The Eagles Gather

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  “It is the same as ever,” murmured Adelaide. But no one heard her. She could see the intense green grass and the beautiful trees and the gardens through the windows. A Henri Bouchard to this daguerrotype was incredible. It was no other sound.

  A young woman came towards them, smiling reservedly. She laid down a book she had evidently been reading. She came across the smooth floors, which reflected her straight and slender figure like bright shadowy water. Her step was serene, quick yet unhurried, and very firm, and only a certain stiffness and definiteness of carriage prevented her from being extremely graceful of movement. She carried her small head high, with a touch of cold arrogance. Everything about her was narrow, hard and slender, except her thin shoulders, which were broad and level. She wore a dress of a deep blue and white print, which covered the knees of her slim sure legs, and was high in the throat. Her black straight hair, uncut, was wound smoothly in a roll at the base of her neck. Her eyes were nut-brown, without softness, and very direct and disingenuous. There was not a feature in the narrow somewhat Latin face which was beautiful; the nose was too long and too thin and prominent; the mouth was hard, straight and colorless; the cheek-bones, unpowdered, were too high and ridge-like; the chin was square and uncompromising. Her expression was forthright, yet reserved, with no graciousness. Yet, she had breeding and smartness, and a certain magnetism, for all her lines were clean-cut and sharp, and there was no fuzziness or vagueness about her, such as there was about Adelaide, and even about Celeste.

  Edith came directly to Adelaide, and extended a brown, veined hand to her, like a boy’s. Her smile lessened its reserve. “Aunt Adelaide? I am Edith, you know.” And she bent and kissed Adelaide’s flushed old cheek. Adelaide caught an odor of good soap and clean firm flesh. This overcame the bad effect on her of hard disingenuousness and sharp competence, and a well-bred English voice that was too metallic for her ear.

  “My dear,” she said gently, holding that dry brown hand in her own, “I should have known you again. You have not changed much since you were a child.” She turned to her son and daughter. “Perhaps you remember Christopher? And Celeste?”

  “How are you, Christopher? And Celeste?” Her more friendly smile, now, revealed big white teeth, which glistened in the darkness of her face. She gave them her hand. Celeste was already afraid of her, and colored brightly. But Christopher smiled into his cousin’s face. They were almost of a height, for she was rather tall. “Hello, Edith,” he said. “I see you have improved. You were an awful brat.”

  Adelaide was horrified; Celeste colored more than ever. But Edith, after the first stare, laughed. Her laugh, like her voice, was high and British, but quite unaffected.

  “And you apparently are no better than the other Bouchards,” she said. They regarded each other with humorous caution. Adelaide was surprised at this mysterious rapprochement. She was always being surprised like this. Her unvarying courtesy and kind thoughtfulness never received much acknowledgment from people like these; in fact, they seemed to arouse their indifference or disdain. Their own kind, however, could bully and insult them, and be bullied and insulted by them in return, and the utmost understanding was the result. She was always at a loss, and always vaguely frightened by this understanding, which pushed her aside as though she were a fool whose opinions could not possibly have any weight, and whose observations could only be futile and silly. She finally was convinced that they despised her sort, which was quite true.

  Edith, almost unbending now, turned to Celeste, and kissed the brightly flushed cheek. Celeste looked like a beautiful child in comparison with this compact young woman, for she was much smaller and more delicate, and appeared all softness and sweetness and shyness. Edith regarded her, her nut-brown eyes direct and critical. A foolish little creature, she thought. Probably without much intelligence; but a dear. I can see that: a little dear. She felt quite affectionate towards her young cousin, and candidly admired the dark-blue eyes that shone in the shadow of the hat as though they were newly polished.

  “You were such a baby when I saw you last, Celeste,” she said. “Six or seven, perhaps. But so pretty.”

