The Balcony Read online

  “Let me look at Gavin’s child. You aren’t like him, my dear. You haven’t got the Hieronomo nose. That’s lucky. Your mother must have been a lovely woman.” Behind us, a line of yellow windows slid by. I looked at her. She was tall, she wore riding clothes—her usual garb—and her head was bare. Her short, dark hair—she hadn’t inherited the fiery locks of the Hieronomos—was shot with gray and her thin, lined face bore the marks of care and suffering. Site was not as young as she had seemed in my first startled glimpse. But I can’t re= member that I’ve ever seen a woman who seemed so vital and confident and alive.

  I said wonderingly, “You’re exactly what Father said.”

  “Am I?” She was pleased. “Gavin always admired me beyond my just deserts.” She chuckled. “And I can’t say I ever minded.”

  Before I thought, I said, “You aren’t in the least like your letter. I was expecting . . .”

  She waited. “What were you expecting, Anne?” “Someone—older,” I admitted, unwilling to acknowledge the complete absurdity of my mental picture. “Your letter . . .”

  It seemed to me she hesitated. Then she laughed. “Possibly I was determined to insure your presence, dear. I wouldn’t be above a little minor trickery to gain an—an important end. We Hieronomos”—her arm tightened on my own—“have been too long apart.” She piloted me across the slippery, yielding ground and toward the station. “Sister Patience is waiting in the carriage.”

  I became aware of the agitated, mountainous shape that overflowed the rear seat of the conveyance. Patience Hieronomo burst from a cocoon of furs and blankets as we approached, and, without alighting, somehow contrived to seize and to embrace me. It was too dark to see distinctly the younger of my great-aunts, but years of photographs helped me fill in the gaps. There were, I knew, small bright eyes beneath peaked brows. The round, moonlike face was crowned by crimped hair dyed such a brilliant red that even darkness could not subdue the color. I hadn’t counted on that hair, nor had I been prepared to find Great-aunt Patience quite so large. She may have read the thought, for she said, chuckling: “You wouldn’t believe, would you, dear, that I was once as slim as you? And now, getting in and out a carriage taxes me.”

  I can’t quite explain why I liked her less than Amanda. It is equally difficult to explain why I sensed between the dissimilar sisters a kind of tension—almost like jealousy, as though the two were rivals for my affection and attention. Perhaps it was that Amanda stood by so silently while Patience was wheezing and exclaiming, and, finally, said:

  “Let the child catch her breath, Patience. She hasn’t spoken to Amos yet.”

  Amos? With a sense of shock, I turned toward the Negro, who had watched and waited without a word. Amos? I had been brought up on anecdotes of Amos, my great-grandfather’s body servant, the loyal and devoted black of many tasks and talents who had followed John S. Hieronomo everywhere like a faithful dog, and had almost followed him to his grave. Amos had been crippled permanently in the accident that had cost John Hieronomo his life, and for a quarter of a century had mourned the master who had been the center of his own existence. Still I had not realized that he would be so old. Amos took my hand in a trembling, wrinkled palm. Tears spilled down his face.

  “Welcome to Mount Hope, Miss Anne. Welcome to your father’s child. The old order,” he said with a floweriness that somehow did not seem inappropriate, “passes and youth comes on to take the stage. I suppose we should thank God that life itself is indestructible.”

  “Indeed we should,” said Aunt Amanda dryly. “Get in, Anne. I’ll drive, Amos, since we’re dropping you in the village. Take care, Anne, the step’s quite high.” She laughed a little. “I dare say it’s your first experience with a horse-drawn carriage.”

  “Yes,” I said, as Amos wedged my bag beneath my feet and wrapped a blanket around my knees. “I think it’s rather nice.”

  In the muffling, murky gloom that smelled of age and leather, I couldn’t see her expression, but I heard her sigh.

  "We Hieronomos haven’t much run to cars. Progress has passed us by.” Again I heard her little chuckle. “Sister Patience”—the light tone carried a thread of malice—“brought her machine down from Baltimore, but as it turned out, she didn’t care to drive.”

  The rear seat emitted an indignant little creak. “There’s no point taking risks.”

