Three Bright Pebbles. Leslie Ford
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this was the day?”
“Or is this the place, Mrs. Latham?” Dan said. “Wait. I’ll get you an umbrella.”
“I’ll make a dash for it,” I said.
I slipped over to the right side of the car and out, and made a bolt for the porch, and drew a deep painful breath of relief when I cleared it.
Dan, following me, tripped and lunged forward, caught himself, swore quietly and gave something a violent kick across the porch. I went on over to the door, put my hand out to open it and stopped, my heart suddenly gone quite still . . . because, as if all this wasn’t already too much, the door quietly and slowly opened itself. Or for a moment I thought it did, until I made out, standing beside it in the dim candle-lit hall, Dan’s young sister Mara, her dark pointed little face lost in the glow of her great somber eyes and the halo of her dark cloudy hair.
She didn’t smile or hold out her hand. She just looked at me, and beyond me at her brother, and said, in that strange, almost poignant voice of hers, “You’re late. Mother’ll give you holy hell.”
She didn’t smile or hold out her hand to him . . . and Dan, who’d started toward her to kiss her—after all, I thought, he’d not seen her for three years—stopped abruptly and stood staring at her.
Then he bent down and picked up the long bow, still strung, that he’d tripped over in the dark, and flung it angrily across the porch.
“If this is your bow,” he said, “I wish you’d put it in the rack, instead of leaving it around for somebody to break his neck on.”
Mara Winthrop’s pointed chin went up, her eyes blazed.
“Paris hasn’t changed you a bit, has it, darling!”
Her voice was cold and perfectly flat, but her big somber eyes were suddenly filled with tears that she blinked back resolutely.
“Anyway, you’d better come on in just as you are, or the fatted calf’ll be all eaten. Everybody’s been waiting hours for you . . . including Natalie, the glamour girl.”
She turned and started toward a door off the wide elegant hall. I looked around at Dan. His face was set, hurt and angry, and he certainly looked like anything but the returning prodigal. We went on in. I glanced around the familiar long passageway, full of old mahogany, with the strapped leather mail pouch hanging on its hook by the door, and the Sheffield urn full of scarlet roses under the Adam mirror. Dan tossed his hat on a sofa and pushed back his crisp unruly hair with both hands.
“What’s come over that girl?” he said. “Would it be this guy Keane?”
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense, some way—at least those sudden smarting tears didn’t. I found myself wondering about Mara—actually, when I came to think about it, for the first time I’d ever done it. Up to this time I’d always seen her through her mother’s eyes, moody and difficult, resisting with the thoroughness of a wilful demon all the efforts made in her behalf. I could see Irene Winthrop, a corsage of yellow orchids pinned on her mink coat, stopping me just outside the British Embassy one afternoon, her eyes raised in amused despair, saying, “Darling, that child will be the death of me!” and the woman I was with saying when she was gone, “You know, Irene’s wonderful to that girl. You know, it really hurts her terribly, the way the little wretch acts!” I wasn’t, some way, so sure of that, now. I had the sudden definite feeling that Mara hadn’t wanted to be so horrid to Dan. Maybe it was because he was late, or because I was there. Then the picture of that bareheaded young man crashing through the storm in his open car came back to me.
“I mean, what the hell have I done?” Dan said.
“She’s probably just upset about something,” I said. “Come along. Wipe the rain off your face and let’s go in. I want to see the glamour girl.”
“Yeh?” Dan said. He grinned suddenly and took my arm. “Me, I can hardly wait. Let’s go.”
Mara Winthrop had stopped at the broad carved pine door at the end of the hyphen that connects the dining room wing with the main house. I saw her push back her cloudy hair from her forehead, almost as if bracing herself for something to come, and then, remembering, hurriedly tie the dangling ends of narrow green velvet ribbons that made the belt of her smart brown cotton dinner frock. We weren’t then, I thought, the only ones late for dinner, and I thought again of Alan Keane careening crazily through the rain, and wondered if Dan and I would be the only ones to get holy hell that night.
As we came along Mara threw open the door.
“Lo, the bridgroom cometh!” she announced.
I couldn’t hear what Dan said through the sudden blur of excited voices beyond us, but I knew from the grin on his face that Mara was not only forgiven but was even definitely one up. Then I could hear the sound of Irene Winthrop’s high-pitched lilting laughter rippling along the top of the dinner table talk and the subdued wellbred clink of silver on fine porcelain that all stopped abruptly as her voice came out to us:
“You waited for them, Mara! You sweet angel!”
Behind me Dan made some kind of not too polite noise as we went in. For the instant that we stood there looking down into the room—and I suppose it’s because light travels faster than sound, and the eye takes in a whole impression at a glance while the ear has to wait for parts to be transformed into meaning—I saw the long polished mahogany table, with its white lace and crimson flowers, its sparkling crystal and gleaming silver under the soft light from the Georgian candelabra, as an island in the shadowed room, a solid core of beauty and warmth and security that blotted out instantly everything that had gone before . . . the storm-driven sky, the weird racked cedars, the white-faced man tearing through the slanting rain, the shrill cries and the shuttered house, and Mara, dark and elfin and bitter. They were all gone as if they were something I’d imagined, that had never happened at all.
But that was only for one brief instant . . . and I still don’t know whether what I saw then was because all of that really wasn’t gone at all, was still in my mind, so that I was just fancying things out of a disordered brain, or whether it was a trick of the yellow candle-light that cast long oblique shadows on the people standing round the table . . . or whether in the moment I stood there I had a sudden insight into the characters of people I’d only known pleasantly, as one knows most charming people. But the faces down there, except for two, looked suddenly angular, and predatory . . . and cruel. It was almost terrifyingly uncanny, to see Irene Winthrop’s delicate patrician face hard and hawklike, her quick-moving hands with their scarlet-lacquered nails like talons tipped with blood. Rick Winthrop, her elder son, at the far end of the table, was like a brooding bird of prey, too, his thin nose elongated by its own shadows, which deepened the circles under his harassed sullen eyes and gave the tiny mustache above his thin lips an almost sinister look.
The auburn-haired girl next to him—that would be Cheryl, I supposed, whom he’d married and brought to Romney in expectation of an allowance that hadn’t materialized—was sharp-beaked, with strange brilliant eyes and high sunken bony cheeks. Major Tillyard, next to Irene, was sleek and round and too well-fed, his bristling eyebrows prominent over his pursy cheeks. Mara and the other girl there, their backs to us in the doorway, seemed small and fragile and drooping. It sounds perfectly fantastic to say it, but for one crazy instant it flashed into my mind that this wasn’t real at all, that it was some kind of nightmare, and that in it Dan and I had wandered not into the dining room at Romney but into a den of . . . something . . . and that those two were the sacrifices at a strange altar that was not an altar.
It not only sounds fantastic, of course, it was fantastic; for instantly the whole illusion was dispelled as I stepped down the three steps onto a level with the candle-light that softened and smoothed each of those faces back into faces that were recognizable, and civilized, and even handsome, each in its own way.
As we came, Irene Winthrop rose to her feet, light as thistledown, and held out her soft bare arms.
“Grace, darling! You’ve brought me my son! My son! Danny, my sweet!—But you’re