by Craig Rice
Then she spoke, saying only, “It is quiet here, under the trees,” and his fear, his uneasy embarrassment, his feeling that unknown things hid in the shadows slipped away from him, and he heard himself answering, “Yes, it is quiet, wonderfully quiet,” and it seemed to him that he embraced the darkness like a long-treasured friend, and all at once he loved the little wood and the trees, and felt that they loved and sheltered him in return.
“Tell me,” he whispered, “what do you dream, Laurel? Tell me, do you see, in dreams?”
Her hand stiffened faintly in his—or was it his imagination?
“No, David, I do not see. But I know.”
He caught both her hands then, there in the impenetrable shadows of the wood, and said “Laurel, you must never leave the Island. You must never go away from me again, because without you to guide me, I cannot see at all.”
Then he felt her hands creep up to his face, cupping it between them. It seemed to him that he felt her warm breath on his cheek.
She said nothing, and he made no answer.
The woods began to break away from them, and the pale light that appeared through the trees ahead was like a shadow appearing on a lawn before sundown. It was, he thought, the moon, but it might have been the mist, and then, as the darkness fell away behind them and only a thin veil of leaves hung between them and the lawn, he realized that it was the house itself that cast the light. Now the path broke out of the woods and carried them to the edge of the wide lawn, like two stranded wayfarers at the edge of the desert.
Suddenly it was not Laurel Stone’s hand he felt on his arm.
This was more than the feeling of being in a familiar place, repeating an action done not once, but innumerable times before. This was a whirling back of time, like the hands of a clock spun backward, because now David knew the place in which he had been, he knew what it was that he remembered.
They had been following a path through a little woods, rich with the fragrance of moist leaves, of grass and flowers trampled underfoot. Now they had passed beyond the last tree and there, across the smooth, wide lawn, was the old house, Telefair.
In all his lonely long life, he had never loved anyone save old Philip Telefair. There had been no one else to whom he could cling; while he had never seen Philip Telefair, and did not know whether he was tall or short, or pale or florid, whether his voice was rich and beautiful or cracked and hoarse, whether he was kind or cold, he had loved him, because there had been no one else. And he had loved him in the moment when he first stepped onto the Island. And he loved him now.
A desperate cry burst from his throat. It did not matter to him that Laurel heard it, since he did not hear it himself.
… there … across the smooth, wide lawn …
The house, Telefair.
They had walked across this lawn, arm in arm, David’s young heart fairly bursting with happiness, with love, with affection for old Philip Telefair who had been kind to him. They had paused here, just beyond the woods.
It seemed to David, that this could not be a real house, standing there splendidly, flawless, moon-colored; moving toward it across the lawn that was like an island of moonlight in a sea of shadows he had a fantastic notion that Telefair could not have been made from wood and brick and mortar, but that the whole was a marvelous illusion, a creation of the moon and the darkness, and that it would dissolve and disperse as he approached it, an ethereal thing …
“There is mist; not much, but a little,” Laurel Stone said.
David felt its coolness on his face before he opened his eyes and saw that the broad, smooth lawn had been engulfed in it, swallowed up and hidden. The great house itself was not touched by it, nor were the dark trees on either side, nor the sky overhead. Only the lawn was covered by it, the pale, low-lying fog that settled on—no, David whispered, the fog that floated on the surface of the earth.
“Yes,” he said to her, “there is a light mist.”
But that other night, when he had walked up from the landing arm in arm with Philip Telefair, there had been no mist—only a lake of moonlight and shadows.
They had paused, halfway across the lawn, and he had said some inexcusably stupid thing about the old house (he could not remember, now, what it had been).
“Yes,” old Philip Telefair said, “it is very old.”
Old, and about to fall of its own age, perfect and decaying, magnificent and with rotting timbers, beautiful and yet somehow evil.
“The house is just ahead of us now,” Laurel said. It was not a question.
