Three Bright Pebbles Read online

  It must be hard indeed, with a whole golden universe lying shattered around you, to feel the sudden flick of the lash, on a spot where your heart is the most vulnerable . . . and neither of them could have failed to recognize that note in Irene’s voice.

  Cheryl stood an instant, stunned and hurt, like a child struck full in the face by someone quite strange, and turned slowly around. I didn’t know, then, whether she realized there was nothing she could say to answer her mother-in-law’s question, or whether it was the way Rick Winthrop was looking at her, the expression on his face inexplicable to me. I did know that it wasn’t inexplicable to her. Whether it was a challenge or an accusation, I couldn’t tell; something, certainly, that it shouldn’t have been, probably would not have been if Rick hadn’t been drinking far more than was good for him or anybody, not only that day but for many many days before.

  I saw Cheryl’s slim bare back stiffen defensively, and the color deepen slowly in her high exquisitely modeled cheeks. If she could have spoken before, she couldn’t possibly now. Nor could Dan. If you dissect the loveliest butterfly it’s a mess; the most delicate and complex frost pattern on a window is a drop of dirty water in your hand. How could either of them tell any of these people that they’d sat up all night in front of a tiny cathedral on a little hill in a plain in France, and that the patron of a village bistro that had oleanders blooming at the door had brought them chocolate and croissants at half-past four in the morning, because they were amusing young Americans who had declined his own room . . . when everything would have been so entirely discreet?—I could see him shrugging his shoulders—“Ah, les Americains!”—and raising his fat peasant hands.

  Or how could either of them say that they’d shaken hands and said good-bye, and waved good-bye again, Cheryl from her rattletrap French car on the sunny plain, Dan from the fence by the door of the little cathedral on the hill, not knowing each other’s name, not knowing, yet, that that simple starry night had so changed both their lives? They couldn’t have told it. No one in that room would have believed it if they had. No one but Mara, and Mara could believe anything. She still believed that Alan Keane was an innocent man, and he had served thirteen months in a Federal prison because no one else believed it.

  Irene’s perfect genius of tact in just such moments is a byword in Washington, in Aiken and Newport, anywhere, in fact, on the Eastern seaboard where there are tables like the one we were at and where it’s so easy, these days, to mix inadvertently new deals and old, both foreign and domestic. But Irene, still with that fixed sweet smile of inquiry on her lovely face, was obviously smoothing no paths for her daughter-in-law.

  And that increased and deadening silence lengthened almost unbearably, until the auburn-haired girl by my side did her best by putting in—and I don’t think she meant it in the least to sound as bad as Mara Winthrop’s quick retort made it sound—“I’m sure it was quite all right!”

  “Has anybody suggested there was anything not all right?” Mara demanded instantly, with positively devastating smoothness. “—And as Mother was saying before Dan went native on us, this is Miss Lane, Dan—Natalie to you—and this is Grace Latham, Cheryl and Natalie . . . for her sins a friend and relative. And now that that’s over, Mother, couldn’t we eat? Grace and Dan must be starved.”

  “Oh, of course they must!” Irene cried charmingly, and I thought she gave her daughter a not entirely ungrudging glance of admiration for her rather heavy-handed but effective putting things in place. She drew Dan down in the chair beside her, and I took the one between Natalie Lane and Major Tillyard. I looked at Mara again. Her pointed little face under its cloud of dark hair was perfectly expressionless except for the droop at the corners of her wide unrouged mouth. Was her defense of Cheryl, I wondered, because she liked her—or because she didn’t like Natalie Lane? Or did it spring from something deeper than that, some passionate sense of justice that her own moody little soul had invented, and made a cross for all her family to bear? She’d always, I knew, been a sharp thorn in her mother’s side, from the day Irene first discovered she had a changeling in the cradle and that all the pretty frilly things made for baby girls made Mara look rather like an Armenian refugee, and act worse. When the boys were brought in and proudly exhibited, little Mara was always left in the nursery. I could still hear Irene’s gay careless voice: “Mara? Oh my dear, she’s quite unpresentable . . . such an odd little creature . . . but I’m sure she’ll be awfully interesting when she grows up!”

