by Craig Rice
As he stood there watching it, he felt that he was no longer alone, and wheeled around to see Zenobie standing near him, her large hands folded, her ugly face impassive.
“I came to tell you there’s only a little while before dinner, Mr. David.”
He nodded, thanked her, and started toward the path.
Zenobie spoke again, startling him.
“When the time comes, if you are not able to place a lantern on the wharf yourself, I shall do it for you.”
David paused, and stared at her. Without another word, she turned around and disappeared into the shadowy woods, moving as quickly as a cat.
“When the time comes,” David whispered to himself. “When what time comes?”
He looked once more over the inlet. The little boat had become no more than a faint, dark speck on the smooth surface of the water. Even as he watched, it was swallowed up and hidden from him by the deepening shadows. Then it was gone, lost.
For the first time, David realized that he was a prisoner on the Island.
16
Edris did not appear at dinner. David heard Zenobie and old Philip Telefair murmuring something about a tray to be taken to Edris’ room, and felt strangely relieved. He had been watching every clock he saw, ticking off the minutes till dinner in his mind, half-breathless with the longing to see her again. Yet now that he realized she would not come downstairs, he felt a strain released from his mind. He wished, more than he had ever wished for anything in his young life, to see her, but not here, not across the polished table, not with Edmund’s one-sided smile seeming to mock everything that was said, not with little Doctor von Berger’s round blue eyes observing and recording everything, not, most of all, with old Philip Telefair at the head of the table.
The curious twilight mood that had seized him down by the inlet had vanished as he neared the house; by the time he had dressed for dinner and come down the great curved stair, he had forgotten it. A trick of the sunset and the shadows—a freak of the imagination. Zenobie had said nothing to him that he wished to remember. He refused to let the thought of Laurel Stone enter his mind.
He could see it now, closing his eyes … Edris at one end of the beautiful old dining table, and he at the other, and the shining candelabra shedding their lovely glow between; there would be guests on both sides of the table (he could not imagine their faces nor guess their names, since he had met none of them yet, but he knew that they would be there); there would be musicians on the balcony of the circular ballroom that was hung now with cobwebs and strands of moss. It would all be as it should be, as it had been intended …
“… my dear David” … the reflected gleam in the old man’s hair … “My dear David, I had hoped …”
David looked up sharply. No, Philip Telefair had not addressed a word to him. Philip Telefair did not know, nor could he even guess, what David was going to tell him there in the firelit library, after dinner was through. But how pleased he would be! How the parchment-like skin of his handsome face would light up, how his dark, deep-set eyes would glow! … “My dear David …”
Philip Telefair’s beautiful eyes met his own in that instant, smiling at him down the length of the table, welcoming a son-in-law.
“… It is possible to wish so greatly …”
Again David looked up, certain that he had heard the words spoken aloud. But Doctor von Berger was not looking at him; for once, no one was looking at him.
I must never forget one moment of this day, he told himself, not one single breathless instant of it. It is the day that I shall seek out in the calendars of my mind to remember.
For one clouded moment, he seemed to see the little boat carried away by the shadows, vanishing into the twilight; he seemed to catch a faint echo of Laurel Stone’s voice as it had called to him over the water. Then, with an effort, he dismissed it from his mind.
“So you are a prisoner on the Island,” Philip Telefair said pleasantly.
David brought himself back to the present with a start.
The words had been addressed to Edmund. The repairs on Edmund’s boat, the Dark Lady, were not going successfully. It would be tomorrow before they were done.
“Yes,” Edmund said lightly, laughing at a trivial misfortune, “I too am held here.” His eyes turned away from David’s as he spoke.
“There are worse prisons,” Philip Telefair said, in the same, light tone.
“Many worse,” Doctor von Berger said.
David looked up at him quickly. Was there an oddly reminiscent, and somehow bitter note in the little doctor’s voice, or had he imagined it? His attention was diverted almost in the same instant, when, for the first time since he had been at Telefair, Zenobie, superintending the removal of the dinner plates, allowed one dish to clatter sharply against another.
Edmund laughed. “But there is only one way for a man who is imprisoned on an island to leave it. That is to die.” He twirled his wineglass in his brown fingers.
“Why should anyone ever want to leave the Island?” David burst out impulsively. “It would be like leaving the Blessed Isles themselves! I hope that I may never go away from here, never, as long as I live.”
“Then you never shall, my dear boy,” Philip Telefair said warmly, almost comfortingly, and turning to Edmund he said, “On the subject of boats, I wonder if I ever told you about the time …” and talk moved on to other things.
If he knew, David thought. If old Philip Telefair knew. …“I had hoped … some day … when both of you were grown …”
“I know so little of boats,” Doctor von Berger was saying. “I only recall two, the one that brought me here and one other, less pleasant. I have never seen another, nor do I expect that I ever shall.”
He brought no gift to Philip Telefair when he came to the Island, David remembered, since he could find none worth the bringing, but this would be the one most desired. “… Even when you were children … I had thought …”
“David,” Philip Telefair said in a tone of gentle reproof, “I believe you have not heard one word that has been said.”
