a mass of glowing coals where occasional little flames darted back and forth, changing from blue to gold, and then to violet, and back to blue again. He saw too that Jonas had lighted the lamp and it shone, a sickly yellow against the fog, on the table by his bed.
For all the warm glow in the fireplace, and the faint flickering of the lamp, there were shadows everywhere, soft, velvety, half light and half dark. The room that had already become familiar to him in the past days�
��more, indeed, than any room he had ever known—had, in that time between his first and second wakings, become strange, unfamiliar, unfriendly, and curiously unreal. For a few minutes he walked about it, touching well-remembered objects here and there to reassure himself, yet his feeling of depression grew and with it came an indescribable sense of isolation, as though he and the room had suddenly become islanded by the mist, shut off from all the rest of the world.
A little later, as he went down the great stairway and through the shadowy halls of Telefair to the breakfast room, he grew even more aware of the sense of isolation, which now seemed to extend to all the house. As he passed by the windows, he looked at each one closely, as though the very next might unexpectedly reveal the gardens of Telefair glowing in sunlight, but each was a blank, gray-white wall, obscured and curtained. Lamps were lighted everywhere, yet rather than driving away the shadows they seemed only to increase their darkness by contrast, adding to instead of lightening the gloom.
In some curious manner it seemed to David that the house and the mist had become one. Again he had a sudden fancy that Telefair was not a real house, built solidly of wood and stone and brick, but a creation of light and mist, vaporous, unreal, ready to evaporate before his eyes at so much as a breath. The pale curtains of fog that covered the windows had become part of the house itself; he felt that it would be impossible to tell now where the house ended and the mist began.
Philip Telefair, and Doctor von Berger, who were already at the breakfast table when David came into the room, seemed no more real than the long-dead Telefairs whose portraits hung on the wall. He fancied that their voices, if, indeed, they had voices, would come to him from very far away, dimly, and half-heard; fancied too that his own voice, if he could speak at all, might not be audible even across the little distance of the table’s breadth.
The two men seemed to share his mood; after a brief, perfunctory greeting, they hardly spoke. The servants moved about the room cat-footed. What few words had to be spoken at all were in a low, hushed tone, as one might speak in the presence of the dead.
Again and again, more times than he could remember, David had noticed how, when lights are suddenly extinguished in a room where people are talking, and the darkness comes in suddenly, every voice is instantly hushed, and everyone speaks more softly. Now, there was the same instinctive hushing of the voice and silencing of the footsteps in this room that was shadowed and darkened by the morning fog.
It seemed to him too that in this curious, yellow half-light the three of them—old Philip Telefair, Doctor von Berger, and himself—had become strangers. That was not so singular, of course, in the case of Doctor von Berger. He felt that the little German doctor would always be a stranger to everyone, wherever he might be, in whatever circumstances. In the days that David had spent at Telefair, Doctor von Berger had remained a stranger to him and he sensed that it would be so until the end. What was singular, however, was the manner in which old Philip Telefair had suddenly seemed to recede from him; the friendly intimacy of the past days was as completely obliterated as though years, not hours, had elapsed since their last meeting. The three of them at breakfast were like travelers from widely separated countries, brought momentarily together by some enforced circumstance, a change not of their own making, leaving each of them without knowledge, or desire for knowledge, of the other.
Watching them quietly, David thought that the fog had made Philip Telefair uneasy, disturbed, almost to the point of fear. In the midst of the ordinary surroundings of the breakfast table, the old man was concerned with faraway events, perhaps with faraway years—yet, surely, events and years bound within the narrow confines of Telefair Island. His dark, beautiful eyes, turned toward the misted windows that hid the gardens of Telefair, were staring at shadows behind the mist, his ears seemed to be listening intently for sounds beyond the occasional muted sounds of the breakfast room, listening as though he actually expected to hear some sound, yet knew that he would not. His pale, graceful hands moved nervously on the table.
There was another thing. This morning Doctor von Berger seemed to have no mind for David, and scarcely for himself. His breakfast barely touched, his short pink fingers tapping lightly and unconsciously on the table edge, he was watching old Philip Telefair so intently, with such concentration of purpose, that more than once David felt himself on the verge of crying out across the vast distances that separated them, “What do you see? What is it?”
He knew, somehow, that for all of his hungry listening to long stories and taller tales, for all of his poring over old books and diaries, and examining of old portraits, he knew only the tiniest fraction of the real Telefair, had only caught the barest glimpse of its beauty, and touched only the very edge of its terrors.