David said, “Yes,” and paused, feeling her pause beside him, yet still not conscious of her presence.
“I loved him,” he said aloud, in an anguished cry; “I loved him all my life!”
Since he had been a very little child, all that he had known and remembered, the rustling silk and the musty smell of a school parlor, the fine schools that he’d hated, the tutors he’d disliked, the trips abroad that had bored him, all had come from the beneficence of Philip Telefair who had been so kind to the child, who had rescued him from the misery and poverty and obscurity of a New England parsonage, who had brought him at last to the Island, who had made him heir to Telefair. There was no one on earth or in Heaven to whom he owed so much, or who had wronged him so deeply, or whom he wished so much to see alive again.
As long as he lived on the Island, and he knew now that it would be all his life, he would never be able to leave old Philip Telefair behind him, he would live the rest of his life—and it might be long, terribly, unendurably long—in a tortured remorse, in a hideous remembering of his ingratitude and his crime.
There would never be an escape, now.
Standing there on the lawn, David realized suddenly that though they had left the woods behind them, they had not left the shadow. It appeared to be moving with them, following and surrounding them, slowly engulfing the lawn. Just before them was the moon mist, white and luminous, and beyond it the great pale shining house, but behind them and around them was the vast, black, and oncoming shadow that accompanied them.
They walked on slowly toward the house and the shadow continued to move with them. Then David paused again, feeling Laurel’s hand tighten ever so little on his arm, and stood there, waiting and watching.
Inch by inch the moonlight receded while the wide lawn turned dark before David’s eyes. It seemed almost as though the woods themselves were reaching out for the beautiful old house to bury it forever in their own gloom. And as he watched, the darkness crept up to the steps of the portico, up the gleaming pillars, and beyond them, at last over the roof itself, shadowing everything that it touched.
He turned around abruptly and saw that the moon had set behind the trees of the little woods, casting the shade that had eaten up the lawn and the house. The mist around them was gray now, almost smoky.
“The twilight of the moon,” David whispered.
… this was a land of perpetual twilight; let the sun blaze as it would, all the Island was bathed in a purple shadow, too intense to be penetrated by any sun, yet not a shadow that could be seen by the eye alone.…
“It is strange,” Laurel said quietly, “how the air always seems to grow colder after the moon has set, and yet there is no warmth in the moonlight.”
David turned to her. “How did you know that the moon had set?”
“Because,” she said, almost lightly, “the air seemed to have grown colder. Shall we go on up to the house?”
They walked on across the lawn in silence.
On the broad portico they paused, waiting, and David looked out over the gray mist and the shadows. He could not even guess at the hour, save that he knew it must be long past midnight. There would only be a little gap of darkness, now, between the moonset and the dawn. And at dawn the mist would come in from the inlet and the bay, burying, hiding everything until the sun rose, when it would begin to disperse and disappear, while the Island began slowly to emerge from it, moist and glistening and brilliant with co
lor, first the tops of the trees, then the hedges, then the fountain and the rose beds, as though it were rising from the bottom of the sea.
Across the lawn a tiny point of light showed, growing larger and bright as the minister, Arthur Stone, came up to the house, carrying the lantern that had been in his boat. As he came nearer, it illumined his calm, pleasant face, and his halo of white hair, as the candles had illumined it in the old underground chapel. Watching it, David felt a sudden comfort, a kind of security, as though the door to a place in which to rest had been opened up before him, a feeling that beside the Reverend Arthur Stone there could be no more terrors, no more darkness.
Then, as the old man drew nearer, David realized that, though his lined face was serene and calm, there was a shadow in his eyes. He remembered that first meeting with the Reverend Arthur Stone, the walk through the dusky gardens, the sense of relief as he came within the lighted walls of the old parsonage, the quietude of the minister’s study, and then the breath of time in which he had looked beyond the smiling face of the Reverend Arthur Stone.
