by Zenith Brown
“Oh, well,” I said. “That’s Mrs. Jellyby. It’s all right.”
“Jeez, I hope it’s all right,” he said dubiously.
And that’s when I thought of Mrs. Jellyby again. Mrs. Jellyby is what is called in Maryland “a real character.” In fact she’s more than that. Who she is, what her name really is, where she came from, no one, unless it was Dan’s father, has ever known, or ever asked. She appeared out of the blue at Romney in 1918. Irene was doing war work in Washington, Mr. Winthrop was home on sick leave from Fortress Monroe, Dan and Rick were in bed with the flu, and even Mara, a year old, had it. The one old doctor the war had left in Port Tobacco was driving himself in an old buggy from place to place, his own eyes glassy, his own temperature a hundred and two. The morning he collapsed Mrs. Jellyby walked up to the front porch of Romney with a leather satchel in one hand, a stout oak stick in the other, a canvas rucksack on her tweed back and a pair of men’s shoes on her feet. She had come, she said, for seeds. She stayed, and nursed the three children and half a dozen darkies back to life; and when she wasn’t in the sick room she was gathering little bags of seeds in the garden and stowing them away, neatly labeled, in her rucksack.
No one ever knew exactly how it was that she came to stay on, year after year, in an old slave cabin under the big weeping willow you can see from the house at the head of a tiny inlet at the foot of the kitchen garden, beyond the up-river wing of the house. But stay she did, even after Mr. Winthrop died. Everybody had thought she’d leave then, but she hadn’t. Some people said Irene was afraid to put her out, but I doubt that. The darkies thought she was a witch, but a beneficent one, and they planted her little bags of seed with holy care. I have a bleeding heart against my garden wall in Georgetown that I grew from a bag she sent me.
I wondered, thinking about Mrs. Jellyby for the first time in many years as the young policeman returned to his car, what she would be making of all this. I glanced again down the range, where the little glass nodules on the grass were gone, and the arrow in Rick’s throat was gone, like the broken bow on the porch, and like Rick himself soon, and I turned back and went along the herring-bone walk past the library wing and through the high walls of arbor vitae into the herb garden. At the end of the long vista I could see Mrs. Jellyby’s tiny white cabin with its red chimney overgrown with ivy and trumpet vine, under the feathery streamers of the old willow, the water of the river glistening beyond it in the sun.
I thought then that it was amusing, rather, that I should be going that way, amusing and true to form, as all the troubles of Romney were sooner or later taken down that walk to the little house. Dan in his first year of French had taken to calling Mrs. Jellyby a sage-femme, I remembered suddenly, until he’d learned that that word didn’t mean quite what it said. I was just thinking that as I came to the white fence that enclosed Mrs. Jellyby’s half acre to keep the sheep and dogs out. I opened the gate and went along the narrow walk, bordered with old-fashioned spice pinks and tiny bright flowers whose names I didn’t know, flanked with columbine and bleeding heart and canterbury bells and foxglove.
I stopped as I heard a girl’s voice inside that it didn’t take an instant to recognize.
“She’s terrified, Mrs. Jellyby. If the police find out that Alan quarreled with Rick last night—”
Another familiar voice as harsh as a rusty lock interrupted:
“Don’t be a rattle, Cheryl. Rick quarreled with everybody on the place last night, at one time or other.”
“I know, but Alan’s the only one who . . . who’s been in jail.”
“Not the only one who ought to be.”
“And it was Rick who testified against him—”
“Oh, nonsense,” Mrs. Jellyby said.
And because that seemed to settle that, I decided not to go back but to go on in. So I rapped at the white-washed door and stepped into the room. Mrs. Jellyby was perched on a stool at the end of a mahogany dropleaf table completely covered with trays of dried and drying seeds. She looked up, her weather-beaten face that I suppose had never had a grain of powder or rouge on it bright and amazingly alive under a short thatch of crisp snow white hair.
“You’re too thin,” she said frankly. “All women today look emaciated. I’ll send you something. Put Grace’s name down, Cheryl.”
