Mildred, even at that moment, was trying to repair the damage that water and wind had done to her hair. Dorothy’s face, except in animation, seemed just a face. Now she stared dubiously down at footprints which marked the gray dust over a priceless Aubusson carpet.
“Where’s Uncle Joel?” she demanded. “Where’s the blazing fire and the hot Tom-and-Jerry and the Christmas tree with the candles? Where’re the other guests? Don’t tell me we’re the only heirs with an eye to the main chance?”
“We’ll rouse somebody,” I promised, with a heartiness that I did not feel. Holding the lamp so that its light pointed down the hall, I started out, Dorothy and Mildred flanking me. From time to time we paused to peer past rich and dusty hangings into high vaulted rooms which were somehow dark and tomblike and—waiting, it seemed to me. Everything was in one somber key. Even the massive pipe organ in the drawing room looked as if it had been used only for dirges.
There was an immense dark cedar in the sitting room, festooned and dully glistening with a thousand silver ropes. “Just where it stood that other Christmas!” Dorothy said wonderingly. “Pinch me, will you?” If it reminded her of the past it was the only familiar thing in that house. And even the tree, as we gave it a casual passing glance, seemed the most grim and cheerless Christmas tree that ever bloomed.
“Hello!” I shouted again. The echoes died, and then it seemed that an answer came, muffled and dim. It might have been another echo.
“Uncle Joel! Gilbert! Hello—anybody!”
Both girls started when I spoke the second name, and I felt Dorothy’s long thin fingers cut into my arm. “Why did you call for Gilbert?” she demanded, as if it mattered.
“But why not?” I retorted, wondering. “I saw the baggage at the door and thought naturally that he would be the first one here, on account of his sending the telegrams.”
“Oh, but—” began Mildred excitedly.
But her sister cut in. “Of course, Alan.” She smiled at me so nicely that I knew she was up to something. But whatever it was I knew that she had no intention of letting me in on it, and I found myself oddly troubled by that fact.
“I hear something!” Mildred cried suddenly. “Someone walking.”
“And clanking his chains?” Dorothy suggested.
I supposed that a gesture was expected of me. “You two wait here,” I told them. “I’ll go and see.” At once both girls clung to me like a puppy to a root.
“No you don’t!” Dorothy burst out. “Not with the only light. You may not be half as tall and broad-shouldered and handsome as I remembered you, and you’re more than a little bald on top, but you’re all we’ve got.”
I took a deep breath. “Hello, Uncle Joel!”
“If he doesn’t hear that, Uncle Joel will never hear anything else in this world with the possible exception of Gabriel’s cornet solo,” Dorothy declared, as the silence crept back into the vaulted hall. “You were loud enough to wake the dead.”
“I think I hear footsteps again,” said Mildred in a small voice.
“The odds are against its being a ghost,” Dorothy comforted her. “It isn’t anywhere near midnight yet. But if it is a ghost, what’ll we say to it?”
All I could think of was “Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” which seemed lacking somehow. The idea of greeting a ghost in that manner struck me as funny, perhaps because I was a little hysterical after the long ride. I started to chuckle.
“You are a comfort, Cousin Alan,” Dorothy said fervently. We continued slowly along the hall which suddenly ended in a doorway and portieres. If I remembered correctly, the library of Prospice lay behind those curtains. Suddenly, as the curtains parted under my hand, I caught a glimpse of a moving light at the other end of the long room.
“Come on!” I cried, and we burst into the library.
Then suddenly we stopped short. In the farthest corner of the room, beneath a rank of half-filled bookshelves, a candle nickered. Then the shadow of a man came between us and the candle, a man who carried the limp body of a woman in a wine-colored evening gown. Her face, whiter than the pearls around her neck, showed a splashed carmine mouth, and it was strangely familiar. Her head was bent back unnaturally and her arms were dangling.
The man came painfully forward to deposit his burden on a divan in front of the empty fireplace. His eyes gleamed yellow-green in the light of the flash lamp, and he was smiling.
“Welcome!” croaked Uncle Joel, in the palest ghost of a voice. He came toward us, his arms outstretched. Then Mildred let go a little dry, soundless scream. “Look!” she cried.