  As I was soon to learn, Patience loved her car, and indeed everything she owned, and took few, if any, risks with her possessions. Even then I was able to gather that the matter of transportation had been discussed, that a sore spot had been touched.

  Having annoyed her sister, Amanda decided to make peace. “Personally, I’ve never moved beyond the horse. I’ll choose Princess and Betsy any day.” She slapped the reins, and obediently and at a surprising speed Princess and Betsy started off. Everything seemed unreal and strange and yet in some curious way familiar too, as though I were repeating an experience my father must have had many times. The feeling was enormously strengthened when presently we turned into the silent, drowsing village.

  I knew Mount Hope so well, I who had never seen the place before: The unchanging square where my father and his cousin Hoy had spun their tops while the aunts were marketing, the steepled church where the two had gone to Sunday School, the corner bank, now marked with another name, where the boys had gone to find their grandfather, the patriarch, the leading banker of the community.

  Mount Hope was almost exactly as my father had seen it in his youth. The store fronts that lined the square were modern and unbeautiful, but the serene old houses that crowded the shops from either side were dignified and lovely in the white haze of the snow. A frozen fountain, white and still, marked the spot where the old slave block had been. Near by, the stone figure of a man with a child leaning against his knee and a woman kneeling in supplication at his feet, gazed forever toward the vanished slave block. Aunt Amanda pointed with her whip.

  “Your great-grandfather, Anne,” she said as though in introduction. We paused a moment in the falling snow.

  “Would you like to get out, dear?” suggested Patience, who herself, quite obviously, had no intention of traipsing across the blowing square. “You can hardly catch the spirit of the figure from so far away.”

  “The spirit,” said Aunt Amanda, to my great relief, “can wait until tomorrow. Father wouldn’t want the child to freeze her feet!”

  With which she drove at a fast clip around the square and stopped before the steepled church. Here, to my surprise, the Negro left us. Amos, who worked daytimes on the lawns and gardens of Hieronomo House, acted also as janitor for the village Methodists.

  “Necessity drives us all,” remarked Aunt Amanda as we waited until a light flashed inside the church to indicate that the Negro had safely reached his modest basement room. “Nowadays, Amos has to piece out a living with a second job. I don’t pay him enough to keep a fly alive.”

  “You manage to keep a couple on the place,” observed her sister. This met with silence, but Patience wasn’t one who hesitated to speak her mind. “If you want my opinion, Amos is worth a dozen like the Frawleys. Eliot is always ailing and Wanda seems to feel herself superior to any kind of work. Why you let Amos stay in town and have those two on the home place is beyond my comprehension.”

  Amanda seldom commented when others criticized her own arrangements, but, as I was to discover, she never changed them. Quite unruffled, she replied: “One must pay for service, Patience. No doubt I should have been blessed with money.”

  With unusual and unexpected bitterness Patience spoke.

  “So should every one of us!” she said, and then she laughed and tried to make a joke of what had been a burst of honest feeling.

  III

  LONG BEFORE WE REACHED HIERONOMO HOUSE, Patience, used to the early hours .of the schoolmistress, was fast asleep. Amanda herself must have been very weary, but quite deliberately she had set herself the task of qualifying me as a member of the family. As we advanced
into the falling snow, past shrouded fields and hills and frozen brooks and occasional darkened, silent houses, she talked of the lost and splendid past. The talk was gay and vivid, but I suppose my youth made me want to hear about the present. I was interested in Cousin Hoy and I had a natural feminine interest in the son whose age was so near my own, the Glenn Hieronomo who was studying to become a doctor. I heard only that the two were driving down from Boston on the morrow, and that Great-uncle Richard and his wife were expected from New York in the late afternoon. With growing restlessness I listened to anecdotes of balls and eight-course dinners, to stories of the days when my greatgrandfather had raced trotting horses, and run the village bank, and acted as the village mayor, and still had time to charm his children and his grandsons.

  Once Aunt Amanda said, “But I’m boring you, my dear.”

  “Oh, no,” I said quickly, but the truth was that I felt rather stifled. I hadn’t guessed that Aunt Amanda, who seemed so young in spirit, could be so absorbed in glories that were gone forever.

