by Craig Rice
“I can remember,” Philip Telefair said very low, “love in this same garden. She was a fragile little thing. Very pale she was, like the mist that rises in the early morning over Telefair, or like the clouds drifting below the moon, or the fountain in the garden … and very gentle.” His voice became almost inaudible. “I could not have endured to see her die.”
From the terrace it was possible to see the inlet, still and glassy, now violet-gray; above it the blue sky was deepening into night.
“Surely,” old Philip Telefair said, “all things are permitted to those who love, all things are justified. If any two must destroy half the world, and leave it a crackling ruin, for the sake of love, it may be that it is their right. Perhaps Amabel and Anthony should have slain David Telefair, rather than attempted to fly from him. For they were surely justified in doing so. But in the same breath, the husband of Amabel Telefair was justified, since he preferred to kill rather than to see his love taken from him.”
Only a whisper of a wind rustled the trees of the grove, yet to those on the terrace it seemed to bring a faint chill.
Suddenly David wished that Laurel Stone was there, wished it so much that he could almost materialize her, a slight gray shadow in the gray twilight.
“Yet they would never have escaped,” Philip Telefair said—a new note had crept into his voice; he sounded almost stern—“David would have followed them to the end of the earth, had he needed. No Telefair ever forgets an enemy or forgives an injury, though his revenge may take him the rest of his life”—he paused for only a breath, and said, “or cost him his life.”
“And unto the last generation of them that he hates,” Edmund misquoted quietly.
Somewhere in the farther reaches of the sky a bird had lost a feather from its wing. The feather drifted now to earth, slowly and lazily, carried this way and that by vagrant currents of the wind; a small, dark feather, almost lost once or twice against the shadowy trees. They watched it as it fell, turning and turning, floating for an instant, caught on the air, then dropping gracefully and silently to rest on the stones of the terrace before them.
“An angel has flown overhead,” Philip Telefair said lightly, looking at it.
“But the feather is black,” David said, speaking for the first time.
In the far inlet, the rising wind began to moan softly.
“All things are permitted to those who love,” the old man said again. “Should distance lie between, or some inconvenient one, or the rules of human beings, or the laws of God, whatever is done that those who love may love, it is not a sin.” He picked up the small dark feather and twisted it between his long, graceful fingers. “Not even murder.”
As he spoke, David could see a small, white figure appear against the depths of the grove, hardly more than a flicker of pale light in the great dark trees at first, yet growing larger and clearer almost as though it was being created by the shadows, rather than emerging from them. Not until it had reached the great bed of peonies did he see that it was Edris.
She walked slowly up the wide garden path, small and delicate, like some frail wisp left behind by the dawn mists that rose over Telefair, or some shaft of moonlight appearing, incredibly, in the purple of the early twilight penumbra. As she came nearer up the path, the softly falling waters of the little fountain hid her from their sight, behind a thin, almost transparent veil. There for one moment she paused, and David held his breath, half expecting her to evaporate and disappear into the feathering spray of the fountain, half doubting the evidence of his eyes that she was there at all.
“I see that Edris is about to join us,” old Philip Telefair said pleasantly, rising from his chair. “Shall we go in to dinner?”
The tiny dark feather dropped unnoticed from his old fingers, falling to the ancient gray stone of the terrace.
All through dinner, David found himself watching Edris, almost against his will. As usual, she took little part in the conversation, her small pale face composed and serene, her soft, fair hair glimmering in the candlelight. Once or twice her eyes met his momentarily across the table, with that inexplicable look of recognition, as though they alone knew of some marvelous and delightful secret, one that could never be revealed. It was a look that left him baffled and faintly uneasy. Surely Edris knew of no secret that they shared. The bond between them was one of which she knew nothing. He tried to avoid her eyes.
Just as on that first night at Telefair, David sensed again the hostility she felt for her father, for Philip Telefair, and wondered again at the reason for it. Philip Telefair could never have been anything but kind to her; he could never have been anything but kind to anyone. Yet there it was, hostility, and fear too; he could feel it in the silent currents that passed back and forth across the table.
Most of all, he wondered about Edris herself. How did she spend her days on the Island? It was hard to believe that she had never left it since the day of her birth, yet he knew that it was true. He tried to picture her childhood, the colorless, delicate little thing she must have been, with a deafmute Negro for her nurse, the dour Zenobie to oversee her care, and Doctor von Berger to teach her, intermittently and halfheartedly, her lessons. In all her life—and she was seventeen years old, three years younger than he—Edris had never known any others than the people on the Island.
Had she never wished to go away? Perhaps she had. How lonely she must have been, David thought, with a sudden ache of pity for her. How lonely she must be now, through these endless days.
What under Heaven did she do to amuse herself, in the long hours between waking and sleeping? There was the library, of course; once or twice he had found her sitting by the great oriel window that overlooked the inlet, reading one of the old, exquisitely bound books, or in the small parlor bent over some incredibly delicate bit of needlework, or idly fingering the little rosewood piano, calling forth whatever melodies chose to come. Yet it seemed to him that she must spend days on end in which she never spoke one word to another person, or heard one word spoken to her.