David had heard them all, with some other part of his mind, and remembered them all, but he looked up now and said apologetically, “I’m sorry, I was dreaming. My mind was very far away.”
Edmund said almost harshly, “I was wrong about the man imprisoned on an island. There is another escape, after all.”
“But dreams are not an escape,” old Philip Telefair said. “It is the waking that is the escape.”
David was glad when the hour was over. He had begun first to resent Edmund and Doctor von Berger, then to dislike them, and at last to wish them dead. Everything now lay between himself and Philip Telefair, and even Edris did not figure in it. It was with a breath of relief that he rose from the table, stood for a moment in the little parlor, watched his great-uncle light one of the long, thin, Italian cigars, and heard him say after a brief silence, “I am going into the library.”
Did he guess, then, what was going to be said, David wondered.
The interval, before David slipped quietly out of the room and tapped lightly at the library door, seemed longer to him than all the rest of his young life had been. He stood there listening by the door, the beating of his heart like the tick of an enormous clock, until he heard the beautiful voice calling to him to enter. Then he opened the door slowly and stepped into the room, torn between dread and longing, with an agonizing fear of the moment to come and a realization that this was the moment he had been destined all his life, and had always ardently desired, to reach.
He said—
He never knew what he said.
He knew that he closed the door behind him and leaned against it, one hand frozen to the Dresden china knob. He knew that old Philip Telefair sat there across the desk, smiling at him, one graceful hand playing idly with a jeweled desk ornament. And he knew that he spoke, between cold tight lips. But that was all he knew.
A dozen, a hundred times he had rehearsed what he wante
d to say. He had phrased it and rephrased it over and over during that interval after dinner. How should it be said? “Great-Uncle Philip, I want to marry—” Or perhaps better, “I am going to marry—” Maybe he had better begin “Edris and I—” Everything seemed to hang on a choice of words, now.
Yet as he stood there, and realized that he was speaking, he was unconscious of the phrases he used; he never heard them himself. He clung to the china doorknob as though it alone stood between him and the shades of the damned, and felt his voice moving in his throat, but of what he said he caught only a few words, “—I—Edris—marry—” Then, almost before he was aware of it, the thing was done.
Once, when he had been quite small, a schoolmaster had taken him to an amusement park as a treat during a brief vacation, and he had watched, fascinated, the man who was shot from a cannon. Even then, he had been able to imagine the sensation, the breathless rush, then the sudden emergence into the air, the wonderful feeling of joyous release. He had dreamed of it ever since. Now, he felt the sensation himself, as the last word left his lips; like having fired himself into space, there was the sense of lightness, of joyousness, of flying.
It was the thing he had wanted to say, it was the thing he had been intended to say since he was born. Now it was actually spoken, and David felt that he would never again be as happy as he was in this moment.
“You—marry Edris?” old Philip Telefair said. “It is quite impossible.”
17
There was no anger. There was no surprise. There was not the faintest shadow of displeasure on Philip Telefair’s face as he spoke. The parchment-colored skin might have turned a shade more pale—or it might have been David’s imagining—and the delicate eyebrows lifted an immeasurable fraction of an inch, and the jeweled desk ornament fell sharply to the floor. But that was all.
“It is quite impossible,” Philip Telefair repeated.
David could see the room shrinking away from his sight, its walls receding and growing smaller, as though he were looking into an underground tunnel; he could feel the air rushing past his ears even though his mind told him there was no air in motion; he knew that he was incapable of speech, and yet he felt his lips forming words.
“You must never speak of it again,” old Philip Telefair said, putting an end to the matter. He rose from his seat behind the beautifully carved desk and stood looking at David, his face expressionless.
“But wait,” David cried, “you don’t understand. I want—”
He felt the words die in his throat as he stared at the old man, and at the room around him. There was the great, polished desk, the firelight, the paneled walls, just as he had pictured them in his mind. There was old Philip Telefair, smiling at him. “My dear David … I had hoped—” Surely it was a mistake of some kind, an absurd and horrible mistake. “… it is quite impossible …” He felt a slow fury rising in his brain.
“My dear young man,” old Philip Telefair said, “you are hurt and tormented. But it is a dream, after all. And it does not matter what one might do in a dream.” He paused and added very softly, “Or perhaps it does not matter what one does in that other life, the waking one.”
David stared up at him, at the slender, vastly tall figure with the beautiful pale face and the delicate, graceful hands. It seemed to him that he could not tell if Philip Telefair was speaking to him now or if he remembered the words, “… to those who love … all things are justified … whatever is done that those who love may love is not a sin … not even murder.…”
Before David could move, before he could even speak, Philip Telefair turned and went out through the door—in his terrible bewilderment David could not tell through which of the two doors he went. He only knew that suddenly he was alone in the library.
A vagrant wind blew the dark red silk window curtain across his face; in a sudden rage he caught at it, tore it down, ripped it to shreds between his anguished fingers, and flung himself out of the room.