  At last, quite suddenly—at least an hour had slipped away—Great-aunt Amanda was silent. I had long since ceased any attempt to fathom the obscure and barren countryside, the landmarks muffled and concealed by the spinning snowfall. Some instinct must have prompted me to peer forth again.

  Directly off the road, and to the left, stretched an iron fence, tall and proud, which enclosed a steeply rising hill studded with the shapes of trees and shrubs. No house was visible, no pin-prick of light pierced the shifting, swirling curtain of the constant snow.

  “Our grounds,” said Aunt Amanda, “lie beyond the fence. Hieronomo House itself is on the hill. You’re almost home, my dear.”

  I was staring at the fence. Possibly it was only imagination, but all at once I fancied that Princess and Betsy hesitated. Two tall stone supports, presenting grilled ornamental gates, interrupted the marching spikes. The gates were closed. The horses hesitated and then went on.

  I said stupidly, “Isn’t—haven’t we passed the entrance?”

  “Nowadays,” said Aunt Amanda, “we use the entrance on the side. The front drive has long since gone to rack and ruin, the front gates were locked so long they’ve rusted shut. They haven’t been opened,” she finished, “since Father left his home for the last time. It was his wish that the central gates be locked until some member of the family was in permanent residence. And we have honored it.”

  “I see,” I said rather faintly.

  “Do you see?” Her tone was queerly urgent. It was as though, for some odd personal reason, she demanded my approval, insisted upon having it. “You’re a sweet child, Anne. Understanding beyond your years. So few of your generation have any respect for tradition, for family custom or for family name.”

  Again it was a speech I hadn’t anticipated, an attitude I hadn’t expected her to take.

  The side gates stood open to the road. Princess and Betsy, quite unguided, turned in unison and started to mount a twisting, snowy path whose outlines were virtually invisible. The carriage lamps made spots of yellow light which intensified the gloom beyond their wavering circles, the gloom overhead. Cedars and cypress, bent low with their frosty burden, enclosed us like a vault and again I had the strange illusion that I was in an empty world, that Aunt Amanda and the sleeping Patience and myself would mount forever behind the laboring horses. At last the trees gave way, and we were in the open. The horses stopped.

  “Let me help unwind you, dear,” said Aunt Amanda, now quite matter of fact. She pulled the blanket from my knees, and turned to awaken Patience. I alighted.

  The open space, blanketed in white and bare as an arena, directly fronted the great, dim bulk of Hieronomo House. My great-grandfather’s home, as I was to discover in the morning, wasn’t so vast, so chilling, and so magnificent, as I thought when first I glimpsed its somber grandeur in the whirling snow. Actually, I suppose that anyone familiar with those Southern mansions built under the influence of Latrobe, bemused all his life by the monumental architecture of early Greece, has seen similar dwellings. But that night it seemed to me that the classic entrance might have opened into the Parthenon or the Acropolis. Four tremendous Doric columns, fully five feet in diameter, composed the massive portico of Hieronomo House, and continued upward to form the pillars of an iron-encircled balcony above. On either side stretched severely simple wings, their final outlines lost in shadows.

  “You’ll find the bell beside the door,” called Aunt Amanda. “Give it a good sharp jerk. The servants are waiting up for us.”

  I stepped between the huge columns, found a bell and rang it. A door opened so suddenly and so abruptly that it was almost as though someone in the darkened house had been watching our approach. At first, with an unpleasant lurch of the heart, I thought the doorway was empty. Then I saw a young girl looking out at us. She held an oil lamp in her hand. She was about my own age, and in the soft yellow bloom of her lamp, with the shadows of a cavernous passageway framing her like a picture, Wanda Frawley should have been pretty. A sulky mouth and sullen eyes spoiled her looks.

  She didn’t speak to me at all, but as Amanda and Patience approached, she said sharply, “We expected you at midnight, Mrs. Silver. The electricity went off in the storm two hours ago. The telephone’s gone now.”

  “I dare say,” replied Amanda mildly, “we’ll survive, Wanda, just as we’ve survived before. Have you made up the Blue Room for my niece? Where’s Eliot? I’ll want him to stable down the horses.”

  “Eliot has gone to bed.”

  A peculiar silence occurred. I saw Patience look at her sister. “I believe,” said Amanda quietly, “that I asked you both to await our arrival.”