It was then that I noticed the great change which had come over my uncle in the long years since I had last seen him. Not only had the old man lost weight, seeming to shrink within himself, but the hand which he held out to us, his clothing and even his wrinkled face were thickly festooned with gray glistening cobwebs.
II
NOW WILL I SHOW MYSELF
To have more of the serpent than the dove,
That is, more knave than fool….
—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
I STOOD THERE, MILDLY surprised to find that my legs were not carrying me rapidly away. I was more surprised to realize that the reason for this sudden rush of bravery to the head was the presence, not of pretty Mildred, but of Dorothy.
They say that astonishment is a momentary thing, and that in a few seconds one must come to terms even with a ghost. My uncle, though his face was wrinkled like an apple left too long in the cellar, though his features were wreathed horribly in streaming cobwebs, was no ghost.
He cast a very definite shadow in the candlelight, and though the croaking voice which issued from his throat was in keeping with the cobwebs, his words were not.
“Well, are you all crazy?” demanded my uncle impatiently. “Just because that fool sister of mine has a fit of the vapors….”
The woman on the divan moaned feebly, her hand clutching at the string of pearls around her throat. “Oh, isn’t she dead?” little Mildred whispered. The three of us were in such an aggravated state of the jitters that every mouse was a bat and every bat a Dracula.
“Dead!” barked Uncle Joel. “My sister Evelyn will never die! She only becomes younger and more foolish with the years.” We rushed past him to the divan, where the two girls did the usual ineffectual things that one does when people faint.
“I think she’s coming around,” Dorothy announced after a moment, vigorously chafing Aunt Evelyn’s wrists. So she was. The woman on the divan opened her eyes and tried to sit up. Then she looked into the hovering countenance of my uncle Joel, gave a faint gulp, and fainted all over again.
“You ought to do something about your face,” Dorothy suggested, turning to the old man.
Uncle Joel mopped at himself with a handkerchief. “Filthy place, the cellar. I really had no idea how I looked. But it’s full of termites and spiders and rats. No place for me with this sore throat, but somebody had to do it. Fix the wiring, I mean. Every time we’ve tried to use the lights lately a fuse has immediately blown out. With so many of my dear relatives coming for the holidays it seemed… Wait! Whatever are you doing, girl?”
Dorothy as a last desperate measure had thrown some very dead foxglove into the fireplace and then dumped the vase full of water into Aunt Evelyn’s face.
Uncle Joel looked almost angry for a moment, and then his smile came slowly back. “I’m sorry you did that,” he croaked hoarsely. “But no matter. I always keep a bowl of them in here, even though the front of the house has been closed up for so long. In memory of Hester, you see. Her heart stopped beating one night, right where you’re standing.” He was looking at me.
I had heard about that. But I was more interested in tonight’s fainting spell than in a fifteen-year-old tragedy. “What happened?” I demanded, pointing to Aunt Evelyn.
“I’m telling you,” said Uncle Joel testily. “I was down in the cellar trying to find the spot where rats must have gnawed through the wir
ing, and I heard someone walking around up here. I hurried up just as I was, and saw my dear sister prowling around with a candle. Naturally I tiptoed up behind her and said ‘Boo!’ as we used to do when we were kids.”
“Naturally!” I heard Dorothy say softly.
Like the rest of the family, Aunt Evelyn had not seen Joel Cameron since that Christmas more than a decade ago when the family party had broken up into a family quarrel over what families usually quarrel over—money.
True enough, every year there had come invitations asking us all down for Christmas, but usually couched in such a manner that nobody cared to accept. He usually took pains to emphasize the fact that he did not intend to play Santa Claus.
I could well imagine Aunt Evelyn’s feelings when she heard someone coming up behind her, heard a voice, and turned to see her long-lost brother grinning through his cobwebs.
“You looked like nothing so much in the world as a corpse, Joel!” she explained weakly as she finally came out of her faint. I heard Uncle Joel mutter something about its being the first time he ever heard of anybody fainting with joy.
“What?” Aunt Evelyn asked sharply.
“Nothing at all,” he said.
