The Balcony

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  After that we scattered, and began drifting off to bed.

  I think the least pleasant part of staying at Hieronomo House, and none of it was pleasant, must have been the necessity of retiring—parting from the others, closing a door behind one, and hurriedly getting into bed. Our evening good-byes were always long drawn out; at that particular hour we Hieronomos seemed to cling together, as though safety lay in numbers.

  Patience was the first to go that night. She forgot her photographs, but Aunt Lucy didn’t neglect to call her back. Lucy and Richard went off next, then Hoy. Glenn and I were the last to part. We lingered long in the foyer but inevitably the moment of separation came, and I climbed quickly up the stairs. I hastened down the long, forbidding corridor, and was turning into my room when Patience emerged from the room across the hall.

  “I heard you coming up,” she said.

  That was evident.

  “Look, Anne,” she said in a humble and embarrassed way, “there’s a couch in my room. Would—would you like to stay with me tonight?”

  I didn’t know whether I would or not. I was surprised that she had asked me. Because of her special build and special garments, Patience set a certain premium on privacy.

  She perceived my hesitation. She glanced down the shadowy hall. Her voice was urgent, a little strained. “The plain truth is, I—I get nervous nights. It sounds absurd, but you and I are the only ones who room alone. I suppose you haven’t thought of it.”

  I had thought of it more than once. In the end, for quite another reason, I adopted my great-aunt’s suggestion. I wanted to know Patience better. The decision cost me a certain amount in comfort. The cot allotted me was hard and bumpy, and was placed squarely in the draught of the directly adjacent window. It didn’t occur to Patience that she could share the double bed.

  She undressed behind a heavy screen with gasps and sighs, and rustlings and mysterious creakings. For Patience to remove her clothes and don a nightgown was something like the process of taking down a public building: there was so much structural material underneath.

  I had ample opportunity to survey the litter of my great-aunt’s personal possessions on the bureau—the chin-strap and the reducing creams, the diet list that Patience carried hopefully and invariably forgot to follow, the saccharine tablets that she sometimes remembered to drop in her coffee. My casual examination of the room was unproductive. I had about decided to ignore the light and try to sleep, when I saw something that brought me to alert attention.

  On the table beside the bed, in a careful heap, lay some of the photographs which Lucy had lavishly dispensed—the photographs of Patience herself. But it wasn’t that which caused my sharp, almost electric shock.

  Not all of the photographs had come to rest on the bedside table. Some of them had reached the near-by wastebasket. Before they had been tossed there, they had been raggedly torn across, ripped in a single violent movement, and then crumpled savagely.

  With no sense of prying or of guilt, I rose from the couch. I had to be sure. A moment later I was sure. Patience had destroyed those striking poses of John S. Hieronomo, her father. Lucy had presented her with six separate views, and the fragments of six photographs lay in the wastebasket.

  I stooped and looked again. At that point, Patience emerged from behind the screen. She wore over a lacy night robe a dressing gown patterned in crimson flying storks. Her face went the ugly crimson of the gown. My face went crimson, too. I straightened up. I thought the silence would never end.

  “Sometimes,” said Patience finally, and in an angry tone, “Lucy makes me tired.”

  It seemed a singularly inadequate remark. I had no desire, however, to continue the conversation. I only wanted to go to bed, to hide my own embarrassment in the grateful darkness; particularly did I want to stop staring at the fragments of those photographs.

  Patience said, “Lucy should know—does know—that my apartment is jammed with Father’s pictures. Sometimes I get tired of Father, too. Sick to death of him. Sometimes just thinking of him makes me want to scream.”

  The pitiful part of it was that her fury seemed absurd, as though her monstrous body had condemned her to emotions and behavior more controlled. And then, suddenly, Patience didn’t seem absurd. The scarlet faded from her face, and her sudden pallor emphasized the glaring hair, the harshness of the features concealed beneath the solid flesh. The change wasn’t reassuring, nor was it attractive. I was reminded once again of a fierce, predatory bird with an evil crest and small, glittering beadlike eyes. Once again the pronounced Hieronomo nose was like a cruel beak. Patience sat down upon the bed.

