Three Bright Pebbles Read online

  Ahead of us the narrow oyster-shell road stretched, snow white, between two tall dark lanes of pollarded cedars. The western horizon framed in the narrow windshield was a threatening oblong of inky black and murky yellow, the sheet lightning flashing mutinously behind it and dying in distant rumbles of thunder. It was suddenly as if we’d become part of an El Greco canvas, moving beyond mountains into the vast unknown, portentous and terrifying. And then the storm descended on us. Just as I switched on the lights, a great fork of streaked lightning split the sky, and huge splotches of rain stabbed and broke against the windshield, and it was abruptly pitch-dark, the two long fingers of light stretching out in front of us cut by slanting lines of driving rain. We craned our necks to see through the blinding screen of water that the windshield wipers were powerless against. The sudden wind, whipping and tearing at the boughs of the cedars, contorted them into black mangled arms struggling in the night, and buffeted the car until it lurched drunkenly on the slippery road.

  In front of us a terrified rabbit streaked across the path into the frantic grass . . . and suddenly, from somewhere beyond the black screen of cedars, came the most ghastly shriek, rising in the night and the storm, blood-curdling, half-human, half-animal, as eerie as violent death.

  I caught my breath sharply and pressed my foot on the gas.

  “What on earth is that?” I gasped.

  Dan shook his head, straining his eyes through the curtain of rain.

  I put on the brakes sharply as a small open car, with no lights, shot crazily out from nowhere into the road, without the slightest warning, and careened crazily past, almost ditching itself and us. In the white glare of my headlights I saw a man, bareheaded, his face a ghastly white, his collar turned up, his head bent down, gripping the wheel, driving as if hell and all its black shadows were after him.

  Dan sat bolt upright. “Wasn’t that Alan Keane?” he shouted above the howling wind. He swung around in the seat.

  “It looked like him!” I answered.

  “I thought Mother didn’t let him come on the place!”

  “I didn’t get the impression of the ordered departure of an honored guest!” I said.

  We slid out of the cedar-lined road into the narrow drive circling the great Romney oak that stands in back of the old house. It’s vast leafy arms creaked and groaned, mighty against the storm. A quarter of the way round it we came suddenly in view of the house . . . and we sat there, for an instant, both of us, just staring at it.

  It wasn’t the Romney that either of us had thought of coming to—warm and hospitable and lovely in its simple dignity. It lay there in front of us dark and silent, and in some way forbidding. The rain lashed against the old brick, the wind tore desperately at the heavy purple and white wisteria vines until they writhed like whips. The shutters swung crazily, banging and crashing in the night, and the faint shadowy glimmer that came through the elliptical fanlight over the white door only made it eerier, as if something dark and stealthy moved inside there.

  And suddenly from close behind us came that scream once more.

  I clenched my hands on the wheel involuntarily, and I saw Dan’s big hands tighten on his knees.

  “What in God’s name is that, Grace?”

  It’s silly to say it, but I definitely had to steady my voice. “It sounds like Cassandra,” I said.

  It’s absurd, now, to say that the weird memory I had then of something I hadn’t thought of for years and years would have had any significance, if it hadn’t been for the incredible things that did happen at Romney. For Cassandra, you remember, was the seeress doomed by the gods to be always right, never to be believed . . . and when she comes back with Agamemnon, after the fall of Troy, she stands before his fated house, screaming, stricken with the fearful vision of the eaves dripping blood and the smoke of blood rising from its walls, and herself and Agamemnon murdered by his queen.

  The headlights moved across the porch and the silent bricks and stretched, as I put my foot on the brake, down a long grassy alley between wind-racked lines of somber box. They rested, as I came to a full stop and switched off the engine, on a great blue and red and white target, and picked out, clearly visible to my astonished eyes, a single arrow stuck and left in its golden heart. And with that sight coming as it did, so abruptly on the weird memory of that other far-off homecoming that had raced through my mind, I sat perfectly still, staring at it.

  “I must,” I thought, “be losing my mind entirely.”

  Dan’s voice, sane and practical, came to my ears with almost a shock of relief.

  “I see Mother still plays Robin Hood,” he said. “Wonder if she still wears that Lincoln green get-up with the feather in her hat?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “What I wonder is if the rest of us have to take all the skin off our arms playing Robin Hood too?”