  I looked again at the small pointed face and great somber eyes reflected under the flowers in the candle-lit Empire plateau. There might be something in it, I thought, but next to the lovely golden oval of the face of the girl sitting next to her, her long lashes brushing her flushed cheek, it didn’t seem very like it.

  I glanced down the table at Rick Winthrop, as big as Dan and with the same blond hair, with broad square shoulders that looked even broader in his perfectly tailored white dinner jacket. He’d always been far handsomer than Dan, I realized with a kind of minor shock that he wasn’t now. The thing in Dan’s face that made him so attractive and engaging wasn’t visible in Rick’s; his cheeks were heavy, his dark eyes brooding and sullen and the flesh around them puffy, his full mouth sagged at the corners. The contours that had made him so much better looking than Dan were coarsened and blurred. He had wasted what nature had given him, and wasted it in a short time, I thought. Three years before, when I’d seen the most of him, he hadn’t gone quite so much to the fleshpots. I glanced back at Cheryl, wondering vaguely what could have happened to him. He hadn’t, obviously, gone completely off, or he’d never have married this girl. Heaven knows there was nothing of the fleshpots about her. She was more like a willow branch tipped with gold in the spring than like the glamour girls one heard vaguely that Rick trained with around 52nd Street. I found myself wondering how it could have happened, this marriage, and what they were thinking now, the two of them, their eyes fixed steadily throughout dinner on the delicate juicy soft crab and water cress, the tender broiled chicken and young asparagus and spiced sweet potato balls, and the tipsy squire pudding that had been a specialty at Romney when General Washington dined there, that old Yarborough’s white-gloved hands successively placed in front of them and removed barely touched. Through it all Irene’s light chatter rippled, like threaded rose and silver through a dark woof, or sunflecked froth on a portentous sea.

  4

  When Yarborough had brought coffee and closed the pantry doors, Irene put her bare elbows on the polished table and leaned forward, her smooth chin resting on the back of her clasped jeweled fingers. A hush fell over the table, and in the mirror of the Empire plateau I saw the corners of Mara Winthrop’s mouth droop and the sides of her nostrils as sensitive as harp strings quiver, and her whole dark little body grow suddenly perfectly still. She had been waiting for this. So had all the rest of them—even the girl next to her. I looked at her, and our eyes met for the first time, just as Irene said, in her most charming voice:

  “Grace dear, you must tell us everything you’ve been doing, you look too fit, really you do! What have you been up to? And Dan, I know you’re simply dying to talk Paris! How was the trip over? Was it awful?”

  A quick smile flickered for an instant behind Cheryl Winthrop’s long gold-tipped lashes and was gone, as Irene, without waiting for Dan to speak—and heaven knows he looked less like a man dying to talk Paris than anyone I’d ever seen—went rippling along.

  “I did want all of you together tonight! Because Sidney—” she held out one lovely hand to the man at her side—“Sidney has finally persuaded me there’s no use of our waiting any longer. We’re going to get married!”

  She paused brightly and looked around. Good seeds, I’m afraid, never fell on thornier ground. That they had all known it for several weeks didn’t seem entirely to account for it. Even Natalie Lane, who tried to look pleased and interested, didn’t succeed particularly well. Irene, if she noticed it, didn’t mind, a
nd neither, apparently, did Major Tillyard. He looked affectionately pleased, and really quite nice.

  “Of course, the real point is that this is a sort of . . . well, a sort of council of war,” Irene said.

  Dan’s eyes caught mine. I looked away quickly, and across at Mara, staring with unseeing eyes into the bottom of her green Worcester coffee cup.

  “You see,” Irene said—she looked earnestly about at her small brood—“your father was so anxious for you all to have the benefit of the money he worked so hard to make—”

  There was a sudden violent motion at the end of the table as Rick Winthrop pushed his chair back and got to his feet so abruptly—and unsteadily—that his chair went crashing to the floor behind him. He turned, smashed his foot violently into it and swung back to us, facing his mother over the candles. I saw that up to that point I hadn’t at all realized how definitely he was under the influence—as my grandmother used to put it in the days when no gentleman was ever intoxicated.

