The Trembling Hills

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Judith had been unexpectedly direct. “What is Ritchie to you?” she asked.

  Sara sat up and stared at her, recovering from her first shock and ready to do battle for her love.

  “I’m going to marry him,” she said. “He’s always promised that. You had no right to be kissing him.”

  The little smile lifted Judith’s lips again, and watching her, Sara felt young and awkward.

  “A man may change from a boyhood fancy,” Judith said, not unkindly. “But I’ve no desire to hurt you, or to take Ritchie away if he is promised to you. Tell me, Sara, what would you do for him if you married him?”

  The question had bewildered Sara. “Do for him? Why, I’d adore him, of course. I’d love him with every bit of me.”

  “What if adoration isn’t good for him?” Judith asked coolly, “You might sit at his feet and clap your hands over his dream castles. But if I married him, I would make him build them.”

  Sara had found nothing to say and after a moment Judith stood up. “You needn’t worry. I’m not going to marry your Ritchie. I’ll admit to his charm. I’ll even admit that I’m attracted to him. But such things aren’t good enough for marriage.”

  She had rustled silkenly away down the stairs and Sara had stared after her, silent with astonishment.

  Of course, as Sara realized now, she had not needed to worry about Judith. A girl who was so pale and without warmth could never have been right for Ritchie. Certainly she had inspired him to raise no breath-taking buildings in San Francisco. Instead, as he’d admitted when he was here, he had invested in the insurance business of Renwick and Merkel. Judith’s brother Nicholas was a partner in this firm, and insurance was apparently a profitable business in San Francisco.

  The tower room was cold. Sara stood up and shook the stiffness from her body, blew out her breath in a great cloud of vigor. That other time when she had faced Judith she had not known what to do. But now action was possible—if only she could find the way.

  As she crossed the attic she left the tower door open behind her and a finger of sunlight cut the gloom, setting dust motes dancing in its beam. When she turned toward the stairs to the lower floor, something flashed in the darkness, very close to her, and she drew back startled. Then she saw it was the oblong mirror set in the top of an old bureau discarded here in the attic. Her own reflection looked back at her out of darkness touched with sunlight, and her breath caught in her throat, her knees trembled, as sharp memory returned.

  She closed her eyes and clung for a second to the edge of the bureau, aware of the sick trembling that ran through her. All in quick succession pictures flashed through her mind. A long dark corridor in a strange house. The flashing of storm across the surface of a mirror.

  She picked up her skirts and fled toward the stairs, ran all the way down to her room. There she sat on her bed, clenching her hands together until the trembling stopped. She mustn’t dream tonight. It was a bad omen whenever the dream came. Perhaps she could stay awake, not sleep at all. Read. Write letters. Write a letter to Ritchie to say that they’d be coming.

  Because they were coming. Sara knew, irrevocably, that they had to go to San Francisco. But she could not write until she had persuaded her mother, and still she did not know the way to do that.

  She roamed the empty house that day, as if movement might give her a sense of meaning. In her futility she found herself remembering her childhood, recalling happy hours and sad ones between these walls. Ritchie’s father had been her good friend. Mr. Temple had long ago stopped struggling with his wife and had given up his son to be raised by Mrs. Temple. He had told Sara once that he wished she were his daughter, and much to his wife’s annoyance he had left Sara a bit of money when he died a few years ago. Mrs. Temple had never liked her or approved of her. Mainly, perhaps, because of Ritchie’s interest and kindness.

  He had been kind when she was a little girl. Once there had been a dance when she was ten, and she had hidden behind a door, where she could watch through the crack and observe the gaiety she could have no part in. Ritchie had found her there and pulled her out. But he had not revealed her presence to the others. He had danced her away down the hall while the music played and whirled her till she was dizzy. Afterward she hadn’t minded so much going up to her own room alone.