“… his sin, whatever it was … was so grave and could never be entirely wiped away.…”
It was so despairing, so hopeless a look that David felt himself crying out, “Whatever you have done, whatever part you played in the crime, it has been forgotten by now; it has been paid for and forgotten!” He found himself wondering why the Reverend Arthur Stone did not answer, before he realized that he had not spoken aloud.
The old minister paused on the first of the three steps up to the portico, holding the lantern high, and said, smiling and yet fearful, “Yes, my children?”
He had lived so good, so simple a life, David felt, that he knew of evil only as a word in the prayer book he held in his hands at every service; it had touched him as a shadow passing might touch, and blight, a flower; he suffered from it but he knew nothing of what it was.
“You cannot know,” he heard himself saying, and it seemed to him that his voice was harsh, “you cannot even guess what it is; you are not a Telefair, you do not belong on the Island.”
“But I am a Telefair,” old Arthur Stone said, setting the lantern down on the step. Its rising light showed his face to be very pale, and yet very calm. “Philip Telefair and I had the same mother, though my father was only a poor minister who died young. Their marriage was never recorded by the family, since it was so brief a time. And Laurel is twice a Telefair, since her mother was Edmund Telefair’s aunt. You see, my dear David, we are all Telefairs here now.”
He paused for so small a space of time that it could not have been caught between the ticks of a clock, yet in that space David lived through Arthur Stone’s life, another grandson of that fabulous Edris Telefair who had died in Paris at the age of a hundred and one, the cast-off son who’d been brought up by the family of his father, only a poor minister who died young; who’d married the sister of Edmund’s father—she must have been a brown-haired, laughing girl—and who, for all his life as the Reverend Arthur Stone, for all his life-long separation from the Island, was still a Telefair, and was irrevocably marked by a Telefair’s crime.
Yet what could he know of crime, the kindly, elderly minister, with the benign, smiling face? He started to say, and roughly, “You should not be here,” when he realized that the Reverend Arthur Stone had only paused for a breath, and was still speaking.
“He was my brother,” said the Reverend Arthur Stone quietly.
He was my brother. But how did Arthur Stone know of his death, his murder? David reached out a hand to rest on a cool, smooth pillar of the portico. It was as though he grasped, desperately, at all Telefair. Before him the broad lawn stretched away in a vast, gray shadow. He felt Laurel’s hand, light on his arm.
“How did you know?” he asked, and waited a fraction of a second for an answer before he realized that he had not been heard, and that the Reverend Arthur Stone had spoken in the same instant.
“How did you kill him?” asked the Reverend Arthur Stone.
“With this little knife,” David whispered, as though he were repeating a speech taught him and rehearsed long before. Then suddenly he looked at his hands and it seemed to him that he was clutching it still, that it must have been in his hands all this time, not a jeweled ornament he had caught up from the desk, but a little knife that had been laid there to wait for him.
His hands were empty.
“How did you know?” he repeated, and Laurel answered softly, “Because you sent for us.”
“It was what he meant you to do,” Laurel Stone said, and again David’s mind spun backward as though someone had spun the hands of a clock; there had been the wind up from the inlet, shaking the trees, in a great, moaning sigh; there had been the tiny waves of the inlet crashing ineffectually on the stone of the shore; and there had been Edmund saying, hopelessly, despairingly, “It was what—”
“He meant it to be his revenge,” said the Reverend Arthur Stone, “his own death.”
Suddenly the words rose to David’s throat in a tumultuous flood, all the questions that had been pent up for so long, all the terror, and all the longing. “Why? What have I done to him? Why has he hated me so, all my life? The dogs chained by the landing, the one boat, the inlet, and never anyone allowed to go away. The mist, and the fountain, and did I ever truly steal into Edris’ room at night to watch her while she slept, or was it all a dream, and is Telefair all a dream?” He felt the breath catch in his throat, and managed, somehow, to say, “Often, in the night, it seemed to me that I heard a woman weeping.…”
Laurel’s fingers were cold and tight on his arm, and she said, “Shall we go into the house?” as she had once said, “This to our left is the little parlor, is it not?”