Cheryl opened a thick gray ledger on an old walnut bureau desk between the little windows and wrote my name down. Mrs. Jellyby pushed back her stool and got up. She was wearing an old blue polo shirt and an ancient gray tweed skirt that came just below her knees. Her thick legs were covered with gray wool stockings, and she had on men’s shoes—whether the same pair or not I didn’t know. She took her straw sombrero off the hook behind the door and put it on.
“I can’t be bothered today,” she said, and walked out. But at the door she stopped and looked back. “Try to remember that death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a man, Cheryl.”
Cheryl Winthrop nodded slowly. Just looking at those words they don’t seem to hold much sympathy or comfort; but hearing them, from that square hard woman whose life was given up to saving flowers at their death for a new awakening, there was, some way, and Cheryl felt it. I watched her go, thinking she seemed no older to me than she did when I ran into her tying short strands of red ribbon around the great blue heads of the morning glories on the paddock fence the first day I came to Romney, the year I was married. It didn’t seem to me at all that Mrs. Jellyby, who seemed old then, was eighteen years older now. Her step was still as firm and her eye as steady, and her manner as brusque as it had been rather terrifyingly so then, for I’d picked a morning glory I hadn’t known was being saved for seed.
9
Cheryl had changed from the blue linen tennis dress with the bare back. She looked almost like a cloistered nun now, in the simple black sheer frock with narrow white collar close about her firm slender throat. Her hair looked lighter, her skin a paler gold. As she turned to me her eyes under their long gold-flecked lashes were as blue as the great stalks of delphinium in Mrs. Jellyby’s little garden.
“I can’t find Mara,” she said. “I’m so afraid she’ll do something she’ll . . . regret.”
“She doesn’t think Alan Keane had anything to do with this?” I asked. “Or does she?”
Cheryl looked away.
“I don’t know how long anyone can go on, believing in someone,” she said quietly. “She’s held out so long, in this other business.”
“There’s not much doubt about that, is there?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . I wish I did!” she said. “I don’t think Mara would be so belligerent if . . . if they’d let him alone. They did have something on him, and they’ve never got the bonds back. He did get a long prison term, and Major Tillyard and Dr. Birdsong got him paroled. Irene was furious. Oh, it’s all so stupid. You see, in the summers he and Mara had had a sort of idyllic romance, while he helped Mr. Keane on the farm.”
She came back from the window and sat down near me.
“You see, at first it never occurred to Irene that they were both old enough to fall in love, not until Alan got his job in the bank. It was Major Tillyard who said one night at dinner—more to tease Mara than anything else—that after all this was the great universal romance . . . the farm boy working up and marrying the Lord of the Manor’s daughter. Irene nearly hit the ceiling, and just after that came the business of the bonds. Rick was working in the bank too, and she made him quit, and Alan went to prison for eighteen months.”
She shook her bright head slowly.
“Major Tillyard was grand about it. I think he . . .”
She came to a full stop, and then went on, I thought almost defiantly.
“I think he thinks Alan was . . . innocent. But he doesn’t dare say so. Irene threatened to take her account to Washington, and they couldn’t afford to lose it.”
I supposed they couldn’t, actually, but it seemed strange that Irene could dictate to a bank—though not as strange as i
t would have seemed a couple of days before.
“And Alan,” I said. “What has all this done to him?”
“What do you suppose?” Cheryl said. She spoke with a sudden passionate bitterness, without moving her eyes from the charred logs in the fireplace. “How can anyone go on living even, if everything they do is misinterpreted and if they’re treated as if they were—”
She stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry! I guess I’m being what Irene calls ‘dramatic.’ I only mean I know exactly how he feels, and I’ve never been in prison. If I’d had the courage Alan’s got, I’d have run out the first week I was here. But I was sorry for Mara . . . and then it was too late.”
“But you’re running out now?”
“Not exactly. Irene doesn’t want me here, and I’m . . . I’m glad to go.”
She got up and stood looking out the door toward the great house, and beyond it at the glistening waters of the Potomac.
