She was, I suppose, very English, but more fragile than the English. She had that sort of ceramic delicacy and grace, like certain very lovely kinds of china. She was rather tall—quite tall, in fact, and from certain angles may have appeared a trifle sharp. But I had never thought so. And above all she had the flowing movement, the infinite, effortless grace of a fairy tale. She had the pale hair, so pale, so gold, so fine that you never saw a separate strand of it. It was the hair of a princess in a remote and bitter tower. It was the hair an old nurse would have brushed, hour after hour by candlelight, in a vast dim room, holding it softly in tired old hands, while the princess sat before a polished silver mirror, half asleep, and glanced into the burnished metal occasionally, but not to see herself. She had dreams for that mirror. That was the sort of hair Millicent Crandall had. I touched it only once and then it was too late.
She had lovely arms too, and they seemed to know it, without, as it were, her knowing it. So that they always seemed poised in just the right way, in the most languid and gracious curves, along a mantelpiece, with the wrist trailing, or the edge of a rather severe sleeve falling away so straightly that the curve it let you glimpse gained strength and lost no loveliness. And at tea, her hands would make gracious, unheeded, beautiful motions over the silver. That would be in London, particularly in the long, gray upstairs drawing room they had there. It would be half raining, and the light would be the color of rain, and the paintings on the wall, whatever color they had in them, would be gray. Even if they were van Goghs they would be gray. But her hair would not be gray.
Today, however, I just looked at her and waggled the cherry-wood stick and said, “No use asking you to walk over to the lake and let me row you about, I suppose?”
She half smiled. Her half smile was negative.
“Where’s Edward? Golfing?”
The same half smile, but derision in it now.
“Something about rabbits today, with a gamekeeper he met in the village pub. It would be a gamekeeper. It seems a lot of them get around a sort of clearing in a spinney, a warren, and the ferrets are sent down into the rabbits’ holes, and so the rabbits have to come up.”
“I know,” I said. “Then they drink the blood.”
“That should have been my line, if you ever left me one. Run along now, and don’t be too late back for tea.”
“It must be fun,” I said, “just waiting for tea. In a warm spot, in a nice garden, with the bees droning around you not too close, and the nectarines perfuming the air. Waiting for tea—as if it were a revolution.”
She just looked at me with her pale blue English eyes. Not tired eyes, but eyes that had looked at the same things too long.
“Revolution? What in the world does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said frankly. “It just sounded like a good gag line. So long.”
To the English, Americans are always a trifle stupid.
I walked over to the lake too fast. It wasn’t much of a lake, as American lakes go, but it had a lot of tiny islands on it, and these made vistas and gave a false impression of length, and the water birds swooped and clattered or just sat on reeds growing out of the water and looked supercilious. In places the old backwoods strolled down very close to the gray water. In these places there were no water birds. Somebody’s cracked but not somehow leaky old tub was tied to a log by a short rope, stiff with age and paint. I used to row that among the little islands. Nothing lived on them, but there were things growing, and now and again some old gaffer would stop hoeing and shade his eyes and stare at me. I would call out a polite semi-English greeting. He would not answer. He was too old, too deaf and had other uses for his energy.
I got more tired than usual that day. The old boat seemed as cumbersome as a water-logged barn in a Mississippi flood. The always too short oars were shorter than ever. So I loafed going back, and there were shafts of yellow light through the beeches, distantly, in another world. It got cold on the water.
I dragged the boat up high enough to tie the painter to the log and straightened, sucking a finger the knot hadn’t been kind to.
I hadn’t heard a sound of her or of her big black horse or even of the clinking rings at the end of the bit. Last year’s leaves must have been very soft around there, or she had a magic with horses.
But when I straightened and turned she was not more than nine feet away.
She wore a black riding habit, a white hunting stock at her throat, and the horse looked wicked as she sat astride of him. A stallion. She smiled, a black-eyed woman, young, but not a girl. I had never seen her before. She was terribly handsome.
“Like rowing?” she inquired in that offhand English way that is utterly beyond mere ease. Her voice was the voice of a thrush, an American thrush.
The black stallion looked at me red-eyed and quietly pawed a leaf or two, then stood like a rock, quietly swinging one ear.
“Hate it,” I said. “All hard work and blisters. Then three miles home for tea.”
“Then why do you do it? I never do anything I don’t like.” She touched the stallion’s neck with a gauntleted glove as black as his coat.
I shrugged. “I must like it in a way. Exercise. Takes the nerves out of you. Beats up an appetite. I can’t think of any clever reasons.”
“You should,” she said. “Being an American.”
“Am I an American?”
“Of course. I watched you rowing. So fierce. I knew even then. And of course, your accent.”
My eyes must have been a little avid on her face, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“Staying with some people called Crandall, at Buddenham, aren’t you, Mr. American? Gossip does get around so in these country places. I’m Lady Lakenham, from Lakeview.”
Something must have stiffened in my face. As if I had said out loud: Oh, you’re that woman!
She noticed it, I dare say. She would notice most things. Perhaps all things. But not even a very small new shadow was born in her deep black, depthless eyes.