Suddenly, his thoughts wandering, a picture of her rose before his mind, a picture seen in one quick flash of lightning: her face white, her closed eyelids like pale, thin shells, one spray of spangled, almost transparent hair falling over her cheek.
Involuntarily his eyes lifted and met hers, watching him from across the table. In the candlelight they seemed to be the color of the inlet, a curious, misted gray. For an instant it seemed to him that he was choking, that he could not draw another breath or that he dared not breathe lest she should look away. He felt oddly light, almost without weight, as though he had lost contact with the earth and was drifting away from it.
Not until old Philip Telefair spoke to him for the third time did David realize that he had not heard one single word of what had been said at the table.
In the early evening, immediately after dinner, David walked down to the inlet with the little doctor. A faint light remained in the sky, but the Island and the inlet were lost and shadowed in the purplish twilight. They crossed the broad lawn that spread itself before Telefair, and walked down to the edge of the woods that bordered the shores, pausing momentarily before them with the instinctive dread that always rises at the prospect of entering shadowy, cavernous woods, at dusk.
David turned and looked back at the house. In the soft light it loomed up like a great, pale, unoutlined bulk, dominating the Island even in the dark. The few lights that showed in its windows flickered feebly, faintly yellow, almost vanishing as the darkness deepened.
“It is a beautiful house,” he breathed, trying to remember where he had heard the same words before. He glanced quickly up at Doctor von Berger, to see if he had heard, but the little man was apparently engaged in snapping a pebble out of his path with the toe of his shoe, paying no attention to David.
He turned his back on the house and plunged into the woods, ahead of Doctor von Berger, feeling his way carefully along the narrow path. Under the trees the last light disappeared
altogether, black caves of shadow forming the edges of the cleared path. A sudden wave of salt air came in from the water to meet them, moist and salty. The unusual warmth of the past day still lingered after nightfall, a damp, suffocating heat, heavy with the odor of decaying vegetation.
The path widened and grew lighter, and then the inlet appeared, smooth and dark and glassy. They walked on down to the water’s edge, listening to the sand as it crunched underneath their feet, and then paused there, gazing into the shadows.
Across the inlet a small light burned, marking the location of the Reverend Arthur Stone’s house. It shone and faded and vanished and reappeared again, as the wind across the water blew the trees back and forth and back again over a faraway window. The rest was darkness. Then suddenly along the far point of the Island that reached out toward the bay, a thin line of blue-green fire appeared, like the glow of a reflected flame, coming from nowhere and vanishing into nowhere again, moving and changing and shifting. Against it the ancient gallows of Telefair Island were great and black.
Then in the next instant the fire was gone, and the world was dark again. One of the dogs chained by the landing howled mournfully.
“Marshfire,” Doctor von Berger said quietly.
David felt the hairs rising on the back of his head. Marshfire. He’d heard the word spoken before, just as quietly, in just such an hour. Had it been so long ago that he stood on the shores of the mainland with the Reverend Arthur Stone? The study, the quiet, warm-lighted minister’s study, the old books, the comfortable chair, and Laurel Stone coming into the room. Suddenly he longed for her as a very young and frightened child might long for the nurse to bring him in a light. Where she was, there was warmth, and comfort, and safety, a security against the terrors that ran up and down the shadowy shores of the inlet at dusk. But there was only that one illuminated window on the far shore, and there was the width of the inlet between.
He heard himself saying, as though it was another person, “Yes, it is marshfire.”
There it was again, the strange, flickering, blue-green flame.
“Odd that it only appears at that one point on the Island,” Doctor von Berger said. “One might even think that it was attracted there by the old gallows.”
The wind that came up from the inlet was almost cold.
“Let us not go too near to the dogs,” the little doctor said. “One does not like to set them barking.”
They stood there, looking out over the water. Then all at once David again felt himself overwhelmed by that feeling of being in a scene many times revisited, repeating an action often done. He closed his eyes, and the sensation swept over him in a wave of faintness. This very spot along the shore, with marshfire outlining the old gallows, black and terrible against the sky, and the dogs howling by the landing. It was like some point in his life that he had passed by before without noticing it; now by some curious reversal of time he had come back to it. He suddenly found himself wondering to what else he would return.
“You are lost in thought, my young friend,” Doctor von Berger said amiably. He slipped a friendly arm through David’s. “I do not believe that you have heard one word that I have said since we left the house.”
“I was thinking—” David paused suddenly. In this twilight he felt a sudden nearness to the little doctor that he had not even guessed might exist, a nearness born more of necessity than desire, as two strangers lost in a dark lane might cry out to each other.
This was the real Doctor von Berger who stood so comfortingly beside him, not the one who was seen by day. It seemed to David that in the light everyone became another person; only as night fell did he become himself again.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that I am doing something I have done before, seeing something I have seen before, and yet I know I have not.” He breathed deeply of the cold salt air from the inlet. “I have had this feeling before since I came to Telefair.”