  Ritchie had taught her to dance and he’d helped her with her lessons—though he went off to private school, and she did not. She had hated her own school because Ritchie wasn’t there. And somehow Ritchie’s friends had always seemed so much more exciting than the few children who had been available in the neighborhood for her to play with. As long as there was Ritchie she never minded. She had been content with books and imaginative games and had never felt sorry for herself, though she knew her mother had worried about her solitary life.

  Now as she looked back, remembering, it seemed a lonely life for a little girl, with only the one bright star that was Ritchie Temple to light an empty sky.

  In one way or another Sara postponed the moment when she must return to her room and go to bed. The answer to her problem still eluded her and in the end the day passed. There was nothing else to do at a cold, late hour. She fell restlessly asleep in spite of herself and at once the dream she feared returned—as it had not done for years.

  She was in a room in the dream. Not a bedroom. Not a parlor. But a room cluttered with furniture—a storeroom perhaps. And there was the glass—a long gleaming shaft of wardrobe mirror shining in the gloom of a stormy afternoon. Then a soft light. A candle. Moving closer, not dispelling the gloom, but making it all the more ghostly. A hand holding a tall candlestick. Then the feeling of horror that always closed her throat so that she could not scream, though she struggled to. In a moment something dreadful and completely demoralizing would appear in the glass. There was a loud crackling sound in her ears.

  She awoke drenched with sweat, her throat muscles tensed, her body tightened with dread. Always she awoke before the vision in the mirror came clear, possessed by a dreadful feeling of weakness and nausea. As a child the dream had come often. “The mirror nightmare,” her mother called it and could make nothing of it. But Sara had grown up with a sensitivity toward any mirror in a dark room. She knew where every mirror in the house was, and in her own room she kept a cloth flung over the one on her dresser so that it could not frighten her suddenly in the dark. A mirror in a lighted room she did not mind.

  But things had been moved about upstairs in the attic during the packing, and she had not known that bureau had been turned from the wall where she had pushed it long ago.

  She lay back in bed, her stomach still squeamish, and for a long while she stayed awake.

  She must get to San Francisco. That was where her roots lay. Not only Ritchie, but her father’s family. The Bishops of San Francisco. When she could claim her rightful background in Ritchie’s eyes, how much less Judith might matter. And now she knew how she would manage. Now she knew the way to get there.

  2

  They ate their meals in the kitchen these days, since the two of them were alone in the empty house. At breakfast time, with the big black cookstove freshly stoked and crackling, it was the coziest room in the house. This morning snow blew across the city and Sara stood by the kitchen window looking out at the big flakes falling from a gray winter sky.

  In San Francisco there would be no snow.

  Her mother was making pancakes, setting golden syrup on the table and a mound of country-fresh butter. There was an odor of freshly ground coffee from the mill. Sara watched until her mother sensed her look and glanced at her, smiling.

  The smile was an effort to pretend that yesterday had never been, that no letter had come from Ritchie Temple. If only she could make her mother understand how important it was to reach San Francisco. If only the thought of that city didn’t worry her mother so. Perhaps it was better to plunge right away and get the words behind her. Plea
ding and argument had failed. Now she must take the next step.

  “There’s no other choice for me, Mama,” she began. “I must go to San Francisco.”

  Mrs. Jerome stood with the pancake turner in her hands. “Because of Ritchie?”

  “This is my only chance. If I am there, where I can be near him, I’m sure—”

  Automatically her mother flipped over a browning cake. “You believe what you want to believe, Sara, not what is really so.”

  But she had to give this a chance to be so, Sara thought. If she sat back and passed up the opportunity, then of course what she wanted could never happen. She would have to come right out with her plan, even though it frightened her a little. She and her mother belonged together; neither of them had anyone else. Nevertheless she had to fight for this chance.

  “I have the legacy,” she said quietly. “If you won’t go with me, then I must go alone.”

  “What will you do in San Francisco alone?” Mrs. Jerome asked, working at the stove, not looking at her daughter.

