The Trembling Hills

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  Ah Foong set the enemy general down gently, and Sara, glancing at him, saw that there was moisture in his eyes, that his chin quivered as if he might cry at any moment. Lest he be disgraced, he went abruptly out of the room, his pigtail flying as he disappeared from sight.

  “Did you see?” Sara asked Geneva. “Ah Foong had tears in his eyes. I thought the Chinese were never emotional!”

  Geneva smiled. “Most of our notions about the inscrutable Chinese are mistaken. They are really a very emotional people. It’s just because they’re different in their customs that we think they’re mysterious and not to be understood.”

  “But Ah Foong is mysterious,” Sara said. “There are a good many things shut up inside his head that he doesn’t choose to tell.”

  “I expect that’s wise of him,” Nick put in unexpectedly.

  Sara put the soldiers back into their nest of cotton.

  “I was looking for you, Sara,” Geneva said. “If you’re going to be home today, perhaps we could get started on a dress for Judith. I have all her measurements—if you care to work on it now. It seems that I’m not to go back to the relief center.”

  “Indeed not,” Nick said.

  Geneva had worked too hard for her slight strength and had fainted one day from being on her feet so long. Aunt Hester didn’t seem to care what she did, but Nick insisted that she must not return.

  Delighted at this opportunity to have Geneva to herself, Sara agreed to work on the dress.

  Before they left the library, Geneva went to Nick’s side for a moment. He took her affectionately into the circle of his arm and Sara slipped hastily out of the room. The sight of Geneva’s love for Nick made her own feeling all the more difficult to bear. Yet how could she make herself stop loving when every new sight of him drew her all the more strongly?

  At Geneva’s request Ah Foong had laid a fire in Miss Varady’s sitting-room grate. The two girls found it especially cozy here with Aunt Hester absent.

  Judith’s first choice had been the chrome-yellow gown and Sara and Geneva went to work snipping at the stitches, pulling the seams apart, so that as nearly as possible they could start anew.

  “I’ve been happy about your coming here, Sara,” Geneva confided shyly. “I like our being cousins. But I have the feeling that Aunt Hester has been purposely keeping us apart. Every time I try to be alone with you, she finds something for me to do, or interrupts in some way.”

  Now that she thought of it, Sara realized that this was so. She had not considered the matter before, being occupied with other things. It seemed rather pointless to keep the mild Geneva away from anyone, but Sara was beginning to learn that Hester Varady liked intrigue for its own sake. This made just one more touch in an evident pattern.

  “I suppose you know that Aunt Hester walks in her sleep,” Sara said, ripping a seam open with strong fingers.

  “Oh, dear!” Geneva cried. “I was afraid she’d disturb your mother eventually in that room. She goes to the same place every time she gets away from Ah Foong. He’s growing old and he doesn’t always hear her. She has done that as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl it used to frighten me when I’d hear her walking about at night on my floor. But she never seems to wake up, and Ah Foong always gets her back to bed. I don’t know what this house would ever do without him.”

  “Have you heard her speak?” Sara asked.

  Geneva bent her head above the bright material of the dress. “A few times.”

  “Do you know who the Callie is she calls for? Ah Foong says Callie is a little white cat, but I don’t believe him.”

  Quickly Geneva glanced toward the door, as if their aunt might come through it at any moment. Then she leaned toward Sara, lowering her voice.

  “Don’t mention that name out loud! I was curious about it too when I was small. I got up the courage to ask Aunt Hester who Callie was. I’ve never seen her so angry in her life. She was like a madwoman. She struck me across the face. It wasn’t just a slap—it nearly knocked me down. I went about with my head ringing for days. I’ve never dared mention the name again. Whoever Callie was she must have been very upsetting to Aunt Hester. Let’s not talk about it, Sara.”

  But this was exactly what Sara wanted to talk about. “Then you think she was a person—not a cat, as Ah Foong says?”

  “Ssh! Don’t speak so loudly. I don’t know—I don’t know anything about it. Except that there really was a cat—small and white. I ran after it once when I was little and Aunt Hester was angry. When I asked her if I could have the little cat, she told me I was making up stories. She said there wasn’t any cat and I was never to say such a thing again. But I know what Ah Foong believes.”

  She tiptoed to the door, opened it softly and looked into the hall. Then she returned, assured of their privacy.

  “He believes that the spirit of Callie—whoever she was—entered into a little white cat and that it will always walk about this house. I know too that the cat is the one thing that frightens Aunt Hester nearly out of her wits. But there’s something else in this house, Sara—a strange thing I discovered a long time ago. I don’t think even Aunt Hester or Ah Foong knows about it or it would have been removed. Perhaps there’ll be a chance to show you someday.”

  “Why not today?” Sara asked. “This may be a better chance than we’ll ever have again.”

  But Geneva looked frightened. She seemed to back away from her own suggestion, to be ready to disavow it. Before Sara could urge further, the door opened in the silent manner Ah Foong could always manage and he stood bowing to them in the opening.

  “You come topside see Missy Valady,” he told Sara.

  “She must have found out that we were together,” Geneva said in alarm. “Why did you tell her, Ah Foong?”