  “Then why don’t you divide it between us, and cut out all this harping about what father wanted!” he said bitterly. “Why don’t you let us get the benefit of it, instead of keeping us tied to your apron strings, having to grovel for every penny we get! Then marry Tillyard, if you want to, and the rest of us’ll clear out! Then—”

  “Oh, shut up, Rick.”

  It was Dan’s voice, quietly matter-of-fact, that interrupted that extraordinary tirade. The rest of us sat, too stunned to do anything but stare at him open-mouthed . . . even Irene, so much more used to Rick’s unbridled furies than the rest of us.

  Rick turned, his dark eyes bloodshot, his mouth trembling.

  “It’s all right for you to talk. You don’t have to take it—you never have had to. You’ve always had a way of getting whatever you wanted without the trouble of paying for it.”

  I still don’t know how it was that everybody at that table knew instantly what it was that Rick meant. He didn’t look at Cheryl . . . but we did know, just as surely as if he’d said it. Maybe it was because he stopped short himself, as if he too was shocked by it. But there it was, as ugly and revolting as if he’d taken a whip and lashed it across her face.

  Dan got slowly to his feet, white with rage, his jaw set like a steel trap. He stood motionless for an instant, turned and walked over to the door.

  “Would you mind stepping outside?” he said, his voice so dreadfully quiet that gooseflesh stood suddenly on my arms.

  Rick Winthrop moved around the long table.

  “We’ll settle it right here!” he shouted.

  Irene’s voice was a low terrible moan. “Boys, please! Oh, please!” If I’d ever thought her incapable of a very deep emotion—and I had—I’d been wrong. She leaned her head back against her chair, her face white as death. “Please, please!”

  Cheryl got instantly to her feet, her face pale and set.

  “Don’t be a fool, Rick,” she said quietly. “And please, Dan, come back. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He . . . he isn’t himself.”

  She turned quickly to her mother-in-law. “If you’ll excuse me, please, Irene—I’d like to go to my room.”

  Irene nodded without opening her eyes. Major Tillyard, who’d got up as Rick left his place, stood there looking down at her, his face hard and angry. Then he said, controlling his voice with an effort. “Perhaps if I left too, Irene, this might be a little less . . . difficult.”

  She held out her hand.

  “No, no, Sidney—please stay. Natalie, you go with Cheryl. The rest of you stay here. Come back, Dan. Sit down, Rick.”

  For a moment no one moved except Natalie Lane, who got up and out like a streak of lightning. Dan closed the door and came back to his place. Rick picked up his chair and sat down, his face mottled, his eyes fixed on the lace mat in front of him. And all the time Mara sat there, motionless, her short thick black lashes shading her dark eyes, two hot dull spots burning in her cheeks, her brown sensitive little hands folded quiescent on the table in front of her. I don’t know why that should have surprised me so, and alarmed me too, in a way; for when she finally moved it was to give her mother a look that was utterly disillusioned and at the same time totally inscrutable. That was when Irene, having I suppose so much more survival value than most people—and I still think she had, really, in spite of the way things turned out—moved forward in her chair again, and smiled wanly.

  “Now don’t you two think you’re being pretty silly? You’re forgetting you’re brothers . . . and Dan’s come back after being away so long! And the French look at these things so differently! Now, now, Dan—you mustn’t be ridiculous!”

  I thought for a moment that Dan was going to invite her outside too, and I’m not sure he wouldn’t have if Mara hadn’t said quickly, “Wouldn’t it be a good plan if Dan would come out and say plainly where he and Cheryl knew each other? That seems to be what’s holding up this . . . this council of war, as Mother calls it. We ought at least to try to keep it from becoming a blood purge.”

  I looked at Dan. He sat there tight-lipped and silent. Before there had been nothing he could say. Now, I knew, there was nothing he would say, even if he could.

  Mara looked away quickly. “Then let’s skip it. And maybe Rick’ll let Mother finish what she was going to say.”

  Irene raised her arched brows.

  “So sweet of you, lamb,” she murmured, with a charming smile.

  Mara flushed.

