Three Bright Pebbles. Leslie Ford
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can’t go!”
“But I’ve got to go, to-night! You don’t understand, Mara! A horrible thing has happened . . . please let me go, I tell you I’ve got to!”
“But you can’t! The tree’s down over the road—you can’t walk, you can’t stay in the village all night!”
“But you can phone Alan—he can take me to Washington. I’ve got to go, Mara.”
There was a long silence. I heard steps on the polished pine floors then, and in a few minutes the tinkle of the country phone. I looked at my clock. The hands pointed to twenty minutes past one. I lay there as long as I could without going quietly out of my mind, and got up. However bad the situation was, it seemed utter folly for Cheryl Winthrop to go barging off into the night in Alan Keane’s open car . . . it would only give Irene and Rick another stick to thwack her with, and it wouldn’t help Dan.
I put on my dressing gown and slippers, opened the door into the hall, and went along the hyphen corridor to the main upstairs hall where the phone was. The receiver was hanging down, but neither of the girls was there. Then as I stood there, wondering what to do, I heard low and bitterly intense voices below. I looked over the pine rail. Down in the lower hall, cowering in a corner, was Mara Winthrop, in front of her, a riding crop in his raised hand, was Rick. His voice was like a hissing madman’s: “Where is she, damn you! Tell me where she is, or I’ll—”
Mara’s answer was a strangled terrified sob. “She’s gone, out there!”
For a moment I stood there, not knowing what to do. Then I saw, quite suddenly, a figure standing in the shadow of the landing just below me, watching this as I was watching it, and my blood froze with horror. It was Irene Winthrop . . . just standing there, not raising a hand or saying a word to save her youngest child in that moment of abject mortal terror. My hands on the dark wood rail were cold and shaking like a leaf. Below me then I saw Mara sink down on the sofa and sit perfectly rigid, staring white-faced at the door that had slammed on her brother’s back.
Irene hadn’t moved. I stood there for a moment, frightened and angry—angrier, I think, than I ever remembered being in all my life. Yet I knew that if I made a scene it wouldn’t help—anybody: Mara, or Cheryl, or Dan. I could, however, keep something pretty terrible from happening to Cheryl. I thought of that riding crop and of Rick Winthrop’s face, convulsed with rage.
I turned as silently as I could and crept along to the other wing, the dining room wing where Dan’s room had always been, and opened his door. In the dim light I could make out the great fourposter bed and its blue resist print curtains. I could see Dan’s bags still unpacked on the rack. I ran across to the bed and put my hand out to wake him, and touched the soft cool linen sheet still folded neatly back.
My heart stopped dead at a sudden wild shriek outside, and beat again as I realized that it was only one of Irene’s fancy buzzards. My knees were shaking and my hands were icy, and I don’t know how long I stayed there, just standing by the bed, afraid to go back for fear of meeting Irene. I had a profound conviction in my heart that she would make Mara, and Cheryl, suffer for that night . . . so charmingly and delicately that no one but they would know what was happening.
Just as I was gradually realizing that I had to go back, I couldn’t stay here, I heard slow cautious footsteps coming down the hall, something in them so secret and stealthy that without fully realizing what I was doing I slipped behind the tall painted screen in the corner. I heard the door close and the latch uncatch, and a match strike. Looking out between the sections of the screen I saw Dan Winthrop go very quietly to the window and pull down the blinds. Then he took off his shoes and went into the bathroom and turned on the light. I saw him look in the mirror. A long streak of blood trickled down from a cut above his right cheek bone. He mopped it off with a cleansing tissue and painted it with iodine, and examined another cut on the side of his mouth. Then he came back into the room, took the pajamas off his bed, went back into the bathroom and closed the door.
I got back to my own room . . . with a feeling of considerable satisfaction at the idea that if Dan had been marked up a bit, Rick Winthrop was probably unrecognizable.
It was half-past eight when I went downstairs the next morning. Breakfast at Romney is served English fashion, in the summer, on the terrace of the dining room hyphen, overlooking the lawns stretching down to the Potomac. As I came down the wide staircase it seemed incredible that it was less than eight hours since I had seen Mara cowering there in the corner, her brother’s upraised crop, her mother watching, detached and impassive, from the landing by the grandfather clock. The hall was quiet, a fresh breeze from the river came through the front door and out the garden door where Dan and I had come in. It was the cool airy silence of a summer morning in the country, before the day’s life begins and the sun becomes hot and drowsy. A humming bird hung motionless like a jewel in the white wisteria on the garden porch, a wasp nosed at the copper screening on the door.
The old rubbed pine made the hall dim and shadowy inside. I pushed the screen open and stepped out onto the pillared portico, and stood looking down at the green lawns sloping to the glistening waters of the river, almost blue under the clear cobalt sky, and the white urns full of brilliant flowers, and the Italian marble balustrade and benches, drenched with sunshine, that marked off the formal gardens on each side of the long dark alleys of box; and I caught my breath at the loveliness of it. The night, and the storm, and that passionate scene at dinner, were a nightmare—the wind whipping the cedars and the box, the buzzards in the oak, were as unreal as remembered pain. My heart rose inside of me with a sensation of almost physical release . . . and dropped again as suddenly, out of all this loveliness and light and sunshine came that horrible scream again.
I turned my head, hardly knowing what I must see. There parading majestically out of a tiny domed and pillared temple of love set in a crimson sea of roses, came a long troupe of peacocks, strutting the living beauty of their coverts, spread like great jeweled fans above their soft iridescent breasts. I watched them move sedately across the garden, their trains spread, glittering magnificently, a shimmering glory in the sun, to where an odd-looking woman in a wide straw sombrero was sprinkling corn on a marble rose-colored balustrade and calling them in a strange high-pitched voice.
I turned quickly toward the terrace, a quite sheepish flush rising to my cheeks. The glamorous entourage parading through the sunlit flower-decked lawns of Romney made the fantasy of the night an even madder child of my disordered brain. I wondered with some amusement even if the rest of the night was also a horrible imagining: Cheryl’s flight, Mara cowering under the upraised crop, those tell-tale cuts on Dan’s face.
I stepped out on the terrace, and stopped dead. Cheryl Winthrop was sitting at the table, in a blue backless tennis frock, her warm gold skin unbelievably lovely under her thick wheat-gold sleekly waving hair, her eyes as blue as hyacinths, her brown legs bare except for short white socks, her feet in stubby woven grass slippers. And beside her in a Lincoln green archery costume with a peacock feather in her hat, and looking very gay and lovely, was Irene.
“Darling—good morning!” she cried. “I’m so glad somebody can get up in the morning! Do hurry and have a bite of food, and then come along to the range. Cheryl’s not going to shoot, so you really must.”
I steadied myself against the walnut hunting table and poured myself a large cup of coffee from the fluted Sheffield urn. I must, I told myself, be quietly losing my mind. I was convinced of it a minute later when Irene said, “There comes Mara!” and in Mara came, dressed in tan mud-spattered jodhpurs, her jodhpur boots wet and muddy too, her yellow shirt open at the neck, her dark eyes shining, her pale cheeks flushed. She tossed her hat and crop and a yellow glove on one end of the table and sank down in her chair. Then she sprang up again.
“Let me get something for you, Grace. Kidney stew—ham and eggs? Did the peacocks keep you awake all night? I think they’re ghastly, but you get used to it. They’re only vocal once a year—mating season.”
I shall never know how I got through that breakfast, though it didn’t take long, Irene was waiting with such marked impatience for me to finish. She chattered gaily along like a bird among the