It was she who led him into the house, the Reverend Arthur Stone a step behind.
David had entered the house once before with a slender hand resting light on his arm; he’d been conscious of a large, very high room, brilliant with lamps, and of the long, shadowy stair that seemed to rise from nowhere and float on the air, without support.
He had turned, then, for his first look at Philip Telefair—old Philip Telefair who had been so kind to him.
… Philip Telefair seemed incredibly old, older than any man had ever lived to be. His narrow, handsome face …
It seemed to David that he heard a strange, half-strangled sound from the Reverend Arthur Stone, as though a word had been throttled in his throat.
Laurel Stone’s blind face stiffened.
But David was not aware that he saw Laurel’s white face, or that he saw the dark figure of Edmund Telefair appearing at the far end of the hall; he did not see the carving of the balustrade, or the beautiful, French-papered walls, or the place below the stair where the shadows gathered into a little pool. He saw only old Philip Telefair descending the stairs, slowly, gracefully, one measured step at a time.
… was smooth and unwrinkled, but the skin, waxy and colorless, seemed brittle, ready to crumble with age, like some fine and well-preserved, but still perishable leather. The hair that was thinning on his beautifully shaped skull was pearlish white, fairly blue, making his deep-set eyes even darker and more brilliant by contrast. He was extremely tall, straight as a pole, and almost as slender. His hands were pale, long, delicate, and incredibly graceful; on one finger was a great, yellow sapphire. It seemed to David that he should have had ruffles at his wrists.
Even then, it was strange to David that he felt no surprise at the sight of the man he’d thought he had killed, descending the great stairs, and smiling. Yet there was not the faintest shadow of surprise. It seemed to him suddenly that this was how it was intended to be.
This is the beginning, he thought; this is not the end. I have dreamed all the rest, in the boat crossing the inlet. I have never been here before and old Philip Telefair is coming down the stairs to greet me. I arrived at Telefair Landing and had no way to cross the inlet, and the Reverend Arthur Stone and his daughter kindly offered to bring me to
the Island and escort me to the house. I have never been at Telefair before; the rest was a dream.
But he knew that it was not a dream.
And he knew that old Philip Telefair was alive, not lying stabbed to death on the damp grass of the old grove, but standing before them, smiling.
“This is indeed a delightful surprise,” said old Philip Telefair in his charming, beautiful voice.
No one spoke. Philip Telefair looked from one face to another, smiling pleasantly at them all, as though this were the most ordinary of visits from people on the mainland. His eyes met David’s at last, and in their dark depths David saw unquenchable hatred, and a lost, hopeless despair.
“You have all managed to defeat me, at the end,” said old Philip Telefair.
Edmund said from the shadows of the other doorway, “It was you who defeated yourself, when you caused him to live in a dream. How could it be otherwise, but that he would kill you in the dream?”
“But it was not all a dream!” David cried out suddenly.
“No,” old Philip Telefair said, looking at him with terrible eyes, “it was not all a dream.” A new mood seemed to lighten his face; he lifted his shoulders ever so little, smiled at them and said, “Which was the dream, and which was not? No one ever knows and no one will ever know, which is the truly real.”
He turned then, and remounted the stairs, slowly, majestically, disappearing as he passed the turn of the landing.
They stood motionless, silent, watching the place where he had been, as though knowing that in another moment he would reappear. In the interval David was acutely aware of sounds, of Laurel’s soft, and perfectly rhythmic breathing, close to his ear, of a sound that at first he thought was the beating of his own heart and then identified as the ticking of a clock, and of the softest sound of them all, a tiny, gentle, almost inaudible tinkling sound, the whispering song of the little fountain, heard through the door that Edmund still held open.