After breakfast, Philip Telefair and Doctor von Berger left David alone, each going about his own affairs. For a little while the young man wandered unhappily about the great, gloomy rooms. The house was coldly moist and airless, tomblike, emptier than any house had ever been before. He decided at last that the fog itself would be friendlier, and walked out onto the terrace that led to the gardens.
By the time he had felt his way cautiously down the last step that led from the terrace, he had left the house completely behind him, so perfectly hidden from sight that he wondered, indeed, if he would ever find it again. Behind him he could see only a rolling, shifting wall of mist; ahead of him, where the gardens were, there was a veritable sea of fog, more white than gray, filmy and translucent before his face, pale and impenetrable a little beyond.
As he made his way slowly down what was surely a garden path, shuffling the loose gravel under his feet as he walked to make certain of his direction, objects formed faintly through the haze as he came near to them, or as the vapor thinned momentarily, and in the next minute vanished, before he was able to identify tree, or hedge, or, perhaps, human being. The odors of unseen flowers and moist grass came up sharply to his nostrils, carried by the mist; he could only guess vaguely at the outlines of flower beds as he walked by them, but he knew the flowers by their fragrance.
Pausing a moment on the path, seeing no more than an arm’s length before his eyes, he could imagine himself lost somewhere in space, with Telefair and all the world far below him—if, indeed, either Telefair or the world existed anywhere at all—wrapped in clouds that hid the stars. Yet as he stood there, lost in his imaginings, he heard the faintest little sound, no more than the soft whisperings of tiny drops of water as they slipped somewhere into a quiet pool.
For the moment his fancy had carried him so far above the earth that he wondered if he could be hearing some curious phenomenon of rainfall in the clouds themselves; then as he listened more intently to the sound it became clearer and more distinct, a gentle, continuous, tinkling little sound, and he knew that he heard the fountain playing.
He made his way toward it slowly, found it at last by following its sound, felt for the wide ledge that circled the pool and rested there, listening to the murmuring music of the falling water, catching infrequent glimpses of the spray as the gauzy mists shifted and changed and shifted, now opalescent and filmy, wreathing the little fountain with floating, delicate wisps of vapor, now pearly, opaque, almost milky, closing everything from his sight.
For a long while he sat by the fountain, listening to it, and then, growing restless, he rose and began to feel his way slowly through the fog. There was, he knew, a path that skirted the cypress grove and the old graveyard, and led to the water’s edge; somehow he managed to find it and follow it, again keeping to the path by the sound of the gravel beneath his feet. Continually changing odors told him where he was, the scent of the garden flowers giving way to the delicate fragrance of damp leaves and wood as he passed the grove, and these fading at last to the sharp, bitter scent that rose from the salt waters of the inlet to tell him he had reached the shore.
David sat down on a rock near the water, where he could hear the faint lapping of waves against the stones, an
d stared out toward the inlet, trying to guess at the exact line where mist and water met. Somewhere beyond the fog was the mainland, and the house of the Reverend Arthur Stone. But house and mainland alike were hidden from his sight now.
Once or twice David had wished he might row to the mainland and grow better acquainted with the minister, and with Laurel Stone. Yet he could never quite bring himself to suggest the visit to Philip Telefair. It would be such a simple and ordinary thing, he told himself. Some morning at breakfast he would say, “If I may use the boat, I’d like to row over and visit Mr. Stone. I ought to thank him again for his kindness to me the night that I came here.” But for some reason he could not shape, he never could make himself say the words. It was almost as though, in some way, he dared not.
The name of the Reverend Arthur Stone had never been mentioned since the night when David first came to the Island.
Suddenly a new sound came through the fog, one that froze the very blood in his veins before he recognized it for what it was: the howling of the dogs that were always chained at the boat landing. He had seen them now and then on his walks about the Island, great, snarling, ferocious beasts, friendly to no one except old Jonas. They were, he imagined, chained there to keep intruders from landing on the Island, but somehow he had never dared ask Philip Telefair about them. He had heard them again and again at nightfall, and grown accustomed to it; yet hearing them now through the fog, it was a new, unearthly, frightening, and somehow terribly lonely sound.
It was strange, David thought, that no visitors ever came to the Island, and no one ever seemed to leave it, except Edmund and old Jonas. Jonas crossed regularly to the mainland to arrange for the marketing and to bring back supplies. That appeared to be the only link with the outside world. There was no telephone, he never saw any newspapers come to the Island, and never any letters save those occasional ones dealing with the business of the Telefair estate.
What was the reason for the seclusion, the seemingly enforced seclusion, of Telefair Island? David could not guess. He only knew that after a lifetime of roaming about the world, and of filling Telefair with guests during his rare stays on the Island, old Philip Telefair had suddenly returned to his home and never gone away again.
