Columbella

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “The Rocky Mountains?” I asked.

  “Yes—Colorado. My home state. I grew up in Denver.”

  As I moved on from one to another of the pictures I was sharply aware of the man behind me. He watched me now, as I had watched him, and the knowledge gave me an odd feeling of both uncertainty and exhilaration.

  “These are homes you’ve designed?” I asked, stopping before the picture of a low-roofed house with a veranda canti-levered over a steep hillside.

  “Yes—houses are my business. I like what I can do with them here where I’m free of the restrictions of a northern climate. That house you’re looking at isn’t far from here.”

  There seemed something in his tone that gave special significance to the house and I wondered what lay behind the apparently casual words. For whom had this house been built?

  “Nevertheless,” he went on, “I’d like to have lived in a time when houses like this one were built.”

  He handed me the glossy print he held, and I found that it pictured a large, gracefully built house belonging to a far older day.

  “That’s the Hampden family home in St. Croix,” he said. “Both Edith and Catherine grew up there. Catherine’s great-great-grandfather built it for his bride and called it Caprice.”

  Caprice! The word rang an echo of warning in my mind. That was the name Catherine had spoken to Edith last night on the stairs.

  “What a lovely house, and what a lovely name for a house,” I said.

  “It’s the sort of name you’ll find in St Croix. Old places abound there with names like Whim and Fancy, Rest Hope—and Upper Love and Lower Love. I like them all. But I’m afraid Caprice is too apt a name at present. It’s a caprice to keep up the place.”

  “Is that the sugar estate Aunt Janet has told me about?”

  “It used to be. The old mill is pretty much a ruin now, though I’ve been trying to save it from complete disintegration. The house ought to be turned into a museum before it falls to ruin too—but there’s a problem there. It belongs to Catherine and I’ve been trying to manage it for her, and save something for Leila’s sake. Though I’m afraid it’s hopeless and a more sensible course must be taken to preserve it.”

  There was so warm an interest in his voice that I sensed how thoroughly this man from Colorado had fallen in love with a plantation house on a Caribbean island. Clearly he meant it when he said he would like to build houses like this one, though no one could afford to build or own such mansions any more.

  Abruptly he glanced at the clock on his desk as though anxious to be off. “I’d better get to the office, if you’ll excuse me. I’ve a senator coming to see me this morning, and senators don’t like to be kept waiting, even in our easygoing town. I don’t know what you mean to do with your time since you’ve lost your pupil, but you’ll need to find ways to amuse yourself, since Catherine won’t leave Leila to you if she can help it. She has already told me so.”

  “And she has told me,” I said as we left his office for the living area of the house.

  He looked at me questioningly and I shook my head.

  “Oh, not in so many words. But with hints and looks and her claim that there’s nothing I can do for her daughter.”

  “That’s her method,” he said shortly. “You’ll have to deal with some fairly ingenious opposition if you stay. Good morning, Miss Abbott.”

  I watched the long stride with which he walked the length of the main hall to the front door. When he moved it was often with what seemed an explosion of energy, as if too much of the time he held back and must release himself in motion when it was possible. I watched him and was stirred again, as I did not want to be.

  When he had gone I stepped to the open doors of the terrace and saw that a man stood outside on the lower gallery with his back to me. My swift sense of recognition was startling. He was not in bathing trunks today, but wore a blue shirt and gray slacks—a tall man, leanly built. The back of his head—the hair dark with a flecking of gray—the straight column of his neck, these were familiar to me. I knew immediately that this was the man I had seen with Catherine Drew that afternoon on Water Island.

  He heard my step upon the parquet floor and turned about. As he did so my sense of certainty was shaken. Viewed from the front, his black hair seemed scarcely gray at all, and he wore a blunt-pointed black beard, glossy and carefully groomed. A mustache framed his mouth, dividing around it to grow into the beard, leaving his rather thin lips visible, so that I could see the faint smile he wore as he studied me. His face was lean, almost ascetic in its bone structure, his eyes pale blue and curiously luminous.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I’m Alex Stair. And you, of course, are the teacher—Miss Abbott?”