“That lovely Tudor place—I’ve seen it already—from a distance.”
“See it closer and get a shock,” she said. “Try my tea. The name, if you please?”
“Paringdon. John Paringdon.”
“John’s a nice sturdy name,” she said. “A trifle on the dull side. I’ll have to put up with it, during the brief moments of our acquaintance. Take hold of Romeo’s stirrup leather, John—above the iron and lightly.”
The stallion fretted a little when I touched the leather, but she cooed at him and he began to walk homeward, up a rise, slowly, his ears very alert. Even when some bird suddenly whirred across the glade, low under the trees, only his ears jumped.
Nice manners,” I said.
She arched her black eyebrows.
“Romeo? That depends. We meet all sorts of people, don’t we, Romeo? And our manners vary.”
She swung her short whip lightly.
“But that wouldn’t concern you, would it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It might.”
She laughed. I found out later that she very seldom laughed.
My hand on the stirrup leather was inches above her foot. I wanted to touch her foot. I didn’t know why; I thought she wanted me to touch her foot. I didn’t know the why of that either.
“Oh, you have nice manners too,” she said. “I can see that.”
I said, “I’m still not sure. They are swift like the swallow, and slow like the ox, but always in the wrong place.”
The whip flicked around idly, but not at me, nor at the black stallion who obviously didn’t expect it to flick at him.
“I’m afraid you’re flirting with me,” she said.
“I’m afraid I am.”
It was the stallion’s fault. He stopped too suddenly. My hand slipped to her ankle. I kept it there.
I hadn’t seen her move either, hadn’t any idea how she had stopped the horse. He stood now like a casting in bronze.
She looked down very slowly at my
hand on her ankle.
“Intentional?” she inquired.
“Very,” I said.
“You have at least courage,” she said. Her voice was distant, like a wood call. That kind of distance. I shook like a leaf.
She leaned down very very slowly until her head was almost as low as mine. The stallion didn’t seem to move a muscle of his great body.
“I could do three things,” she said. “Guess them.”
“Easy. Ride on, use the whip on me, or just laugh.”
“I was wrong,” she said, in a suddenly taut voice. “Four things.”
“Give me your lips,” I said.
2
The place appeared suddenly, down the slope from a wide, grassy circle, which was supposed to be what remained of a Roman camp. Down the slope was Lakeview, which, characteristically, had no view of the lake.
It lay in an utterness of neglect you don’t see in England, in a jungle of tangled vines, a wilderness of long, weed-grown lawns. Even the sunken garden had become a pit of shame. Grass grew almost knee high on the Elizabethan bowling lawn at the side. The house itself was a lovely time-darkened red brick, in the traditional Elizabethan form, with outward jutting, heavily leaded windows. Fat spiders slept behind them like bishops, and their webs mottled the glass, and they gazed out somnolently where once the hawk-faced dandies in slashed doublets had looked out at England, unappeased, in their furious days, by its cloistered charm.
Stables appeared, tottering in moss and neglect. A gnome, all hands and nose and riding breeches, came out of a shadowy stall and held the stallion.
She dropped to the bricks of the stable yard, walked away without a word.
“It’s not neglect,” she said, when we were out of the gnome’s hearing. “It’s simple murder. He knew I loved the place.”
“Your husband?” I moved my lips softly, one inside the other, hating him.
“Let’s go in the front way. You get the loveliest view of the main staircase. He excelled himself there. He gave that his personal attention.”
There was a wide space in front, ringed with a drive. Ancient oaks closed it in. Its turf was worse than the rest because it had been scythed roughly and looked yellow. The oaks sent long shadows stealing insidiously across the ruined lawn, silent, dark, probing fingers of hate. Shadows, yet more than shadows, as the shadow on a sundial is more than a shadow
A crone as aged and badly hung together as the stable gnome answered the remote, fretful jangling of the bell. The English of her sort seem never to go into a house. They must be admitted. The old woman muttered to herself in some obscure dialect, as though laying curses.
We stepped through the door, and the riding crop went up again.
“Now there,” she said, in a voice than which nothing was ever harder, “you have his best work in the middle period, as painters say. Sir Henry Lakenham, Baronet, mind you, and please remember that a baronet is much more than a baron or viscount in our regard—Sir Henry Lakenham, one of our oldest baronets and one of our oldest staircases, meeting on somewhat unequal terms.”
“You mean the axe was new,” I said.
The main staircase, or what was left of it, was before us. It had been built for a royal descent, for a great lady with a retinue in velvet and stars, for an ingenuity of shadows on the vast paneled ceiling, for a victory or a triumph or a homecoming, and for, on occasion, just a staircase.
It was enormously broad and sweeping, it had the slow, indomitable curve of time. The balustrade alone must have been worth a fortune, but I merely guessed that. It had been hacked to jagged, dark splinters.
I turned away from it after quite a long time. There was a name now from which my stomach would always recoil.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re still his—”
“Oh, that’s part of the revenge.”
The crone had gone mumbling away.
“What did you do to him?”
At first she said nothing. Then, very negligently: “I only wish I could do it again and again, forever, and that he might always hear of it down the dark places he will ultimately wander in.”