Doctor von Berger’s guttural voice was soft and gentle through the darkness. “It is not so strange a thing,” he said. “Some time in your life, too long ago for you to remember, you stood beside a water’s edge at twilight, when the shadows were deepening, and now you remember the feeling of it, even while you cannot remember where it was, or why you were there.”
He paused, and drew a long, sighing breath, and his hand grew a shade more heavy on David’s arm. “Or perhaps some long-dead Telefair who was an ancestor of yours stood at this very place on the Island, at this same hour of the day, feeling the cold wind from the inlet on his face, and now you, who are his descendant, remember what he felt at that hour.” Then he said what David remembered having heard from old Philip Telefair, days—or was it weeks, or months—before. “How can we know how much we may inherit from the dead?”
Far above the inlet one star appeared, materializing on the night sky between one instant and the next, very pale and very distant and very cold. While David watched it was followed by another, and then another, then all at once the sky was brilliant with stars that had appeared one by one, unnoticed and unnoticing.
“They watch without emotion and without interest,” Doctor von Berger said, looking at the sky. “They have no concern for us. Shall we go back to the house before it is too dark to find our way through the trees?”
The little wood was heavily scented now as the night odors rose, the damp grass and rotting leaves underfoot, the moist bark of the trees and the salt smell of the inlet, and the faint fragrance of flowers. It seemed to David that he could feel the darkness against his face, an actual substance, soothing, and welcoming, and cool. He longed to remain there in the dark and quiet woods, yet in the same, moment he listened for Doctor von Berger’s crackling footsteps on the path ahead, and was glad that he did not walk alone.
Then he could see the great pale bulk of Telefair through the trees, even before he could see the sky. A kind of terror seized him, a fear of the silent forest, and he plunged frantically along the last few steps of the woodland path, aware of every damp leaf that brushed against his face. The trees broke away from him at last and then lay behind him, and he stood just beyond their last outpost, a little breathless.
There was the broad lawn before him, like a shadowy lake, and past it the marvelous house, too beautiful in the dusk to be anything but a dream, vast and all-enveloping, and white as death. As David stood there, a thin line of cherry-red appeared at the roof of the house. At first it seemed to be a rising flame; then as he watched, it grew rounder, little by little, until at last he knew that he was watching the moon rise over Telefair, nearly round, garlanded with mist, encircled by flame.
“The moon rises,” Doctor von Berger said softly. “In a little while there will be moonlight, and then it will be difficult to tell if the house is there, built of wood and stone and brick, or if it is an illusion, a mirage, cast up there against the trees by some phenomenon of light and shadow.”
It seemed to David that he was screaming as he spoke, yet his own voice sounded quiet and strangely calm to his ears. “But it isn’t there at all,” he heard himself saying. “It doesn’t exist.”
He remembered—or was it remembering?—his first sight of the old house across that wide expanse of clipped grass, ghost-white under the moon, and of his feeling that it was not real, that it would dissolve and disperse as he approached it, an ethereal thing, leaving behind a great pit of darkness to mark where it had been.
The little German doctor’s laugh was soft and somehow quieting, stilling the desperate cry caught there in David’s throat.
“Can we tell which is the real and which is the mirage; which is the Telefair that we see, and which the Telefair we seem to see?” Again he linked his arm through David’s as they crossed the lawn. “Before you go to bed, visit me for a while. It is a good evening for talking of illusions.”
It was as round as a buggy wheel, round as the bottom of a bowl, the great round moon, as it brushed the highest, feathery boughs of the trees in the old grove and hung i
n the sky. David stared at it from where he lay on the sandy shore of the Island, and imagined it coming down to earth, like some gigantic balloon, turning to flame the instant that it touched whatever lay beneath it.
He dug his fingers into the sand, clutching at the tiny pebbles that came within his grasp. Doctor von Berger had left him. The great pale house was hidden from him. The moon was risen now.
“The whole thing has been dreamed,” he said, almost aloud. His breath rose up in his throat, and he said, “All of it, every bit of it, even old Philip Telefair who has been so kind to me, whom I love with all my heart.… It was all dreamed, and I am awake now, here on the shore, under the moon.”
Across the inlet there was a little stone house, surrounded by a garden; in that house there was a pleasant room, lined with books, and through its doorway Laurel Stone might come.
But it was all very far away. The moon-touched inlet seemed immeasurably wide—he felt suddenly that he would never cross it, no, not as long as he lived.
He found himself wondering, as he stumbled up toward the house, along the path that led near the old grove, why he longed for Laurel Stone as he did.
The whitish-gray walls of Doctor von Berger’s small bare room seemed to shut out Telefair, its grandeur, its shadows, and its melancholy. Had only one of the magnificent old paintings hung there, the Telefair outside those walls would have come in; but the unadorned expanse of plaster became a barrier, making Doctor von Berger’s” room a refuge.
Yet for all its barrenness, to David it was a room haunted by secrets. It seemed a room to which someone had but lately come; though he knew that Doctor von Berger had lived there for twenty years or more, to David it seemed a room shortly to be deserted, even though Doctor von Berger might live there the rest of his life. Wherever he might be, and for however long, Doctor von Berger would always be a transient guest, one who had come from some other place, and who would not long remain.