  “Certainly,” Dan said. “Unless, of course,” he added, in his mother’s most perfect manner, “you don’t want to cooperate.”

  I looked out at the dark house, eerie and forbidding in the violent night.

  “I’m not sure there’s anybody around to co-operate with,” I said. “Are you sure 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 dem
on 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 enormous!”

  And he was, beside her fragile Dresden-china figure in crimson chiffon, her white hair piled in Vigée-Lebrun curls on the top of her delicate head. He lifted her gaily off her feet, gave her a resounding kiss, and set her down again, flushed and radiant.

  Rick Winthrop had got lazily up and come forward. There was something so grudging and perfunctory about his slow “Hello, how are you?” and his handshake that Dan’s good-natured grin froze again, so abruptly that even Irene, who makes a point of never noticing anything that doesn’t please her, noticed it. Her purling laugh wavered for just an instant as she turned with Dan to Major Tillyard.

  “You remember Dan, Sidney.”

  “Yes, indeed!” Major Tillyard said. They shook hands cordially. Major Tillyard turned to me. “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”

  “I’ve been away a lot,” I said, thinking it was odd how well I seemed to know him, seeing him as little as I did, and how very well he looked—prosperous and satisfied with himself.

  Irene was babbling merrily along. “Dan, darling! I do want you to meet Natalie—”

  That was as far as she got. Mara’s dark flat little voice interrupted.

  “I should think he ought to meet Cheryl, first,” she said.

  3

  In the instant’s silence that fell I saw her look across at the auburn-haired girl, who was astonishingly good-looking, now that I was seeing her properly, and in some way exactly the kind of girl I should have expected Rick Winthrop to marry. She smiled, but ever so faintly, her green eyes changing, and I gathered more clearly than if she had spoken that there was no love lost between her and Mara. Then Irene’s light laughter gaily wiped the slate.

  “Of course. Your sister-in-law . . . Cheryl, dear—this is Dan . . .”

  And knowing—because Irene, without saying anything, had managed to say so much about the young woman who had married her elder son expecting a sinecure—what that “dear” was costing her, I looked again at the handsome auburn-haired girl beside him. I saw the smooth but firm set of her jaw, and her hazel-green eyes, and her mouth, not tight-lipped but definitely not soft and yielding; and I found myself wondering, with the first amusement I’d felt since I’d arrived, if it could be possible that Irene had at last met her match, and more than that, had it permanently—like a hair shirt—under her own roof.

  The girl still hadn’t moved, or changed the faintly smiling curve of her red lips. I realized abruptly that there was something wrong in the room, something more than odd about the deafening silence that had fallen on it as this girl was looking at Dan. I turned and glanced up at him. He was standing, his back a little to his mother, absolutely rooted to the floor, his face quite colorless, his eyes blank, his lips parted stupidly, staring—not at the auburn-haired girl, but at the other girl who stood beside Mara, her back to
us.

  Irene’s voice cut the silence almost sharply.

  “Cheryl—this is Dan!”

  The girl turned, supporting herself lightly against the solid Chippendale chair, her hands gripping the back until her knuckles were like a row of white marbles in her brown hands.

  I saw then for the first time that her hair was gold, her eyes as blue as sapphires . . .

  I looked back at Dan Winthrop. I wouldn’t know how a man looks when he merely finds the Holy Grail . . . but I do know how he looks when he finds it only to know he has lost it forever, because it belongs to another man. For I realized, with a lurch of my heart and a feeling almost too sick to bear, that the auburn-haired girl was not Cheryl Winthrop, that she was Natalie, whom Dan was supposed to marry, and that Cheryl was the slim fragile girl who stood next to Mara . . . and that she was the girl of Vezeley, with hair the color of ripe wheat in the sun and eyes blue as faded hyacinths.

  It seemed to me an eternity that they stood there, looking at each other. I could feel, rather than see, Rick Winthrop’s sullen sleepy eyes moving from one to the other of them, slowly. They were still motionless, and speechless. Irene wasn’t. She couldn’t have fluttered more charmingly, but her voice had a steelier note than I’d ever heard in it before, through all the years I’d known her:

  “Cheryl . . . why have you never told us you and Dan were . . . acquainted?”