She sneezed and shivered. “A cold welcome you give your guests, Joel,” she chided him. “I began to shiver as soon as I got out of the taxi and came poking into this mausoleum. All dressed up for a Christmas Eve party, too.”
My aunt Evelyn Cameron—she has kept her maiden name through two divorces—is a singular person. She must be in her fifties, and no doubt she buys her face lifts by the dozen and her kalsomine by the barrel, but she still thinks and acts as if she were under thirty. Among the souvenirs of her marriages is the string of very fine pearls which are the apple of her eye.
Aunt Evelyn has always had a strongly developed social sense. Indeed, it was her first husband who remarked that “The first thing Eve will do when she gets into hell will be to organize a whist tournament.” That was years ago; now it would be contract.
She sat next to Mildred on a wide leather couch, cheerfully repairing the damage done to her gown and her hair. “Whatever you girls poured on me smells like the bottom of a goldfish bowl,” she announced. She found her bag, took from it a long cloisonné holder and case, and began to puff merrily on a cheap Virginia cigarette.
Uncle Joel had turned his attention to the library itself and was belatedly scurrying around removing sheets from the furniture.
“Haven’t you a servant to do that?” Dorothy demanded. “Or did the rats get him, too?”
“Oviedo has gone to meet the eight-forty at Ocean-side,” Uncle Joel informed her.
“More guests?” Aunt Evelyn visibly brightened. “We ought to have enough for two, maybe three tables of bridge! Come on, you!” she commanded us. “I’ve got some Christmas decorations in my trunk, let’s get busy and brighten the place up.”
“It’ll take more than tissue paper and a holly wreath,” Dorothy whispered out of the corner of her mouth. My Uncle Joel watched, not disapprovingly, as we were swept in with Aunt Evelyn’s desire to make a party out of everything.
Within half an hour she had made a clean sweep of the furniture covers in the main downstairs rooms, brought back the electricity by the simple expedient of placing a copper cent in the main fuse, put a cheery red candle at every front window, and hung a sprig of mistletoe over the drawing-room doorway.
Dorothy saw me looking at it. “Just where it hung that other Christmas,” she reminded me. “I stood for hours under it, absolutely neglected. The boy I was waiting for was Todd Cameron, but he never gave me a tumble. Remember? You saw me there, you the grownup cousin with the lovely mustache, and you took pity on me and kissed me. I’ll always love you for that, Alan Cameron.”
I suppose I blushed. “Speaking of Todd,” I said, as I stretched to pin up one end of a rolled tissue streamer, “do you suppose he’ll show up?”
Dorothy said she doubted it. “Everybody else will come, under the circumstances,” she said thoughtfully. “Ely Waldron and his fat wife from back East, Uncle Alger and his little boy, Cousin Mabel, who used to be so sweet on you.”
“Cousin Mabel,” I told her, “still writes to me sometimes, but she has grown sour on the world.”
Dorothy nodded. “From living on the edge of the desert, maybe,” she said.
“And of course Gilbert will be here, seeing that he sent the telegrams,” I continued.
Dorothy looked at me strangely. “What? Oh yes, of course, Gilbert!” she agreed, as if she did not believe it for a moment. “Everybody but Todd, the one adventurous, glamorous member of the family. He’s probably having too much fun exploring the strange corners of the world to bother about coming back here.” Just then Mildred wandered into view, carrying an armful of holly and sucking her white thumb. “Wasn’t it Rarotonga, Mildred, where Todd wrote the last post card?”
Mildred nodded, and then Uncle Joel appeared suddenly in the doorway behind her. “Talking about that worthless Todd, eh? Well, he’ll not be here. Cabled me to send him money for his fare, but I didn’t do it.”
“Oh,” Mildred said, a definite note of disappointment in her voice.
“Come on, everybody,” Aunt Evelyn was calling brightly. “Last but not least we must fix up the tree. Joel, this cedar you’ve got stuck in here is fearfully overdecorated. Nobody uses popcorn strings any more, just a few big colored balls.”
She was standing in the doorway of the sitting room under the stair, surveying the tall cedar with an appraising eye. “We’ll have to take half the stuff off it,” she decided, “and then put our presents for each other underneath. I have the cutest present for you, Joel,” she advised him archly. “A real surprise!”