  She led them into the drawing-room, where they sat down. She showed no signs of self-consciousness. Adelaide nervously removed her gloves. Celeste, miserable as she was always miserable (for no reason known to herself), in the presence of people like Edith Bouchard, sat in silence on the edge of her chair. All her pleasure was gone. She wished she were home. She glanced under the brim of her big leghorn hat at her cousin, and was surprised at her own overwhelming sensation of dislike and fear. Edith was talking now to Christopher; her laugh came with a trifle less reluctance. Her unpowdered dark cheekbones gleamed in the radiant half-light. Her big white teeth sparkled. Now she appeared very attractive and more magnetic than ever. She had small hard breasts under the well-cut dress; all her gestures were decided, yet charming. Her neat slender ankles were crossed, and displayed to advantage the narrow patrician feet in black slippers. Christopher had given her a cigarette, and had lighted it for her. As he did so, their eyes met, and Edith smiled again. Now a faint flush appeared on the prominent cheekbones.

  Celeste had never heard Christopher talk so freely to anyone before. He was audacious, she thought, puzzled. Now, with smiling derision, he was remarking on Edith’s seclusiveness. Apparently she was not offended, for she laughed, without, however, any comment. Celeste listened to her brother’s toneless but apparently sincere laughter, and was more wretched than ever. Now she felt positive aversion to Edith. Adelaide sat in silence, smiling painfully and mechanically. The smile became fixed. Celeste knew that her mother was suffering, and her young heart warmed with sympathy. But she wondered why it was that they both suffered like this when with people of Edith’s kind. She wondered why they shrank when cold hard eyes like these glanced at them so piercingly, and so openly scornful. Were they, perhaps, really fools, as those eyes accused them of being?

  Adelaide moistened her lips and proffered a timid remark about the regained beauty of the grounds and the house. Edith listened with a faint cold darkening of her face. “But you surely don’t intend living here?” asked Christopher. Adelaide colored, for she thought him extremely rude.

  Edith apparently did not consider him unduly rude. She shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?” she asked bluntly. “I like it. I was born here. It’s better than most I’ve seen in this city.”

  “It is my opinion,” said Adelaide in a rush of eager placating words, “that Robin’s Nest is still the most beautiful house in Windsor. Your grandmother was noted for her taste, Edith.”

  Edith glanced up at the portrait over the chill marble fireplace. A faint bright gleam lay upon the mournful painted face and somber eyes. “They say I resemble her,” said the young woman. Adelaide looked first at the portrait and then at Edith, and murmured something under her breath, and seemed embarrassed. Looking in confusion about the room for a place to rest her eyes she saw another portrait facing that of Gertrude Barbour. She exclaimed involuntarily. She had seen this portrait in the house of old Lucy Van Eyck, in New York. It was that of Ernest Barbour, great-grandfather of Edith. Adelaide had always feared and disliked Ernest Barbour, in spite of his open admiration and fondness for her. He had been dead many years, she reflected, nearly twenty-seven, in fact. Yet she could remember those pale inexorable eyes, the big Napoleonic head, the broad stocky shoulders, the heavy sullen mouth, as though she had seen him only yesterday. The portrait was an excellent one, painted when the subject was less than fifty, and had been a present to his wife, May Sessions. Ernest had looked directly and impatiently at the artist, who had been a brilliant one, apparently, for he had kept the face, with the exception of the eyes, in comparative shadow, and had only suggested the neck and shoulders. And so the eyes looked out of the canvas as though alive, and were so vital, so implacable, so full of power, that Adelaide felt her heart quickening with the old fear.

  Edith was speaking. She was explaining the absence of
her brother and stepfather, who had been out for a drive. Only a moment or two before the arrival of the guests Henri had called his sister to apologize for being late: there had been a minor accident to the car. However, they were now expected momentarily.

  She added that Henri was going to New York tomorrow, Monday, but would return before the week-end. At that time she intended to have a “gathering of the clan,” an informal dinner for the whole Bouchard family in Windsor. Christopher raised his pale brown eyebrows without remark; one corner of his mouth twitched. He was thinking of Henri’s visit to New York.

