by Craig Rice
He looked about him. He could not see the pillared entrance to the underground chapel in the dark, but from his knowledge that it was there it seemed to him that he could see it, a cave of gloom, half veiled by the cobwebs. At the end of it there would be the altar, shrouded now in linen, strange-shaped, pale, showing a ghost of a cross.
Surely by now old Philip Telefair would have passed through the unused hall of the old wing, through the library, and up the great curved stair. David reached a hand out into the dark and felt the curving rail of the stone staircase leading to the floor above.
Suddenly he was seized by a terror of being trapped underground, buried alive. The cool darkness was like the very feel of the damp earth on his face. He could see, before his eyelids, the picture of another Telefair burying the body of Amabel’s lover, in the secret grave dug in the dead of night with the cold rain falling, with only the help of a Negro slave. He wondered again why all the house servants at Telefair were deaf-mutes. If the old wing of the house should fall now, collapsing of its own age, he would be buried under it forever, trapped here in the narrow turn of the stone stair, lost underground. It was what lay beneath the surface of the earth that he feared.
It seemed to him that from somewhere far above him he could hear a sound, gentle and melodious, a continuous, tinkling, silvery little sound. It fell for a long time on his tortured ears before he recognized it as the fountain playing.
David ascended the stairs leading from the chapel slowly and carefully, feeling his way from one step to the next, continually watchful for the faint gleam of candlelight in the hall beyond. At the turn at the head of the stairs he saw that the hall was dark, and made his way down it cautiously, feeling for the door that led into the library.
He came to it at last and found that it was closed. No light showed below it; then evidently Philip Telefair had passed through the room and gone on into the other part of the house. David turned the knob and pushed open the door, stepped in, and closed it, without making a sound.
He found himself in a vast, shadowy, almost circular room, heavy with dust. A faint light came from the windows that encircled it just below the ceiling, and little by little he could make out strange, immense figures above his head, a great, dark gallery, and an endless succession of paneled, tarnished mirrors that gave his distorted image back to him, changing and diminishing, infinitely.
David found a match in his pockets and lighted it; a multitude of pin points of flame came back to him from the mirrored walls. He realized at once that instead of finding the door to the library, in the dark he had opened the one across the hall and entered the old ballroom, unused so many years. There were a thousand candles in the great chandelier; the newly silvered mirrors sent back their reflected glow ten thousand times. The match he held burned his fingers and he dropped it to the floor. The dancers on the polished floor paused in their measured steps, the musicians on the gallery bowed and set themselves to play again, and the music that they played was a delicate, misted, sparkling little song, exquisite, spangled, like a spray of opalescent drops of water falling through a mist.
David woke slowly, turning uneasily on his pillow, struggling up through seas of sleep. It seemed to him that he could smell the sweet, sharp smell of mint, heavy on the still morning air, pungent, bitter, penetrating. As he slowly opened his eyes, he thought that it took form like a cloud, a pale green mist. Then, moment by moment he woke, and knew that the scent came from the bruised and drowning stalks of mint in the glass left on his table, the glass brought from Doctor von Berger’s room the night before.
He could see it dimly through sleepy eyes, magnifying itself into a tangled forest, all vine-grown trees, profuse and tangled grass. There it stood, the glass a bubble, quivering with light, and through it shone the green of the mint touched with the gleam of orange peel. Then as he watched, it all faded into one, the clear, sharp smell of mint that gathered and lingered, floating on the air, perfuming all the room. He slept again.
There was that strange light between darkness and dawn, milky, niveous, hovering for an instant between brilliance and bloom, when he next woke. The ceiling was dim and misty, the walls still shadowed. Then while he watched, half sleeping, half waking, the light changed, dark to pale, pale to bright. Still there was the odor of mint filling the room, bitter and strong and yet sweet.
It was morning. Already the Negro boy had tiptoed in and out of the room, drawing up the blinds and lighting the fire. David rubbed his eyes and opened them wide. The table by his bed was empty, the glass had been removed by the boy, no single spray of mint had been left anywhere. Only the odor remained, seeming stronger than before, the mint itself withered and destroyed, faded and dead, the glass emptied.
Which was the real then, David wondered, the mint or the odor, the odor that lives, or the mint that dies; the real or the dream, the great pale house that was an illusion cast up by the moon, or the vast dark pit it would sink into at moonset; the stone stairs leading down to the underground chapel, or the shadows that they cast? He had dreamed of a descent into the earth—had he not, then, dreamed all the rest? Had he truly seen old Philip Telefair in the old chapel? Had he ever, truly, watched Edris while she slept? The sound that he heard now, could it be that he heard the little fountain playing? He examined his hands suddenly and found that the knuckles were darkened and bruised as though he had, somewhere, struck them against stone.
David sprang from his bed, ran to the window, and looked out. Over the garden, where the last pale vestiges of mist slowly evaporated, a cloud of little dark birds rose, whirling and circling, sinking and rising. He felt suddenly, though the morning was clear, that the hollow sky over Telefair Island was dark with unfallen rain.