The library door closed behind him with a strange dull sound that David felt rather than heard. Before him the old stair seemed to float, oblivious of the earth, curving away from his gaze; the hallway itself was half shadow, like the inside of a vast, dark globe.
The door had closed behind him and he knew that he was out of the room, he knew that he could not re-enter it now, yet in his mind he threw himself again and again against the door, beating upon it, confused, bewildered, frightened.
“But it was not supposed to be that way. It was wrong, all terribly wrong. There’s a mistake, some mistake that I cannot understand—” He cried out suddenly, “Wait!” and then realized that no one heard him.
It had to be an error, an incredible error. Philip Telefair could not have understood what he had been trying to say. It was simply that he wanted to please old Philip Telefair who had been kind to him, that he wanted to marry Edris with the old man nodding and smiling benevolently in the background—marry Edris and inherit the Island and live there forever.
He knew, though, that it was not an error.
For one instant Telefair seemed to spin about him like a top, the wonderful staircase a dizzying spiral, the French-papered walls kaleidoscopic. In the next instant he had thrown open the library door again, bracing himself with his hands that clung desperately to the doorposts on either side.
“Why did you bring me here?” he called out. “What have I ever done that you should have hated me so, all my life?”
He remembered that he spoke to an empty room.
In a heedless frenzy David plunged into the library, toward that other door, the one that led to the ballroom and the chapel and the darkness. Then a hand caught his arm in a motion almost like a blow, and threw him back against the doorpost.
“Stop it, you young fool,” Edmund said sharply. “It isn’t you that he hates. Can’t you see what he intends you to do?”
David tore his arm free, shoving the tall cripple away from him; at the far end of the great hall the door to the gardens stood open, a great, shadowy oblong, and he fled toward it as though propelled by some force outside himself. Yet as he reached the broad terrace, the darkness seemed to turn pale. The round moon overhead was hidden but its light reflected on the lakes of mist below. All Telefair Island was lost and swimming in fog.
“Edris!”
David heard the cry before he realized that it came from his own throat.
“He is right, it is quite impossible,” Doctor von Berger said, suddenly appearing on the terrace as though he had been wished there by a magician, a little round man whose face shone in the curious light, whose pale blue, protuberant eyes were no longer peering, nor inquisitive, but despairing.
David did not see him at all.
“Impossible,” the doctor repeated. “You do not understand.”
“You were listening, then”—David heard a voice speaking that was curiously his own, a calm voice, terribly cold.
“Believe me,” Doctor von Berger panted, “I am your friend. You must know, it is entirely impossible. Do you comprehend? Your father. Angeline. Edris. Their child. Believe me, I am not altogether to blame for what I have done. He could have sent me back to the prison ship from which he helped me to escape. I was innocent of the crime, I tell you. I was innocent; he helped me to escape because it was so. Then, afterward, he would not let me go away.”
David repeated hoarsely, “Afterward—?”
“He needed me,” Doctor von Berger whispered, the round drops of sweat on his face glistening in the light, “to keep him alive until now.”
“You are a stranger here,” David whispered in return. It seemed to him that he was speaking as in a trance, unconscious of what he said, not hearing what was spoken to him, only aware of the savage fury that was rising in his mind like a flood.
Without another word he went on across the terrace, unaware of the little round man left behind by the door, even forgetting that he had seen him at all. The silvery, half-transparent mist opened before him and closed aroun
d him; he did not feel its coolness on his face nor see its pallor; he stumbled on, not realizing that he could not see his way through the mist any more than he could see through the confusion and bewilderment in his mind. He had not even the faintest notion of where he went or of his intended destination; he was conscious only of the unaccountable convulsion of rage that was carrying him on.
But there was a sound that he heard, a turbulent roaring, as of a great waterfall, melodious and terrible all at the same time; David thought first that it was the turmoil in his own ears that he heard, and then realized, through the anger that veiled his mind, that it was the sound of the little fountain, not gently and sweetly tinkling now, but magnified by his own agitation into a clamoring tumult, frenzied, passionate, almost savage.
Then a dark shape rose up through the nebulous vapor, massive and ugly; David halted in his tracks and, as though through some half-waking dream, recognized the broad, ugly face of Zenobie, hideous and incongruous against the delicate pallor of the moon mist.
“I heard,” she said in a very low voice. “I am going now, to light the lantern for you on the wharf.”
“Wait!” David said. He caught cruelly at her arm, knew suddenly that if he asked the questions that had smouldered in his mind all these days, they would be answered. But now he did not need to ask. He released her, feeling his fingers slipping away from her firm, muscular flesh even as his mind slipped away from the thought of her.
“I dared not leave here,” she breathed. “He knew of my crime, of the man who was killed. You will not believe it, but I was a beautiful girl, once. He saved me, to be her maid, because it amused him, and then he needed me, afterward—”
“Afterward!” He heard himself repeating it again in a kind of terrible sigh. Doctor von Berger had used the word, and now Zenobie. Then he said very quietly, “But that was very long ago.”
He moved on into the mist, flinging even the memory of her away from him, not even hearing the words she repeated behind him, “… to light the lantern …” He never saw her again.