  Celeste had added nothing to the conversation. She had murmured and smiled painfully whenever it was expected of her. The backs of her little white hands were damp with misery. She wished she were sitting next to her mother instead of in this wing chair of mahogany and dark rose silken brocade. The radiant sun that lay along the flowered windowsills and the edge of the polished floor hurt her eyes. She surreptitiously took off her hat, and the dark glistening hair lay in ringlets against her pale cheeks; She seemed more of a child than ever. Edith’s thoughts had often touched her curiously. She was not so sure, now, that Celeste was a foolish little creature, for she had caught Celeste’s blue eyes fixed upon her with a strange and penetrating expression. She reminded Edith of one of those sheltered and demure young French girls whose very clarity and unmurkiness of spirit enabled them to come to subtle and astute conclusions. She wondered, with some interest, what the girl thought of her, and had a slightly amused but unflattering idea.

  There were muffled footsteps approaching, and two men came across the rugs. Adelaide turned and could hardly suppress a cry, for the younger of the two bore the most astounding resemblance to the portrait of Ernest Barbour. She blinked at him, profoundly shaken, her mind in a whirl, time rolling back on itself in her senses. This young man, stocky, slightly shorter than his tall sister, pale and implacable of eye, sultry of mouth, with a crest of thick vital hair springing upward and back from his forehead, might indeed have been Ernest Barbour in his youth. Adelaide remembered, now, having seen a faded daguerreotype of the young Ernest, which had been the most cherished possession of old Florabelle, Jules’ mother, and the resemblance of Henri Bouchard to this daguerreotype was incredible. It was grotesque; it was impossible.

  He greeted his aunt with grave courtesy but complete indifference. His voice and manners were British and punctilious. Dazed, she listened to his voice, and it seemed to her that she was hearing again the voice of a man dead for a generation. When old Thomas Van Eyck greeted her, she could hardly reply to him. But when his dry old hand held hers she became suddenly conscious of warmth and goodness and kindliness and innocence. She looked up into the old seamed face with the gentle if not too subtle eyes. A good old man, and something tense and bitter in her relaxed, like the coming of tears. She had seen him many years ago, in his mother’s house, in New York, and then only once or twice. Life, and the Bouchards, and the multitudinous and predatory hosts like them, had not destroyed his innocence, had not mortally wounded his heart. He spoke to her in his gentle vague voice, and she replied. When he sat down beside her, and smiled at her so gently, so kindly, her tired bent body turned towards him with gratitude and understanding. We are both old, she thought, and we both know what has nearly killed us. I am embittered, but he has been above embitterment.

  She missed the meeting between Celeste and her cousin, Henri. Edith had been called to answer a long-distance telephone call from New York, so Christopher was the only witness. For some reason he watched acutely, missing nothing. He saw a bright color run over Celeste’s face as she shook hands with Henri. He saw her painful uncertain smile, her aching shyness. She betrayed her lack of contact with young men in her self-conscious stammer, her color, her eyes which seemed to look desperately for shelter and hiding. But Christopher, smiling secretly to himself, was satisfied, for it was evident that she was a great surprise to the sophisticated Henri, who was regarding her with open pleasure and bold curiosity: Her demureness and shyness impressed him; her natural loveliness most obviously excited him. He wanted to see how much of all this was affectation, and how much, real. So he drew a chair close to hers, and began to talk to her in a low voice, bending his big head forward that he might miss nothing of a glance or change of color. The poor girl was in misery; when she was forced to look at him she almost quailed. She wrung her handkerchief in her hands; her face was suffused. When she smiled, it was a smile of pain. Henri was diverted; it was evident, from his greeting to Christopher, and the monosyllables that he had directed at his sister and his aunt, that he was not a talkative young man. Yet he talked to Celeste almost insistently, his eyes fixed on her face.

  “If I had remembered that you were here, I should have come back sooner,” Christopher heard him say. Celeste laughed; her voice seemed to catch in her throat, as though she were choking. She tried to look directly at her cousin, and blushed more violently than ever.

  The girl’s lack of coquetry, her lack of knowledge of the art of flirtation, were charming. Her hands lifted to make gestures that were never quite completed, for her confusion was growing.