“When I came here it was all covered with snow. I’d never seen any place so lovely,” she said slowly, after a little while. “I kept thinking how it would look in the spring, when the lilacs and roses would be out, and then the magnolias and the crepe myrtle and jasmine. But . . . I guess things don’t work out. I knew the minute Irene looked at me she’d never like me. But I thought she’d see that I . . . well, that I . . .”
She stopped. After a minute I said, “Cheryl—why did you marry Rick?”
She rested her head against the white-washed door frame, gazing out with unseeing eyes.
“I . . . thought I was in love with him. He . . . reminded me of someone I knew I’d never see again, I guess. I . . .”
She hesitated. Then she said quietly, “I just . . . mistook the shadow for the substance.”
“And you didn’t know they were brothers.”
She didn’t answer.
“And when you thought of what the place would be like, you forgot the oleanders and the wheat fields at Vezeley . . .”
She didn’t look at me, but a faint smile touched the corners of her mouth.
“Then he . . . remembered it, too?” she whispered, more to herself than to me.
After a moment she raised her head. Her eyes were really very like faded hyacinths, blue and gray and soft.
“It’s crazy, isn’t it,” she said.
I didn’t have time to answer, because just then a colored girl came running down Mrs. Jellyby’s walk.
“Dat man say you all supposed to be in the libin’ room directly, an’ Miss Mara and Miz’ Jelly too.”
Cheryl looked at me in alarm. “What’ll we do?” she said quickly.
I shook my head.
“We’d better go.”
She nodded slowly, her lips trembling and her face the color of old ivory.
I took her arm. We went back together, up the garden path and into the house, every step, I suppose, harder and rockier for the girl whose sin had been mankind’s commonest sin . . . taking the shadow for the substance.
In the hall we heard the murmur of voices, and Irene’s voice above them. “I’m afraid my daughter-in-law has left the place . . .”
Cheryl’s eyes widened. I think she sensed as clearly as I did the danger that lurked in that pleasant, almost anxious tone, and in Mr. Purcell’s “Tch, tch, that is unfortunate.”
I looked at her. She nodded, and we walked in together.
Seated on a sofa at one side of the room was the grotesque figure of Mrs. Jellyby, in her men’s shoes and straw sombrero. Beside her sat Mara Winthrop, like a wild orchid beside an oak. She looked at Cheryl. I don’t know what the message was that passed between them, but Cheryl went over and sat beside her, and I went down by the window where Dan was standing. And I stopped dead as I saw him, staring at him open-mouthed. He looked as if he had been through the nine circles of hell. It was utterly inconceivable that such a change could have come over any human countenance in so brief a time, that this was the man I’d seen grinning and tousle-headed in his bathing suit, a bath towel round his shoulders, whistling debonairly on his way to the river, only that very morning. He couldn’t possibly have cared so much for Rick, I thought desperately—not possibly!
His mother was there in the room, and Mr. Purcell, and Major Tillyard, and Natalie Lane, sitting quietly behind a bridge table in the corner. Not far from her, looking too awfully like an ad for What the Smart Young Man Will Wear in the Country, was a man I’d seen at a night club once, and only once, and for some reason had never forgotten. I even remembered his name, which is something I seldom do. It was Fellowes Dunthorne. I remembered it largely because I remembered thinking, when the two very decorative if rather intoxicated young women he and Rick Winthrop were with went out to the powder room and Rick brought him over to our table, that he had been born neither with that name nor his accent, which was as English as he obviously now thought his clothes were. But what Mr. Fellowes Dunthorne was doing here, in his yellow vest and new plus fours, except looking hot and uncomfortable, and very much as if he’d rather be digging a nice deep ditch somewhere above the Mason-Dixon Line than sitting in that handsome straight-backed wing chair in Romney’s living room, I hadn’t a notion. Mr. Dunthorne was large and fortyish, with a not too high forehead and a rather heavy jaw, and his hair was black and sleek and carefully tended. Neither he nor Natalie Lane, for some reason I couldn’t quite analyze, appeared to belong, exactly. Nor did Mr. Sam Dorsey, the sheriff, though he was sitting there as firmly entrenched behind a maple butterfly table as if he had produced it from his own chrysalis.