PART THREE
13
There would be a long avenue of ancient trees, their heavy branches interlocked against the sky; there would be the shadows beneath them, and at the end a little arch-shaped space of light; then suddenly one would have passed beyond the last tree and there would be sunlight and clear sky and broad meadows, and the dim and haunted corridor would have become no more than a grove of trees already passed through, its entrance shrinking into a shadow among shadows.
Or there would be the long journey one followed underground in the dream, the twisting tunnels through the moist earth, with always the faint suggestion of a flickering light somewhere beyond, and at last, at the end of the darkest and narrowest passage there would be, if it were ever reached, the circular room, joyous with lamps, and behind only a closed door to mark where the passageway had been.
Or there would be the wandering through the shifting mists, the vapor that rose from the water’s edge at early morning, walled in on every side by the shadowy half-substance as cold as autumn rain and as white as death, and then the unexpected falling away of the mist, and the space of brilliant daylight in which the flowers flaunted their colors and the drops from the little fountain fell like crystals.
David was beginning to find it difficult to distinguish between them now.
“One of the most delightful things about the Island,” old Philip Telefair said at breakfast that morning, “is the variability of its weather. Even while the Island is swimming in sunlight, the mists are already gathering out on the inlet, and even while the fog is settling in the secret places of the gardens, a storm wind is coming up from the bay.”
David started to say, “Yes, I know. After last night today is, unaccountably, a perfect day.” But he stopped himself suddenly at the second word, and instead said, “Yes. Yes, it is like that,” feeling indescribably foolish and inadequate as he did so.
It was, indeed, a golden, a breathless day, a day of sunlight and still, mellow air. That had been what he had seen after a little time of restless and uneasy sleep: the incredible clarity of the air, and the pale, yellow light, the unexpected colors in the gardens below his window.
David remembered now how he had wakened that morning wondering what of the night before was real an
d what was not, and then returned to his bed and slept again, to dream of threatening rain, the sky heavy with it. It had seemed to him that ravens might have flown, screaming, against those overhanging clouds. Too, there had been a singular quality to the atmosphere in his dream, unfriendly, oppressive, damp against his skin; there had been the fear of unknown things that were yet to come, the secrets and the whisperings, and the untold and untellable horrors; but there had been, too, the surety that it was no more than a dream, a black dream of darkness, a dusky avenue under old haunted trees, an unlighted corridor under the earth, a cold mist that would vanish as soon as he opened his eyes again.
It had been an uncomfortable and tormented sleep, his weary face fighting its pillow, his exhausted young body struggling against the coolness and smoothness of the sheets. It could have been no more than a few minutes that he slept; yet when he woke, it was suddenly another day.
This was not the dream, this was real, he knew as he woke. Daylight was fairly dancing on the floor in joyous patterns; the sky seen through his window was clear and deep and blue. David leaped from his bed as though he had never been weary in all his life, taking desperate, hungry gasps of the morning air as though he could never get enough of it.
There were no dreams. There was no night.
Striding down the hall, swinging down the graceful old staircase, David felt that he was seeing Telefair as he had never seen it before: not as a place shadowed by its past nor haunted by its future, but as a well-made and well-kept house in which one lived, and ate, and slept, and read the treasured books in the paneled library; a house which he would some day inherit, and in which he would some day marry and father children, and live contentedly for more years than he cared to count now.
But as though Telefair was not enough, there was Philip Telefair, who had been so kind to him, sitting at the breakfast table—David realized suddenly that he was unbelievably hungry—a kind, beloved, white-haired old man; there was little Doctor von Berger, round-faced, round-eyed, and beaming; there was Edmund, smiling and friendly; and there was Edris, hiding her face over her cup, her fair hair all glistening in the sunlight. He loved them all.
It had never occured to him before that Edris was a pretty girl.
“One of the most delightful things about Telefair,” the old man had said, and David agreed with him with all his heart.
But there would be no more weather changes now, save those in the air and the sky over the Island. This was the real Telefair, he told himself, sun and the colors of the flowers, voices, the desire for food, the bright china on the table and the polished silver; it was as though he were awake at last after all this time he had passed through, awake and alive, and with a long and unclouded life ahead of him.
He looked up suddenly. “This is it,” he said, not realizing that he was speaking. “The other is the dream.” He caught himself, broke off in the middle of a breath, and blushed furiously. For a bare moment he devoted himself to his breakfast plate, then looked surreptitiously around the table. No, no one had heard him, no one had been paying attention. David breathed easier. Then suddenly he caught Doctor von Berger’s eyes across the table.
It was like one of those flashes through a window from a railway train; one moment the little doctor’s gaze had been completely curtained by the reflected light on his thick-lensed glasses—in the next the reflection had been cut off and the pale blue, protuberant eyes stared at David. They said nothing, those eyes, they neither asked nor answered, yet in that instant David was conscious of a sudden chilling wind that blew up from the inlet and through the opened door. For only that one instant the shadows threatened to close in again. But in the next instant the curtain of light had shut once more over Doctor von Berger’s eyes. It was as though the moment had never been, and David not only forgot it immediately, but forgot what small secrets he and the doctor shared.