  “Eliot wasn't feeling well and I thought . . .”

  “I’ll do the thinking, Wanda,” Amanda said in tones that were entirely pleasant. “Please call Eliot at once.”

  “Eliot needs his rest.”

  “At once,” repeated Great-aunt Amanda.

  Wanda didn’t stir. There was a mute exchange of eyes—the girl’s eyes blue and very hard, Amanda’s equally unyielding. Patience watched expectantly, a little smile tugging at her mouth. What would have been the result of that meeting of two strong wills was not to be disclosed.

  Another lamp materialized in the passageway, and with it came Eliot Frawley. He was the exact opposite of his much younger wife—no fighter certainly, a thin man in his early forties, stoop-shouldered, tired and melancholy-looking, with mild, myopic eyes screened by heavy spectacles.

  “Did you want me, Mrs. Silver?” he inquired, with an uneasy glance around the group. “I—as it happens—I hadn’t gone to bed. My head was troubling me, and Wanda thought you might not mind, but . . .”

  “I would have minded very much,” said Great-aunt Amanda.

  Her calm voice was entirely pleasant as she suggested that Wanda show me to my room. But I perceived that the girl herself was far from calm as she seized my bag and started up the stairs. I was hard put to follow, and Patience was left laboring in our wake far behind. Amanda lingered for a few parting words with Eliot.

  On the second floor the maid, who had yet to address a single word to me, opened a door and led the way into a vast and gloomy bedroom. A place that might have been a ballroom, hung with two crystal chandeliers, cut by seven windows cloaked in heavy velvet draperies. At one end, two tall pier glasses framed a marble fireplace, surmounted by a heroic canvas dimmed by age. At the other, a canopied four-poster bed, set upon a carpeted platform, was elevated a full five feet from the floor. One reached its velvet-covered expanse by mounting the two shallow steps of the platform, transferring to a short stepladder, and then, I imagined, completed the journey by a flying leap.

  “This is the Blue Room,” announced Wanda blandly, and as though she divined the lost sensation with which I inspected that barnlike place. She seemed inexplicably to have recovered her good nature. She was smiling as she lighted a candelabra. “There’s your bag. I suppose you want to unpack your
self. Do you expect me to turn down the bed?”

  “I’ll turn it down myself,” I said, and thought that even in the uncertain light the walls and draperies looked not blue but an unpleasant bottle-green. Before I could speak, the girl had vanished. I was left alone.

  That somber, cheerless chamber—with its air of long disuse, its faded grandeur—was not a comfortable or a reassuring spot in which to place a weary and unfamiliar guest. Nor had the little scene downstairs been reassuring, either. I had scant sympathy for the sullen, ungracious Wanda, but to tell the truth, I had also been taken aback by a certain inflexible, unyielding strain which Amanda Silver had exhibited in herself.

  A bit uncertainly, I moved across the carpeted expanse toward a window. I pulled back the draperies and discovered that the tall, narrow window gave immediately upon the iron-encircled balcony outside, now deep in snow that lay heaped in fleecy layers about the ghostly supporting columns. Snow was still falling softly. The window wouldn’t open. The frame was warped.

  I finally gave up the effort, returned to my bag, unpacked, thrust my clothes helter-skelter into a wardrobe large enough to stable Princess and Betsy, and got into night things. It was then that my eye was caught by the darkened canvas fixed above the fireplace. What was the subject? Moved by a sudden inexplicable impulse, I picked up the candles and went to see. The subject of the heroic portrait was a man with flaming whiskers who stood, like a lonely Alexander, on a mountain top, his noble, melancholy eyes gazing into the distance. The red-bearded man was John S. Hieronomo.

  I knew then that I had been placed in my greatgrandfather’s bedroom, that he had sat at the enormous flat-topped desk so incongruous in a bedroom, that his twenty suits of clothes had hung in the wardrobe, that he had slept the sleep of the just and proud in that canopied four-poster bed.

  Hardly had this rather chilling realization come upon me when Great-aunt Amanda entered. Her step was always light, but she entered without a sound. John S. Hieronomo, who hated noise, had soundproofed his own chamber at great expense. I heard Aunt Amanda’s voice before I knew that she was there. I whirled around.