  “I’ve told you, Mama—I’ll find work. Perhaps Ritchie will help me in that. And then I’ll look for my father’s family. If I can show him that my background is just as good as his, it will weigh a lot with Ritchie. And if I am there, then everything will be as it used to be. Only I’m grown up now and he’ll realize that.”

  Carefully Mary Jerome set the turner down on the stove, as if it were something fragile she might drop and break.

  “You’re such a determined girl, Sara. Sometimes you remind me frighteningly of someone I knew long ago. Someone I disliked. Of course you can’t possibly make this trip alone. We will have to go together. Now sit down and eat your breakfast.”

  Sara sat at the table feeling a little dazed. Her mother was like that. When necessity demanded, she could do a complete about-face and march in an opposite direction with her chin up. But the capitulation had come more quickly than expected and Sara, braced for a siege, found herself wordless.

  “It’s true that this solves the problem of a position for me,” Mrs. Jerome went on, setting a glass of cold milk at Sara’s place. “And if you must take this step it will be better if I am there.”

  “Truly I didn’t want to go alone!” Sara cried.

  Her mother smiled faintly and began to dish up the pancakes.

  “Nevertheless,” she said, “I can accept Ritchie’s offer only on one condition.”

  “Anything you say!” Sara promised recklessly.

  “If we go to San Francisco,” her mother said, “then we go under the name of Jerome. You will have to forget what you call background. Believe me, Sara dear, I have my reasons for feeling as I do. Most of last night I went over these things again and again in my mind, wondering what was possible.”

  So the capitulation had not been quite so quick as it seemed. Sara waited for her to go on.

  “The Renwicks have no idea that I ever lived in San Francisco. I never told Ritchie’s mother and father, so he doesn’t know either. They mustn’t learn this now. I don’t want them to discover that your name is Bishop. Will you promise me that, Sara?”

  Of course she would promise. This was the thing that mattered least at the moment. To get there was everything.

  “I give you my word not to tell Ritchie or the Renwicks,” she said dutifully.

  Nevertheless, curiosity tantalized her. Why did her mother want this secrecy? What was she afraid of in San Francisco?

  At least the impossible had been accomplished, and now Sara began to discuss plans eagerly as they ate breakfast. Ritchie had said that Mrs. Renwick would forward their train expenses. Tickets must be purchased, a date set. Oh, this was going to be fun, really. And with Ritchie at the end of the journey, how could she help but feel excited and happy?

  Her mother watched her sadly, but said nothing more.

  The moment Sara had finished the breakfast dishes, while her mother returned to more packing, she went again to her room and burrowed in a drawer of possessions she had not yet packed. Laid carefully between the folds of an innocent sachet case was a small oblong of stiff photographic board. She drew it out with careful fingers so that she would not bend it at the place where it had long ago been mended with paper and paste.

  It was the picture of a handsome man with fairish hair and a mustache. He was dressed in the manner of more than twenty years ago, dressed debonairly like the dandy he must have been. She had always been certain that this was her father, Leland Bishop. Even though the imprint of the photographer showed that the picture had been taken here in Chicago, she was sure.

  She remembered the day her mother had torn the picture up. Sara had been no more than nine at the time. A letter had come for Mrs. Jerome which had upset her very much. She had not thought Sara was watching, there behind her book, when she read the letter, with her lips tightened and an indignant flush in her cheeks. From a drawer she had taken the picture, which Sara had never seen, and torn it in two as if she were putting a part of her life behind her, trying to forget something that made her unhappy. She had dropped the pieces in the wastebasket and gone quickly from the room.

  It had frightened Sara to see tears on her mother’s cheeks. Seeking the reason, she had taken the two pieces from the wastebasket and carried them away to her room. There she fitted them together and set the print up beside the mirror on her dresser to scrutinize it inch by inch.