  “It’s of as much interest to me and Dan to hear what you’re going to say as it is to Rick,” she said. It was almost painfully casual.

  Her mother smiled again.

  “As a matter of fact, Mara,” she said, rather gently, “—whatever disposition of your father’s money I may make, I shall certainly have to put definite restrictions on the use you put yours to.”

  Rick Winthrop’s slow voice, angry and also a little blurred, spoke from the end of the table. “—And I’d like to say that if I see that jailbird around here again, I’ll fill him full of buckshot.”

  Mara got up abruptly.

  “If somebody doesn’t do it to you first,” she said. “May I be excused, please, Mother?”

  Irene’s voice was even a little bored. “Certainly not, Mara. Sit down, and don’t be dramatic.”

  Mara’s eyes smouldered with angry resentment.

  “I’m not being dramatic—and I won’t sit down. I’ll not stay around and be treated like a feeble-minded child!”

  “Then quit acting like one, darling.”

  “Everything I want to do you keep me from—you’ve done it all my life! I’d have run away and married Alan . . . but I’ve got a right to part of my father’s money, and I’m going to have it!”

  Irene’s voice was composed and pleasant—and impervious.

  “Not, darling, if you insist on marrying the unemployed son of a tenant farmer.”

  “He wouldn’t be unemployed if all of you hadn’t ganged up on him and kept him from getting a job!” Mara cried. “And what if he is the son of a tenant farmer? Where would Romney be if it weren’t for a tenant farmer?”

  Major Tillyard spoke with a quiet authority that I thought would calm her. “He could have gone somewhere else and started over, Mara.”

  She whirled around at him, her dark eyes filled with scalding tears.

  “Yes—for how long? Until they found he’d been in prison! But that’s not why he didn’t go somewhere else—he didn’t go because he’s innocent . . . and he’s not afraid of coming back here where he can prove it!”

  “He’s had every chance to prove it, Mara,” Major Tillyard said wearily. “I admire your loyalty, my dear—but it’s badly out of keeping with the facts. We gave—”

  Irene put a delicate white hand on his arm.

  “Please don’t go into that again! Mara’s just a silly child. She’s hardly likely to marry a penniless boy. She can’t even wash out her own stockings.—Sit down, Mara.”

  Mara stood a moment, choked and irresolut
e, turned with a stifled sob and groped blindly toward the door.

  “Come back to the table, Mara,” Irene said—quietly, but the velvet glove sort of thing if I ever heard it.

  “Oh, let the kid go, Mother,” Dan put in abruptly.

  Rick Winthrop leaned forward.

  “It’s all right with you if she marries a thief, I suppose? You’ll always get yours, in spite of jailbirds and . . . fortune hunters.”

  He looked at Sidney Tillyard, his eyes sullen, his face flushed.

  “Now you’re being offensive, Rick!” Irene said sharply.

  Dan looked at me, his lips twisted in a bitter smile. He got up.

  “The council of war doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere,” he said. “Good night, Mother. I’ll . . . see you in the morning.—What about a stroll in the rain, Grace?”

  Irene nodded to me, and I went out with him. He opened the big front door with its smooth rubbed pine panels between fluted pilasters, with their carved acanthus capitals and we stepped outside onto the porch. The wind still rocked the branches of the old tulip poplars beyond the lawns, and shivered down the box alleys. The broad waters of the Potomac were dark except for the lights of a single river boat moving slowly on its way to the Chesapeake. The rain came in sharp gusts, wetting our faces. But the air was clean again, not sultry and leaden, as it had been in Georgetown . . . or charged with bitterness as it had been inside those lovely old mauve brick walls.

  Neither of us spoke. There seemed after all so pitifully little to say. Dan lighted a cigarette. As he tossed the match on the gravel path he raised his head, listening. I heard a faint sound coming from the dining room end of the house. It stopped then, as abruptly as it had begun, and the figure of a man, dressed in work overalls, a battered gray hat pulled down to keep the rain from his face, came out of the shadows. He was walking on the grass, not moving stealthily, but walking so that his feet were noiseless on the sodden lawn.

  He stopped when he saw us, and hesitated. Then he recognized Dan and touched his hat.