“I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of a Christmas,” I said to Dorothy. She whispered back that it wouldn’t be—not if Uncle Joel came to suspect what brought us here.
“Is he really crazy, do you think?”
I told her that I doubted it. “Living alone is apt to make anyone eccentric. But there is a wide gap between eccentricity and—”
She shook her head doubtfully. “After all, cobwebs tickle,” she said cryptically. “If you ask me…”
We were interrupted by a gasp and a shriek from Aunt Evelyn, who had turned on the sitting-room lights and approached the tall cedar tree. She let fall an armful of brilliant glass balls, which popped faintly on the rug.
“Look!” she cried.
Now that the lights were full on, the Christmas tree showed itself as brown and dead as a hedge in December. The decorations were gray and faded, heavy with dust, and over everything there showed incredible, fantastic festoons of spiderwebs which wound up and down and around the drear brown branches of the ancient evergreen like fragile spun tinsel.
“It’s the other Christmas tree!” Aunt Evelyn said, with a touch of awe in her voice.
“Just as good as ever,” admitted Uncle Joel, with a twinkle in his eye. “I never had the heart to pull it down after poor Hester was taken. Except for the color it’s just as it was then.”
Aunt Evelyn walked slowly toward him. “Joel Cameron, are you in your right mind?” she demanded. “A Christmas tree fifteen years old! I never in all my life heard—”
Just then there came the sound of distant howling, followed a moment later by the faint chatter of voices in the front hall. As we looked up, the balance of our family party burst upon us. They were an odd enough lot, and yet I liked them all.
In the van was Uncle Alger Ely, dead Hester’s brother. (All the Elys mentioned in this record are her relatives, most of them nephews and nieces. We Camerons called them cousins, although there was, of course, no blood relationship. Anyway, Uncle Alger was the eldest of the lot.)
He came bursting into the sitting room with his arms outstretched. “Joel!” he gurgled. “Evelyn! After all these years!” He embraced them, he embraced the shrinking girls, and he would have taken me into his long and skinny arms had I not s
eized his hand and shaken it. Uncle Alger is perhaps the most sentimental man in the world, in spite of his large-boned face and general hairiness which give him the look of a genial orang-utang. Tears dampened his bright and slightly reddish eyes as he surveyed the family group.
“Home!” he breathed. (Uncle Alger had been at Prospice once before in his life, and then had left storming because Uncle Joel would not finance him in a scheme to get gold out of sea water, or something equally fantastic.) He turned to the somewhat gangling youth who stood in the doorway. “Eustace, come and meet everybody!”
Eustace—about seventeen—was dressed in a soiled camel’s-hair coat, sport shirt of cerise, and tweed trousers with an inch-wide seam down the side, in the Hollywood tradition. “H’lo,” he greeted me woodenly. “Say, if that’s your old ’27 Buick outside you ought to get some new piston rings. She’s still smoking.”
This was he whom Dorothy had called “Uncle Alger’s little boy.”
He stood aside indolently to let Ely Waldron and his wife into the circle. They announced that they had driven their family flivver all the way from Wisconsin, that the roads were in terrible shape through Nebraska, and that they had run out of gasoline and funds just as they came into Oceanside, where Uncle Joel’s Mexican had found them. Thus they had been saved from being stranded forever and ever.
“Blast the Mexican!” said Dorothy in my ear. She never shared my liking for the rest of that amazing family.
Ely Waldron was her first cousin, not mine, as I pointed out. He gripped my hand hard enough to make me wince, and blinked at me. “How’s the weather been?” was his greeting. I was then introduced to his wife Fay, whom none of us had ever seen except for the casual photographs that he had sent West from time to time. She had reddish hair, no figure to speak of, and an unhappy look.
Fay Waldron’s attitude made it very clear what had brought her—yes, and all of us—together. Quite evidently she and her husband had received one of the telegrams. She kept staring at Uncle Joel as if she expected to see him waving a butcher knife, or to hear him announce that he was Napoleon in exile.
Omit Flowers Page 2