“You don’t mean that. Not all of it.”
“No? Let’s go this way. Our Romneys are famous—for their absence.”
We went along what might have been a picture gallery. There were. Darker, plum-colored oblongs on the damask of the walls. Our footsteps echoed on a bare, dusty floor.
“Swine!” I said to the echoes and the emptiness. “Swine!”
“You don’t really care,” she said. “Do you?”
“No,” I said. “Not as much as I pretend.”
Beyond the gallery there was what might have been a gun room. From that a narrow, secret door led to a narrow, secret staircase, curved and intimate and gracious. We went up that. So we came at last to a room that was at least furnished.
She pulled her hard black hat off and fluffed her hair carelessly and threw her hat and gloves and whip on a bench. There was a huge canopied bed. Charles the Second had probably slept in it—not alone. There was a dressing table with wing mirrors and the usual chorus of glittering bottles. She went past all this, without a glance, to a table in the corner where she mixed Scotch and soda, tepid of course, and came back with two glasses in her hands.
Sinewy hands, the hands of a horsewoman. Not the lovely plastic things that were the hands of Millicent Crandall. These were hands that could be desperately tight, that could hurt. That could take a hunter over an impossible fence or a man over an aching abyss. Hands that almost shattered the fragile glasses she held. I saw their knuckles, as white as new ivory.
I was standing just inside the big old door and hadn’t moved a muscle since I stepped into the room. She handed me a drink. It shook a little, and danced in the glass.
Her eyes—they were those far-off, unobtainable eyes. Those ancient eyes. They say nothing, they are utterly withdrawn. They are the last window that never opens in a house otherwise not secret.
Somewhere, I suppose, there was still the rather distant scent of sweet peas in an English garden, nectarines on a sunny wall, another fragrance and another head.
I reached back clumsily and turned the huge key, as big as a monkey wrench, in a lock the size of a cupboard door.
The lock creaked and we didn’t laugh. We drank. Before I could put my glass down she was pressed against me so tightly that I stopped breathing.
Her skin was sweet and wild, like wildflowers on a sunbaked slope, in spring, in the hard white sun of my own country. Our lips burned together, almost fused. Then hers opened and her tongue drove hard against my teeth and her body shook convulsively.
“Please,” she said in a strangled voice, her mouth buried in mine. “Please, oh please—”
There could be only one ending.
3
I don’t remember what time it was when I got back to the Crandalls’ cottage. I had to put a time on it afterward, for a reason, but I never really knew. The English summer afternoons last, like the English themselves, forever. I knew that Old Bessie was back because I could hear her humming monotone in the kitchen, like a fly caught in a pane of glass.
Perhaps even the almost infinite hour of tea had not been laid away.
I turned from the foot of the stairs and made myself go into the drawing room. That which I carried with me was neither all triumph nor all defeat, but it seemed to have no place there, where Millicent was.
She stood there, of course, as if waiting for me, her back to the futile lace curtains at the French doors. They were still, as she was. There was not, for the moment, enough life in the air to move them. She stood as if she had been waiting for silent, immobile hours. I felt somehow that the light had scarcely stirred along her arm or in the almost shadow of her throat.
She didn’t say anything at once. Her not saying anything seemed very thunderous. Then her marble-smooth voice said, surprisingly, “You’ve loved me for three years now, haven’t you, John?”
That
was very swell, that was.
“Yes,” I said. It was too late, far too late to be saying anything at all.
“I always knew it. You meant me to know it, didn’t you, John?”
“I suppose so. Yes.” The croak I heard seemed to be my voice.
Her pale blue eyes were placid as a pond under a full moon.
“I’ve always liked knowing it,” she said.
I didn’t move nearer to her. I just stood there, not exactly toeing holes in the carpet.
Quite suddenly, in that still, greenish late-afternoon light her frail body began to ripple from head to foot.
There was another silence. I did nothing to end it. At last she reached out to the frayed bell cord. The bell tinkled at the back of the house like a child crying.
“Well, we can always have tea,” she said.
I got out of the room, as one does, without seeming to use the door.
I made the stairs without a fumble this time, the whole straight flight and the turn. But I was another man now. I was a smooth, quiet little man who had been put in his place and didn’t matter at all, but wouldn’t have anything to worry about either. All taken care of. Finished. A little man about two feet high who rolled his eyes when you shook him hard enough. Put him back in his box, dear, and let’s go riding.
Then, just at the very top, where there was no step at all, I stumbled, and as if that made a draft, a door fell open, softly, like a leaf falling. Just half-open. Edward Crandall’s bedroom door.
He was in there. The bed inside the door was very high and had at least two eiderdown mattresses on it, as they have in that part of the country. That was all I really looked at—the bed. He was sprawled all over it, on his face, as if eating it. Dead drunk. Passed out. A little early, even for him.
I stood there in the elf light that was neither afternoon nor dusk and looked in at him. The big black handsome brute, the conquering one. Filthy drunk, before it was even dark.
To hell with him. I reached over softly and shut the door again and almost tiptoed on to my own room, and washed up in the hand basin, with cold water. How cold it was, as cold as the morning after a battle.