Foxfire

by Anya Seton

  “I’m not heartless,” said Tyson, feeling the tenuous impact of her thought. “But Slater was nothing but a drunken bum, dishonest, too, and worse because he had the makings of a brilliant doctor—and as for that half-breed whore he kept—excuse frank speaking, Mrs. Dartland—well, this new man, Doctor Jones, got rid of her in jig time. She’s left town, I hear, with some man or other.”

  So even Maria will not mourn, Amanda thought. Nor Viola, whom he loved and who will never know. Then for Hugh there must be pity, since there was nothing else. Pity, and remembrance sometimes; of the sympathy he had once had for Dart, and for her on the night he had worked in vain to save the baby.

  She sighed, and returned her attention to the two men. Tyson had started speaking of the mine, technical matters she did not understand, shoving graphs and reports across the desk to Dart. Take over from Mablett in the morning. Mablett would be leaving at once now that Dart was back and on the job.

  “He’s sorry about the whole business, I mean the way we treated you,” said Tyson ruefully, “but I daresay he won’t admit it.”

  “Good God, no!” Dart laughed. “I wouldn’t expect him to. I’ll keep the peace till he goes.”

  Dart turned and looked at Amanda. Their eyes met. Then they both rose. Dart shook Tyson’s hand again, and left him contentedly wheeling his chair over to a shelf where he kept his office collection of Indian sherds.

  They went down the narrow hall out onto the porch. The miners had all gone back to the boardinghouse for dinner, but Tom Rubrick was waiting for them, smoking his pipe by the water cooler. He rushed up, beaming. “So now ye move into Bosses’ Row, me lad!” he cried clapping Dart on the back. “Tessie’s that pleased about it all, ye wouldn’t believe.”

  “And I’ll be so glad to see her,” said Amanda smiling, then she checked herself and repeated, “Bosses’ Row?”

  Tom chuckled. “Why, ye’ll be moving into Bull’ead’s ’ouse, o’ course. Goes with the job. Didn’t ye think o’ that?”

  “No—” said Amanda, sitting down on a bench. “I haven’t had time to think of anything.” She had an instant vision of the Mabletts’ four-room cottage as she had seen it on the night of the disastrous party. The overstuffed furniture, the antimacassars and Nottingham lace curtains, the sulphur-yellow wallpaper dotted with lithographs and chromos and framed photos of the Mablett family. And she began to laugh. “We’ll give collations—Dart—” She choked. “We can have collations, too!”

  He sat down beside her on the bench, and he put his arm around her. Tom drew away tactfully to the side of the porch.

  “Andy. I know. I know how you feel about Lodestone. I’ve been waiting to talk to you. I don’t have to take this offer. I can find something else now my name’s clear. And from your point of view my promotion here isn’t so much help. Salary’s bigger, but not so much. And as for the Mablett house——”

  “Oh, darling, darling,” she said, shaking her head and looking at him with tender and still mirthful eyes. “The Mablett house is heaven. It has a bathroom. Don’t you know I can be happy anywhere now, if you’re happy?”

  Tom watched them from the corner of his eye. Something’s ’appened to them two, he thought, they’re pulling together at last. They’ll ’ave rough times again o’ course, like all married folks, but I believe they’ll stick it.

  Dart and Amanda drove down the mine road again towards Lodestone, and Dart turned left on the cut-off to the ghost town and parked the car near the dry creek bed, by the furthest of the half-demolished shanties. They walked up the dusty road past the opera house and the fallen sign, through the rubble of foundations and amongst tiny darting lizards.

  They turned silently up the trail that led to the great empty mansion on the mountainside. And Amanda thought of another trail which had led upward through the hush of the past and brooding things to a stone city on a mountainside—and in the poignancy and longing, in the beauty that came to her, almost she understood the single note which throbbed through both these feelings, and then it slipped away before she could grasp it.

  They mounted the broken steps to the huge front door with the silver shamrock knocker. Dart listened for the sound of the piano, as he had so often heard it. The crystalline notes of Mozart, and her voice rising clear and bell-like in “II Mio Tesoro”—“Take my beloved in your keeping, console her, drive away her fears—”

  How can I thank Calise? he thought. And it seemed to him that gratitude was an emotion he had never known, strangely ambient, compounded of love and pain.

  “The door is open,” Amanda cried. “Oh, Dart, the door’s open, what does that mean? It never has been.”

  They looked at each other in quick and fearful surmise. They went through the open door into the hall, calling to her softly. The door of her own suite was open, too. The two rooms were as they had always been, of a shining, ordered purity, and faintly perfumed with dried mountain flowers in the terra-cotta bowl.

  Amanda looked at the rose-gray froth of delicate flowers and thought of those she had seen here the first time with Calise. She had not understood then how beauty could grow amongst the “prickles and the violence” of the desert and Calise had smiled at her with compassion. I understand now, Amanda thought, I must tell her. But the rooms were empty.

  Then they saw a folded piece of white paper on the table. And written in a delicate European script it said, “For Dart and Amanda.” They carried the paper to the window and stood together reading.

  “Mes chers enfants —No, you will not find me, for I have gone into the mountains—from them I shall never return. I am very ill. My summons has come at last, and my release. You must not be sad for me, or think with sorrow that you would have liked to say Adieu, for my release came through you. It is I who am grateful. And I am happy.

  “I know something of the strange journey you two went on together. You went seeking for illusion, ‘les feux follets’ that beckon on but to destroy, and tragedy walked with you. I have held you both in my heart and prayed for you constantly, and I know my prayers were answered. You will come back.

  “I leave what material things I am possessed of to you. As long as one lives in the material world one must be practical, also, this I had too long forgotten. So my will is in order. It is in the brass chest beneath my bed with my jewels and a little money. The house, I think, you will not care to live in, it is too full of ghosts and long-spent passions. But sell the contents, and be happy, my children, whatever you do. As I am, now. Que Dieu vous bénisse. Calise Cunningham.”

  They raised their eyes from the letter, and stood silently side by side looking out the window to the mountains, studded with cactus and mesquite and paloverdes, and for Amanda at last these, too, had beauty. She would never again see the other terrible mountains to the north, girdling the lost valley, but the enchantment would endure. She looked down the canyon towards Lodestone. Yes, one must be practical, too. One lives in the material world—of people, and work and striving and accomplishment. And the only true enchantment is love.