  True, the man in the picture did not have black hair like her own. Nor had Mary Jerome’s hair ever been as dark as Sara’s. But there must be black hair and a Spanish look somewhere in the family. The chins were different—no resemblance there. Sara’s had a square, strong set to it, even as a child—a chin with a will behind it. The pictured chin was softer, more feminine in quality. A nose you could not tell about in such a picture, and the mouth was hidden by a mustache. But the eyes were enough for Sara—the width they were set apart, the shape, the vigor with which they looked out at the world.

  “This is my father,” the young Sara had said to herself.

  She had talked to the picture as a child, and now she talked to it again.

  “We’re going home!” she told the bit of cardboard. She no longer restrained her exuberance, but danced about the room, whirling and dipping. Perhaps her father was out there now. Perhaps after all these years they might find each other. Though this, somehow, she did not quite believe. Nevertheless, hope was in the air, and the possible answer to many things.

  Only once did the thought of Judith intrude when Sara wondered idly how she felt about this plan to bring Mrs. Jerome and her daughter to San Francisco. Probably Judith wouldn’t give it a second thought, being no longer interested in Ritchie. Her presence in the Renwick house was nothing to worry about and Sara did not concern herself for long with thoughts of Judith.

  In the days that followed there was so much to be done that she was kept in a whirl of activity.

  The Temple house had been sold, but the new owners would not move in till the first of February. And the Jeromes would be out in January.

  With her own money Sara splurged and bought herself and her mother materials at Marshall Field’s Store and planned suits for them both. She had no particular skill with a needle, but she could take a bolt of cloth as if it were clay to sculpture, and bring out of it a model any lady might be proud to wear. Mama thought her a little daring, but Sara went her own way, bowing to current styles, but holding that any style must first of all become its wearer.

  Mary Jerome liked to sew and she worked steadily at her sewing machine and by hand until the new garments were completed. At her insistence her own suit was black and simply cut, with only a touch of white here and there to relieve it. But Sara’s was more dramatic and stylish. The bolero jacket of heavy gray English broadcloth had jet buttons, black velvet piping, and there were bands of black velvet ribbon circling the gray skirt at knee height. Mrs. Jerome thou
ght a small train would be suitable, or at least a fullness at the back, but Sara boldly omitted the train and raised the skirt an inch so that it cleared the floor. She wanted a dress she could walk in, she said, and her mother would see—it would look just right. In the end it was, as Sara promised—perfect and quite modern.

  When Ritchie sent the money, it was Sara who made the trip to the soot-blackened station to study timetables and purchase their tickets. Toward the end of their time in Chicago, Mary Jerome seemed to lose something of her courage. She had the air of a woman who walked helplessly toward a fate she had relinquished the power to fight. Often she sat idly, with her hands listlessly folded, and it worried Sara that she was able to make no contact with her mother.

  There were good-bys to be said to a few neighborhood friends, but Sara found this easy enough to do. There was no one to hold her to Chicago as Ritchie drew her to San Francisco.

  For all her inexperience, Sara enjoyed taking on the full management of the trip. When the tickets were purchased, Mrs. Jerome wrote to Ritchie to let him know the time of their arrival, and Sara had their trunks sent ahead. On the day of departure she summoned a hackney cab to drive them with their portmanteaus to the station. Her mother moved like a woman in a dream and Sara gave up trying to waken her. Mama would rouse herself when they reached San Francisco. She was tired now—let her rest.

  Excitement, anticipation, increased in Sara during the long train ride. What lay ahead in San Francisco? The fulfillment of dreams, perhaps? Perhaps the answers to many questions which had puzzled and concerned her all her life and which now seethed to the surface of her mind, churned by her mother’s insistence on secrecy.

  The train trip itself was fun. Sara had scarcely taken an hour’s ride in her life, yet now she was rocketing half across a continent to the accompaniment of roaring wheels, a shrill whistling and a constant rain of cinders. But she even enjoyed the discomforts of smoke and dirt, jerky starts and stops, because all these were part of the adventure.