  I seized that as a hint, and turned toward the couch. “No, wait,” cried Patience. “I want you to hear it all. You’ve heard a lot in this house already about my father and about money. You’re probably too young to understand, but you’ve got to listen anyway. If we’re bitter, Richard, Hoy and I, and Lucy, too, for all her martyred sweetness, we’ve got reason for it. Good reason! We earned the money that Father threw away on a girl he’d known less than a year. We earned every penny.”

  “You earned it!”

  “We earned it,” Patience told me grimly, “with our lives. Father might have been a great, good man, and fascinating too—even in his home surrounded by his dependents. But it was his home, and we were supported by his bounty, and our activities were his, and our interests too. Father saw to that. He was a great, good man, and he spoiled all our lives. Amanda’s life, Richard’s and Lucy’s, mine and Hoy’s. Hoy was only twenty-two when Father died, but he was already good for nothing except to be a rich man’s heir. He had been interested in mechanics, but Father needed him as an errand boy. Hoy had no head for banking, but he was crazy about tinkering with engines. Father killed that interest because he didn’t want a mechanic in the family. Gavin—” abruptly her voice was gentler, “Gavin was the youngest, he’d had less time to be dominated and repressed, or maybe he was smarter than the rest of us. He managed to escape.” Suddenly I wondered if my father had escaped in the sense that Patience meant. I remembered how all his life Dad had measured and compared his own achievements with the achievements of the grandfather whom he had considered a greater, better man. He had walked always in the shadow of John S. Hieronomo.

  “You know Amanda’s story,” continued Patience, determined that I hear her out. “Amanda began her married life in this house under Father’s eye. Maybe Timothy Silver would have been a drunkard anyway, but he started drinking here and he never stopped. I always thought that boredom and lack of self-respect, and the fact that Amanda would listen to her father before she listened to her husband, drove Timothy to the bottle. Lucy tried to remove Richard when their son was born. She had more spirit then, and a burning faith that Richard would be a famous actor. Father didn’t approve of acting. Richard was well past thirty when he started on his career; he was a fumbling novice when he should have been halfway up the ladder. What Richard gave to Father was ten working years. I used to think,” Patience finished bitterly, “how curious it was that Father should spend his youth to free the slaves, and then employ his maturity to enslave his children.”

  She had not spoken of herself. I thought she wouldn’t, for she threw off her dressing gown, and started to clamber into bed. Her back was turned when she said:

  “As for me, maybe I wouldn’t have been a penny-pinching, old-maid schoolteacher if it hadn’t been for Father. My own fault, I suppose, when all is said and done. I was young and spineless, and Father didn’t approve of the only man I ever wanted to marry—the only man I ever met who didn’t consider a fat young girl a figure of fun. I know now, have known for years, that I paid a high price for the fortune I didn’t get.”

  With that the light plunged out.

  XVII

  EXHAUSTED BY THE DAY’S EVENTS, determined not to think about the so-different picture of John S. Hieronomo, about Patience and the family, determined not to think about Dan Ayres, not to ponder, to worry or to wonder, I went
instantly to sleep. Except for the draught from the window, I would have slept the whole night through. Long before I managed to struggle awake, I knew that I was freezing. Cramped and chilled, still half asleep, I groped hopelessly in space for an extra and non-existent blanket. Suddenly, I was wide awake.

  A light was shining in my eyes. Dazed, I sat up. The bedroom was entirely dark. I could hear my great-aunt’s heavy breathing. The luminous hands of the little traveling clock presented by her students glowed at ten past three. Where was the light?

  I had turned my back to the window, through which seeped the freezing air. Puzzled, knees hunched to my chest, I turned again. The light, a moving light, was on the ground, below, and far away. Again the distant light—it must have been somewhere in the winter garden—caught a certain angle, and a wavering yellow beam climbed upward and through the window.

  I thought at first that Glick must be on the grounds, or that one of his deputies was on patrol. I started to lie down again, to roll into a wretched little ball. I had no intention now of getting out of bed to seek that extra blanket. And then I thought of something. The policemen used flashlights at their work.