  Thomas Van Eyck was talking vaguely and mildly to Adelaide. She listened more to the sound of his voice than to his words. She kept thinking: how blessed it is to be in the presence of a gentleman again! And then she was curious: how could such a gentleman endure the Bouchards, and be able to live with them? How could he endure Edith and Henri? She glanced at Henri furtively, to discover what it was that made him endurable to his old stepfather. Then her eye quickened, widened with alarm. Her heart rose and shivered. For she saw Henri’s face.

  She must have started, or moved, for old Thomas looked in the direction in which she was looking. Without Adelaide’s start, or perhaps faint exhalation of breath, he would have seen only a young man being agreeable to a pretty guest. But the almost imperceptible gesture Adelaide had made focussed his attention, and he saw what she was seeing. He gazed at the young man and the girl earnestly, and as he did so a dim grave shadow moved over his face.

  Edith re-entered the room, calm and dark. She suggested that, as Adelaide had remarked on the beauty of the gardens, they all visit them for a few minutes before tea. Adelaide, trembling with something she could not explain, rose eagerly. The men were forced to rise, also. Celeste lifted her eyes to her mother’s face, as though she had been startled from a dream that gave her both excitement and apprehension. There was a bright aloof expression in her eyes, and her mouth had parted childishly.

  They went out into the gardens. Adelaide had laid her hand on Thomas’ proffered arm. He was explaining something to her; she could not listen. All her senses were centered on the young couple in the rear, behind Christopher and Edith. She heard Celeste’s laughter, breathless and self-conscious. Her hand tightened on Thomas’ arm as though desperately grasping it for assistance.

  “You have never seen the gardens at Versailles?” Henri was asking Celeste, raising his thick, rather light eyebrows. “You have never been to France?” His clipped British voice sounded incredulous. “But you must see Versailles. The gardens, I believe, are the most beautiful in the world. We have tried to reproduce the effect of them here, a little.” He glanced about him complacently.

  Celeste somewhat forgot her confusion in admiration of the beautiful formal effect of the gardens. Nothing was pretty, but everything was classic and rather massive. The thick green grass was clipped to a plush uniformity, perfectly flat and without a natural rise or fall. They were approaching an artificial terrace, which rose about three feet above the normal level; three broad marble steps, more than twelve feet wide, allowed one to mount the terrace onto another and greater level. On each side of the steps were huge marble pots of oleanders. Once standing on the upper level, one could see formal avenues of trees stretching away on either side. Directly ahead was a park-like grove, in the center of which were a geometrical series of flower beds grouped about a fountain. Marble benches were scatter
ed about at the best points under the trees. Beyond the grove were the rose gardens, at their best on this June day.

  The western sun had been wound about with rose-colored gauze, and a cool wind had arisen, pungent with the smell of grass newly wet from hosings. Now as evening began “to approach, the multitudes of birds were preparing to sing their last songs. The air was full of chirpings and trills and distant calls and the flutter and brush of wings. The trees murmured in an awakened monotone. Their upper branches were faintly stained with rose, in which the leaves moved restlessly. There were no sounds in this profound and beautiful peace, except the sound of the trees and the birds and the fountain. Behind them, on the lower level, the strollers could see the house, Georgian and formal, the windows standing open, the ivy rippling on the stone walls. The upper windows were slowly brightening into golden fire; a bluish shadow was already rising, like water, on the lower walls, giving the ivy a purple tinge.

  The rose garden was more intimate, full of banks of pink, white, yellow and crimson flowers. The fragrance was almost overpowering. Edith had brought a basket and scissors, and proceeded to cut the freshest and most dewy blooms for Adelaide. (She seemed to know that there were practically no flowers at Endur.) They lay in the basket, delicate heaps of colored folded petals and brilliant green leaves, and in their death, already beginning, they exhaled a more exquisite odor. Light seemed to lie along the edges of petal and leaf; globes of quicksilver ran over them. The rising wind suddenly shook the whole garden into a tide of color, and snowstorms of pink and gold and white blew into the air and then fell onto the grass.