  “A teacher without a pupil, I’m afraid,” I told him.

  He saw my tray on the coffee table and put his finger to a nearby bell. “At least I can show you the room in which you’ll work when you recapture your pupil. I understand that I’m to give up my study for a few hours every morning.”

  “I’m sorry if we must disturb you,” I said, feeling my way cautiously. I could not throw off the arresting sense of recognition that had first gripped me, even though the effect had lessened the moment he turned about. If he had been the man at the beach, there might be a very real source of trouble between Edith and her sister.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he assured me pleasantly enough. “I usually go to the shop in the morning. Though I’m not one to be bound by exact hours.”

  In answer to the bell a maid came in from another part of the house—a pretty brown-skinned girl whom he called Noreen. As she picked up the tray Alex Stair saw the shell and reached for it.

  “Strange company for breakfast!” he said to me.

  I noted his hands as he held the shell—long-fingered and lean as the rest of him, the nails tapered and well kept. He thumped a smooth space between the spikes with a knuckle and the shell gave off a hollow ring.

  “Mrs. Drew left it upstairs—to keep an eye on me,” I told him.

  I had the impression of a thin, tightly drawn smile that showed briefly in response to my words.

  “Catherine fancies herself as a caster of spells,” he said. “But she is really an amateur. Come along and I’ll show you where you’ll conduct your lessons. If there are to be any lessons.”

  I followed him to a door that opened near the foot of the stairs, and went into a room that was the larger counterpart of the bedroom I occupied just above. Here warm-hued terra-cotta tiles covered the floor, with lacy straw rugs from the island of Dominica scattered here and there. A worktable was drawn below a pair of north windows, and books had been spilled across it, with pencils and paper set out, ready for use. At the far end of the room stood a handsome desk of polished mahogany, with a red leather armchair beyond.

  There were touches of brass on the desk, a parchment-shaded lamp, a handsome African carving of a man’s head done in some reddish wood. With its dark velvet backing toward me, a picture in a silver frame occupied a central position and I wondered if it held Edith’s likeness. Somehow Alex Stair seemed an unlikely husband for the gaunt and dour Edith.

  The man stood waiting almost expectantly for me to view the room, and when I turned to look about, I understood. The entire inside wall had been lined with bookshelves, but they held no books. Instead, every foot of space boasted a display of shells. There must have been hundreds set attractively on view—shells of all sizes, from huge conchs and tritons to those so tiny they were placed in shallow containers to prevent their scattering.

  As I looked about at the array he set the murex on a corner of the desk. “Beauty with a flaw,” he mused. “There’s an ugliness about the thing that intrigues me. It’s fitting enough. Perfection goes against nature. Good and evil complement each other and often exist quite comfortably side by side, don’t you think? If we’re realistic enough to a
ccept the fact, that is. And it’s probably as true in man as it is in nature.”

  I could not help but think of Catherine, and I wondered if his thoughts took the same course.

  “When the flaw takes over,” I said, “it’s not very comfortable for those who must live with it. That murex, for instance—once I’ve admired it, I don’t want it around all the time.”

  There was a ring of appreciation in his laugh. “Some of us have a greater acceptance of the flaw—in others, as well as in ourselves. Perhaps we’re the more comfortable ones. Your moralist—but never mind! It’s too early in the morning for discussions of good and evil. At least the murex has a noble history. In Roman times dye for the robes of emperors and senators came from murex shells.”

  I remembered my history. “Royal Tyrian purple! But what happened to it after the fall of Rome?”

  “It became holy as well as royal and went into robes for the cardinals of the Christian Church. But I’ll admit there are more pleasing shells than this one.”

  For some reason his seemingly idle discussion made me as uncomfortable as did the shell. It was as if in his talk of good and evil, in his reference to the flaws of beauty, the man spoke in symbols that carried a deeper significance—perhaps a hint of warning, meant for me? Or was I being fanciful again?