  The flickering, uncertain light below was very yellow. It swung to and fro. It was lantern light. And it was no longer in the winter garden. The light was very near the barn.

  I fumbled into a dressing gown and was out of bed and in the hall before I stopped to think. The inky blackness there gave me pause, I must confess. Stubbornly I forced myself ahead. I had to solve the mystery of the flickering lantern, find out who was so near the barn and why. Or so I argued, as I sought to hold that first false rush of courage.

  I failed to locate the upper switch. In darkness, I felt my way toward the stairs and started down. My teeth were chattering from chill and nerves; my resolution was going fast. The house was wrapped in slumber, completely still.

  The foyer below was black. With a gasp of relief, I found the electric switch. The bulb was small, however, and threw a meager light. The drawing room, illumined only faintly, had the empty look that comes at night when a household is abed. The dining room was still and ghostly. Beyond the dining room lay the dark regions of the kitchen, and beyond the darkness of the kitchen, stretched the darkness of the night. I knew then that the barn was much too far, that I could never make it there. The expedition had been folly from the first.

  I took a last look around, switched off the foyer light, and moved very hurriedly toward the stairs which would lead me back to bed. The library was to the left, and the door was closed. My heart leaped suddenly into my throat. I fancied that I saw a line of light against the floor, gone so swiftly I couldn’t be quite sure. Had someone else turned off a switch? Was someone else about? I didn’t care to learn.

  My feet were safely on the stairs. I took two quick steps, and then I froze. A door opened in the darkness, and a soft voice called:

  “Who’s there?”

  “Who’s there?” I quavered in return.

  Someone blundered through the utter blackness. I might have made a swift escape, but I was too terrified to move. I clung to the balustrade as though sudden death awaited me and the tiniest motion would hasten it. Again, and after what seemed a paralyzing length of time, the foyer light flashed on. At once, my panic disappeared. With intense relief, I recognized Eliot Frawley. With intense relief he gazed up at me. I don’t doubt I was shaking like an aspen, but Eliot was shaking, too. I pulled myself together.

  “You—you frightened me.”

  “You alarmed me too,” was his meek reply.

  He wore a tailored robe over well-cut pajamas, and it struck me that he looked remarkably healthy. The thick spectacles that usually screened his eyes were missing. His eyes were clear, intelligent and bright. He must have gathered that an explanation was in order.

  He said, “My—my head was unusually bad tonight. I couldn’t sleep. I—I decided to get a book.”

  The victims of acute sinusitis seldom care to read. Few people with pounding headaches choose to concentrate on printed lines of type. But Eliot had a book beneath his arms. I started slightly. Although the volume was held upside down, I quite easily identified the paper cover. Eliot was carrying off to bed John S. Hieronomo’s book, My Fight to Free the Slaves.

  I said, “That’s our only copy of my great-grandfather’s book. Miss Hieronomo treasures it.”

  Color rushed into his face. “I fully realize the rarity of the volume. I intended to return it in the morning.”

  I said nothing else, but he may have perceived the question in my eyes.

  “Chance made my choice, I’m afraid,” he volunteered. “I don’t care for novels, and I happened to see this volume lying on the table . . .”

  His casualness was slightly overdone. I wondered suddenly if Eliot had actually spent the early evening groaning in his bed, or whether it wasn’t possible that he had spent the evening somewhere in earshot of the library. We had discussed the book at length. Or had Eliot some other, deeper interest in my great-grandfather’s wordy memoirs? I looked at him sharply.

  He said carelessly, “By the way, Miss Hieronomo, how does it happen you’re about so late?” He was gazing thoughtfully at my dressing gown.

  I hesitated. But why should I refuse to answer, and arouse a servant’s curiosity?

  “I was awakened by a light moving on the grounds, near the barn. I thought I’d investigate and then—then I changed my mind.”

  “You probably saw the deputy,” said Eliot, disinterested. “The little chap that eats and drinks so much—the one named Bevins.”