  Ah Foong shook his head at Geneva, as if he reproached a child.

  “Me no tellum. Miss Valady wantchee talkee Missy Sala.”

  Sara did not go readily. By the time she reached the foot of the stairs her heart was thumping again and she had to fight her own desire to retreat, to hide at all costs from the woman who waited for her upstairs. Twice yesterday she had been terrified by Hester Varady. Once when her aunt’s hand had gripped her shoulder and her eyes had burned so intently. And again in the eerie hours after midnight when Hester had walked in her sleep. Now Sara felt that she never wanted to be alone with her aunt again.

  Nevertheless, her feet carried her up the stairs and her hesitant hand tapped on the door of the room she had never entered.

  “Come in, Sara,” Miss Varady said.

  Sara opened the door.

  “Close it quickly,” said the woman in the big canopied bed. “Shut out the draft. Then come and sit here beside me. I want to talk to you, Sara.”

  Without will of her own, Sara closed the door and went to the indicated chair.

  The room was even larger than the one Sara occupied and it had been furnished sumptuously with the gilt, the cupids, the damask of the courts of France. The bed was hung with faded draperies and carved cupid faces peeked coyly at the woman who sat against the pillows, ignoring them—or perhaps forgetting they existed. The seats of the gilt chairs were covered with pink satin and the rug which had once been gay with great roses had faded to a yellowish hue.

  “Well,” said Miss Varady sharply, “what do you make of it?”

  “Why—it’s a very beautiful room,” Sara faltered.

  “Should be,” her aunt said. “Goodness knows it cost me a pretty penny. And believe me, they didn’t get to sleep in it. It was mine from the beginning. And it always will be.”

  Sara stole an uneasy look at her aunt. Hester’s face was shadowed by the starched ruffles of a bedcap, and her dark eyes, with brown shadows smudged beneath them, seemed cavernous in the morning light. Did Aunt Hester know, Sara wondered, that she had walked in her sleep? Had she wakened when Ah Fo
ong brought her back to her bed? Had he told her what she had done? Or was she unconscious of these nighttime excursions?

  When Miss Varady broached the subject Sara had been summoned to discuss, she ignored both the incident on the stairs and the matter of Mary’s dress.

  “I have made up my mind about you, Sara,” she announced flatly.

  There was no telling whether this was good or bad, so Sara merely waited.

  “I have observed you from the time I learned you had come to San Francisco,” her aunt said. “All my life I have wanted an heir. Someone of my own blood. Someone of whom I could be proud. This was part of my family plan. Do you see those miniatures on the bed table? Look at them, Sara.”

  The painted portraits were small and set in oval black frames. Sara took them into her hands and studied the faces. One was of an elderly, mustachioed gentleman with eyes as deep-set and commanding as Aunt Hester’s. The second portrait was of a younger man who wore sideburns and bore a family resemblance to the first. Though here force of character was less evident.

  “The two Julians,” her aunt said. “My father and my grandfather. The first Julian meant to found a dynasty and he would have done so if his wife had lived. But he could never bring himself to remarry after her death. All his hope for a family line depended on his son, the second Julian. But my mother was a puny thing, for all that she outlived her husband, and she bore him only two daughters. You can imagine the disappointment to my grandfather.”

  Sara, studying the strong face which the artist had portrayed, could well imagine it.

  “In the end of course, Grandfather put all his hopes in me. He was proud that I was so much like him and he trained me from childhood to be head of the family. Even if the name died, he hoped the bloodline would continue. He would have preferred me to be a boy and he gave me the business training he might have given a boy, although neither he nor my father would hear of my interest in medicine. Grandfather was further disappointed that I did not marry. When he was dying he made me swear to raise Elizabeth’s son to continue the line.”

  There was a burning quality in Hester Varady’s voice. Sara could envision this handing down of the family scepter as the older Julian sought to assure continuance of the line that descended from him and his wife Consuelo. Hester in turn had inherited something of his own forceful purpose. And all this, Sara thought in dismay, might now be concentrated upon herself.

  “Leland, your father, failed me,” her aunt went on. “I had hoped to raise his child suitably. Your mother spoiled that. Geneva was a makeshift—the best I could manage. There was no other descendant, however remote. I gave her the Varady name in the hope that the possession of it would help her to develop the necessary iron in her soul. It is not, of course, her own name.”

  Aunt Hester paused and reached for throat lozenges on the bed table. Sara waited uneasily.

  “Geneva,” Miss Varady continued, “was an even greater disappointment than Leland. She is too much like my sister Elizabeth—soft, without character.”

  Sara could not feel that this was true of Geneva. In her quiet way the girl had character one learned to respect. But this was not something her aunt would appreciate. The likeness to Elizabeth would probably get in the way.

  Unexpectedly, with perhaps deliberate intent to tantalize, Hester Varady changed the subject.

  “Tell me,” she said, “what is all this about Ritchie Temple being an architect?”

  It was hard for Sara to turn her thoughts to Ritchie at such a moment.

  “Why, he—he’s always been interested in the subject,” she said feebly.

  “But what does he know about it?”