“The repairs on my boat are nearly done,” Edmund said. “The storm did not do so much damage as I thought. She’ll be back at anchor tomorrow.”
David had forgotten there had ever been a storm.
14
There was the house behind him, the splendid, lofty house, and there were the woods and the inlet beyond, green and blue and turquoise and all the shades between, and just before him lay the gardens, all nodding and beckoning flowers, with the fountain in the center, an explosion of spangled light.
David stood one moment on the terrace and, for the first time since he had come to the Island, said “How beautiful!” Impulsively he repeated it, “How beautiful, the roses collapsing with bloom, and the light on that waterfall—” He stopped suddenly and drew in his breath, and looked about to make sure that no one had heard him, talking to himself, or the wind.
But there had been no one to hear, and the air against his cheek was warm and cool all in the same breath, and the trees made a little, almost indistinguishable, friendly sound, and suddenly he was bounding down the steps—he would have skipped down them, had he been a few years younger, for the pure joy in his heart.
It was all so good, so perfect, so wonderful. He was David Telefair, heir to the most marvelous island in the world; the stars dazzled him by night, and the garden flowers by day. There could be nothing better than this, to be David Telefair who would inherit the Island, who would some day own it, every inch of grass and every bursting flower, the Dresden china doorknobs in the house, the little grove of gently swaying trees where all the dear, beloved, unforgotten Telefairs lay, and the little fountain, with its gentle, sweet, continual sound.
He whispered to himself, “You must walk slowly, and you must not move too quickly in any direction, for the whole thing is a bubble, a bubble of light and shadow, and if you should so much as breath on it, it will be gone.” He stopped himself and said, harshly and aloud, “What am I talking about?”
“After all, you are heir to Telefair.”
David wondered if he had imagined, or if he had heard, the words.
Beyond the grove of ancient trees, beyond the tiny meadow that lay past it in the very center of the Island, was the far shore of which he still knew little. It was the shore that faced toward the bay, all jagged rocks and small, sandy coves, where only coarse grass and dwarf pines grew to mark the line where the water ended and human habitation began. He walked there now, first through the grove, where the damp leaves touched lightly on his cheeks, then through the miniature meadow, with its tall, thick grass, then past a thin, sentinel line of trees, and finally down to the shore itself, a kind of rendezvous between the earth and the water, where the seaweed lay in great, rotting strands across the beaches and the winds continually drove the sands into the water.
“I have been dreaming since I first came to Telefair,” he whispered to himself.
There was a little bluff before him, no more than a few feet high, and beyond it the shining water reached out endlessly.
David explained it all to himself, carefully and with infinite detail, while he walked on toward the path that would lead him down to the water’s edge.
It was that everything had been new to him. He had come to Telefair as a guest, uncertain of himself, anxious to please, in a strange place and among strangers; he had magnified his own dreams in his mind, he had imagined situations where none existed at all, he had let sounds frighten him in the night because he was in a place where he had never been before. But Telefair was strange no longer, it was his home.
“I am David Telefair,” he repeated in his mind, “the nephew of old Philip Telefair who has been kindness itself to me.” He would live here on the Island and some day inherit it and to the end of his days he would never leave its shores.
Could there be mystery, or tragedy, shadowing so fabulous an Island, so beautiful a house? If Philip Telefair chose to remain here, never going over to the mainland, that was his own affair. Yes, and the others, too. In fact, David believed them right. Why should anyone leave the Island, even for one day, when everything to be desired was here?
/> It was due only to natural reticence that Philip Telefair did not wish to speak of his dead wife, Angeline. He must have loved her very dearly, and even now, after all the years between, would not wound himself by talking of her. Most likely she had gone back to visit her own people, in France, and had died and been buried there.
It was all so easy to explain. Those were the facts, and he had imagined the rest.
David paused suddenly, halfway down the little sandy path. Was it a wisp of fog that he saw, still clinging to the shore—a white, misty shadow? Then he realized that it was Edris’ white dress, and as he went on down the path he saw Edris sitting on a rock and gazing over the water, her pale arms resting on the sand, her soft hair catching the sun. In the same moment she heard his footsteps and turned to wave and smile at him, and David all but ran down the last stretch of sandy path, his heart bounding. That was the one more thing he had been wishing for, the last touch to make the day perfect. He had wanted to talk, to share his happiness with someone, anyone, but preferably—though he had not realized it before—Edris.
She looked up at him, half shyly, half welcoming.
“May I have half the sunshine?” he asked, as though he were asking for the greatest favor in all the world.
Edris laughed, a little tinkling waterfall of a laugh, and said, “Please do. There is so much of it, I would not try to keep it all for myself.”
He sat down beside her, suddenly at a loss for words, yet longing to speak. What did one say to a girl, anyway?
She contrived, somehow, with a gesture, a smile, a nod, to put him at his ease, and it was she who spoke first. “This is my favorite spot on all the Island, where I can see so far out across the water.”
David leaned on one elbow and looked up at her. “Wouldn’t you like to cross it, and see what there is on the other side?”