As Dan’s eyes met mine I saw they were sick with pain, and I looked away again and sat down quickly to keep my knees from shaking.
Mr. Purcell cleared his throat.
“This isn’t the way we ordinarily do things,” he said slowly. “But under the circumstances—and I want to say Sam here is with me one hundred per cent—and to avoid as much trouble and anxiety for the family as we can, I want to say I appreciate the frankness and honesty of certain people here.”
I couldn’t make that sentence make any possible logical sense, but I realized that it made, in some way, another extraordinary kind of sense, and that everybody else in the room was breathless before it.
Mr. Purcell bent down and picked something up from the hearth. I didn’t recognize it at once, and then I saw that it was the bow Dan had tripped over, that Irene had found broken on the porch that morning, before we came on Rick’s body with the arrow through its throat.
I looked for some reason at Dr. Birdsong. He was looking, oddly enough, not at the broken bow but at Irene.
“I won’t go into it except to say that we all realize a very terrible accident happened,” the State’s Attorney went on. “—One of those queer cases where the truth is stranger than fiction. But there’s no doubt it is the truth. And nobody here is going to be fool enough to think for a minute that when Dan picked up this bow and fitted an arrow to it, and shot it out in the dark at that target, he had any idea that his brother was at the end of the range.”
The silence in that room was so profound that his voice, perfectly normal, sounded in my ears at least like a clap of thunder.
“Dr. Birdsong has pointed out that nobody could possibly shoot a single arrow, in the dark, and hit such a mark. And that goes along with what is undoubtedly the fact of the case.—Dan says that last night, as he came past the target he pulled out an arrow that was stuck in it, to put it in the quiver on the porch. But instead he picked up the bow he’d tripped over earlier in the evening, just on the merest impulse, to try a shot with it. It was dark, he could only guess where the target was. The bow was a woman’s bow and too light for his draw. As he let fly it snapped in his hands, cutting his cheek, as you see.”
I sat perfectly motionless in my chair, not looking at Dan, not daring to look at him. If it was true, and he had killed his brother . . .
“We all know the deep bond that existed between Dan and his brother,” the State’s Attorney went on. “We can all symp
athize with Dan’s horror when he got up this morning, and found that this awful thing had happened.
I look at Cheryl. Her face was as white as death.
“It was the kind of thing that wouldn’t happen once in a million times. I am confident that the coroner’s jury will bring in a verdict of accidental death, and that time will heal the tragedy for both Dan and his mother.”
I couldn’t help looking over at Dan. There was no doubt of the truth of part of what Mr. Purcell had been saying. Dan’s face was drawn with agony . . . the deeper, I knew now, because he knew in his heart how much he would have given to have the girl who was his brother’s wife. But what would the Freudians, for instance, who won’t allow accident to account for a broken tea cup, or the most trivial slip of the tongue, say about such an accident? What would Dan himself, in his own heart, be saying?
I looked back at Cheryl Winthrop. Mara was gripping her hand with all her might to keep her from fainting dead away. Mrs. Jellyby near them was sitting bolt upright, looking fixedly at Irene. Natalie Lane was laying out cards for a game of patience. Her cigarette, lying on the edge of a silver tray, had burned its full length of undisturbed ash; the smoking tip had fallen off the tray and lay, quietly burning a hole in the top of the table. Major Tillyard had moved over beside Irene, and had taken her hand. There was a subtle air of relief in the room that was suddenly almost unbearable to me.
I got up abruptly and went over to Dan, and as I did I saw Dr. Birdsong’s crazy dog lift his head from the floor and grin through his crimped bangs.
There was a sudden rasping sound in the room as Mrs. Jellyby cleared her throat, and a sudden suspension of everyone’s activity.
“Now is the time for you to say something, Tom Birdsong,” she said.
Dr. Birdsong nodded.
“Yes, I think it is,” he said. He leaned forward, his great hands resting lightly on the back of the chair in front of him.