  I was acquainted with the wispy Bevins and his disproportionate appetite, but I hadn’t realized he was on the place. To my surprise Eliot, who seemed to know more of Glick’s ways than did I, volunteered that Bevins was on guard every night from twelve o’clock until dawn.

  “Or he’s supposed to be,” said the servant.

  “This was lantern light,” I said slowly.

  Eliot smiled. “You saw Amos, then. He makes patrols of his own with his lantern. I’m afraid Amos has a low opinion of the Sheriff’s men. Bevins, in particular. Claims the deputies don’t hear important noises.”

  I was satisfied with the explanation. Eliot seemed loath to let me go; indeed he was determined that I step into the kitchen.

  “From the kitchen window, Miss Hieronomo, you can see Amos and his lantern.”

  Why I adopted Eliot’s suggestion I don’t know. Possibly I hoped to obtain some further clue to the little puzzle of the book held firmly beneath his arm. The kitchen was neat and clean and shining—cheerful even in that odd, still hour of the morning.

  Eliot drew me to a window. The lantern that had been circling about the barn was now moving toward the house. By the uneven, fleeting beams I could make out Amos, could see that he was running. He was breathing hard when he came into the kitchen.

  “Where’s that deputy?”

  Then he noticed me and paused, and ducked his grizzled head. Not until later was an odd thought to occur to me. Amos was surprised at my appearance in the kitchen, but evidently was not surprised to find the invalid up and about at three A.M.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” Eliot asked.

  “The trouble,” said Amos, “is that this place isn’t properly watched. I almost caught a fellow snooping near the barn just now. Would have, if I’d been more limber, and hadn’t tumbled over the currant bushes.”

  “A fellow?” Eliot echoed alertly. “You actually saw someone?”

  “Well, not exactly.” Amos hesitated. “But I know I heard noises outside the barn. Sounded like someone walking. I got my lantern lighted and went to see.”

  “And then what?”

  “I fell over the currant bushes. Otherwise I’d have had the fellow. I was right behind him.”

  Eliot looked skeptical. Amos appealed to me.

  “Maybe you’ll believe me, Miss Anne. I know I heard someone. I vow I did. Walking at first, and then running faster than these old
legs could manage.”

  I wasn’t brought up to accept the evidence of every Negro with an indulgent smile, or to consider every black man a primitive and superstitious child. And I had definite reasons for believing Amos.

  “Are you sure, Amos, it was a man?”

  He frowned.

  “Could it have been a woman?” I asked quietly. Amos made no reply. More insistently, I repeated, “Could it have been a woman?”

  In his yellow, bloodshot eyes I caught the merest flicker—the tag end of an emotion I was sharply anxious to classify. Was it alarm? Amos leaned over to set down his lantern, and straightened up.

  “This was a man, Miss Anne,” he said.

  Why then had my mention of a woman startled him? Or had I only fancied that? I might have pressed the Negro, even with Eliot standing by, except that I saw abruptly how old and worn and ill Amos looked.

  The change in him since Aunt Amanda’s death was almost shocking. Within the space of a few short days he had aged years. It seemed to me that he was taking the loss of his mistress harder than were her kin. At a time of life when he needed both rest and sleep, Amos had surrendered both to protect the rest of us, driven by some burning fury within himself. It wasn’t right, nor was it natural. I know now that Amos had his own personal terror and his own personal problem, and that in futile and sometimes in meaningless activity he found some kind of surcease. But I didn’t know it then.

  “You should try to get some sleep, Amos,” I said. “Leave the patrolling to those who are younger and more able. You do too much for us.”

  Amos’ color was like putty. “You—you’re kind, Miss Anne. I hope you don’t regret your kindness to one who is undeserving.”

  At that point, and dramatically, arrived the deputy whose duty it was to guard Hieronomo House from midnight until dawn. Bevins had heard some noises himself—the sound of our voices—and he rushed into the kitchen to investigate. He actually had his gun in hand, and was happily unaware of his appearance. A schoolboy could have guessed that Bevins had been abruptly roused from deep and dreamless slumber.