  “He studied in Chicago. Ritchie says American architects should stop imitating Greece and Rome, or anything in Europe. He doesn’t believe such styles fit our country. He wants to do something that would be truly American.” This was a subject she knew, having listened to Ritchie for so long.

  “Well, then, why hasn’t he tried to do something about these beliefs?”

  This was too complicated a subject to go into, since the answer lay deeply in Ritchie’s own character. Sara chose a surface answer.

  “It would cost too much to put up that sort of structure in San Francisco. Because the insurance is so high. All those little wooden buildings that invite fire.”

  “An invitation which has been accepted,” Miss Varady snapped. “The tinder has been burned out. Now new buildings must go up.”

  “But neither the Renwicks nor Ritchie Temple will have the money to invest in such buildings,” Sara pointed out. “Aunt Hester, how did you learn about Ritchie?”

  “Through Judith Renwick. There is a woman with brains. She would be wasted on him, of course. But she is foolish enough to think she can do something to help him.”

  So Judith had listened, after all, Sara thought. It seemed strange that she should have talked to Miss Varady about the matter. Now her aunt was watching her with bright malice.

  “You disappoint me, Sara. Perhaps I’m mistaken about you after all. I would have expected a more direct reaction a few moments ago when I changed the subject from the one you should obviously be interested in.”

  “I am interested,” Sara said stiffly.

  “I am sure you are.” Aunt Hester nodded. “There’s iron in you, my girl. The same iron that’s in me, and that was in your great-grandfather, the first Julian Varady. You can go far, Sara. You can have exactly what you want of life if you are determined to have it. You are like me in that.”

  Sara thought about this for a moment. She was no longer sure, as she had once been, just what she wanted from life.

  “Have you had everything you want just by being determined about it?” she asked.

  Sara half expected anger, but it did not come.

  “I was too young to be wise in myself. Just as you are too young. But you have an advantage I lacked. You will have my years and knowledge directing you. There will be no chance to make the mistakes that I made. It was no more than a foolish mistake and a lack of wisdom on my part that allowed Elizabeth and Martin to be thrown together. I never for a moment thought that so colorless a creature as Elizabeth could be my rival. But these gentle, helpless women seem to have an appeal for men. Had there been someone wiser to guide me—” She moved her hands in a gesture of futility.

  “What do you want of me?” Sara asked directly.

  Her aunt regarded her with satisfaction. “That is the approach I would take in your place. There need be no mincing of matters between us. We are enough alike to understand each other from the start. You are as eager for power and wealth as I ever was. I am going to make you my heir. My sole heir. You will divide with no one.

  Sara could only stare at her, without fully comprehending. “But there is Geneva—” she began.

  A flick of Miss Varady’s hand dismissed Geneva. “I may fix a small sum upon her. In any event she will probably marry Nicholas Renwick and be impoverished for years to come, considering the unfortunate business he is in. Why should I leave my wealth to someone who would never appreciate it? You, Sara, will do something with what I give you. You can make this house a center of fashion, of importance and influence. You must marry, of course. Suitably. Have you anyone in mind?”

  Still dazed, Sara could only shake her head.

  “That will be remedied. You are young and when you are properly dressed you will be one of the handsomest women in San Francisco. You lack grace and poise, it’s true. But these things can be learned. And I will see that the eligible young men of the city meet you so that you can choose. Of course you must be in love. That is a Varady tradition. But there is no reason why you cannot fall in love with the right young man if you are thrown together.”

  Sara felt an almost hysterical desire to laugh. “But what if he shouldn’t fall in love with me?”

  “We will plan wisely,” Miss
Varady said. “We will find the young man to whom you will be irrisistible.”

  This was too much and Sara laughed out loud. “Aunt Hester, do you really think life can be managed like that? You sound like one of the Fates, weaving, planning, snipping.”

  Directness had not made her aunt angry, but laughter did. Hester Varady leaned across her pink satin quilt and took Sara’s wrist in her metallic grip, silencing her.

  “If I find that you consider this a laughing matter, I shall drop the entire plan. You will work with me seriously. You will do what I say or nothing will come of it.”

  With her aunt’s cold fingers about her wrist, the matter no longer seemed funny.

  “Very well, Aunt Hester,” said Sara meekly.

  “Good. Tomorrow I’ll arrange to settle a generous monthly allowance upon you. I have money in banks outside San Francisco. Perhaps we can plan a ball to present you to society. Not crude Nob Hill society, but to members of San Francisco’s best old families.”

  “Aren’t the old families rather poor these days?” Sara asked. Somehow it was easier to talk about the inconsequential than to face the larger facts of what had happened.

  “I am thinking of blood, not money,” said Miss Varady. “I happen to have both. My wealth will be enough for you—and a husband. It is possible, Sara, that you do not realize how great that wealth is. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I am probably one of the wealthiest women in California today. I do not boast of this, naturally. It is merely a fact you should know. A society event will launch you as my accepted heir.”

  “But, Aunt Hester,” Sara pointed out, “only a few weeks have gone by since San Francisco burned down. It doesn’t seem that people will be thinking of parties for a long while to come.”