  He gestured toward the shelves, inviting me, and I stepped close to one of the displays. At random I picked up a scallop shell, admiring the fan of delicate ridges.

  “Scallops always have a classic look,” I said.

  He seemed indifferent to its beauty. “Scallops and limpets and cockles are simple shells. Open-faced, like some people. The more involuted types interest me more. They’re not to be read at a glance.”

  Again I had that uneasy sense of a deeper meaning and knew that he watched me intently with his pale, luminous eyes.

  He moved on, showing me other shells and naming them—volutes, cones, augers with long slender spires. When I found a small olive shell with a sheen to its beautiful black and yellow markings, he seemed pleased by my interest and gave it to me. Yet never did I feel easy and comfortable with him. He seemed as involuted as his favorite shells.

  “It must require a great deal of work to take care of a collection like this,” I said.

  Again he made a slight shrug. “Some of it is rather unpleasant work. My wife does a great deal of the preparation. And of course the whole family dives and dredges for me. Steve and Mike O’Neill, who were here last night, own a boat and I do a good business with them. The best of our finds I keep for myself and send the rest to dealers in the States. Shells are a bigger business than you might think these days.”

  From a tray I picked up a shell that was no more than half an inch in length and studied its brown and cream speckling.

  “That’s a columbella,” he said. “Last Christmas I had one of the rare larger columbellas gilded and hung on a gold chain as a gift for Catherine. She plays a little game of calling herself Columbella when she’s feeling whimsical. It was a beautiful shell—without a flaw.”

  “I’ve seen it,” I told him. “But for me the gilt seemed to flaw it. I suppose I like natural things to be the way nature made them.”

  “Perhaps that was the intent—the secret joke,” he said.

  His beard was like a mask over part of his face, the man hidden behind it. The look in his pale eyes made me increasingly uneasy. Smiling to himself, as though he enjoyed what he called the “secret joke,” he walked to his desk and picked up the picture in the silver frame, handing it to me without comment.

  Instead of Edith’s dour expression, I was startled to find a man’s face looking out at me. This was not a photograph, but a pencil sketch, and the subject wore a kerchief knotted about his head, a single loop of gold in one ear. His brows were heavy and black, the nose saturnine, with a prominent beak, the nostrils faintly flared. His mouth was drawn thin, the lips barely curved, suggesting a hint of cruelty, and the beard was thick and black and pointed. The face was Alex Stair’s done with the wicked, subtle humor of good caricature.

  “Leila did that sketch,” he said. “Sometimes the child shows more perception than her mother.”

  What did he mean by that? I wondered, looking from the pirate face in the sketch to the rather urbane visage of the man himself. “Why did she see you as a pirate?”

  “It’s a legitimate heritage.” He replaced the picture on the desk. “Tradition has it that a pirate ancestor retired from his risky existence and married the daughter of a Caribbean ex-governor, fathering a family of twelve children. I’m supposed to be descended from one of the twelve. There’s no great honor attached—they were a rapscallion lot and hardly in a class with the Hampdens.”

  There seemed a bitterness behind his wry manner and I sensed that here was a man who might well be resentful of the very wealth he had married into. Perhaps that was what Edith meant to him—position and wealth. Perhaps these were the answer to what seemed the enigma of their marriage.

  “You’re from St. Croix?” I asked. “I believe Mrs. Hampden said you had a dress shop over there.”

  “It was my mother’s originally. She managed to send me abroad for a dab of education after my father died. When I came home she was ill and I took over the shop. Apparently I’ve a flair for catering to the tastes of women travelers who like the special and unusual. I’ve done well enough with the business, though I find I can accomplish more with my second shop here in St. Thomas.”

  When he spoke of shells or of his shops, there seemed a quickening of interest in the man. Now he replaced the pirate sketch on the desk and went to a large, weather-beaten chest bound with corroded bands of iron—a chest that might have belonged to old Blackbeard himself.

  “Let me show you some better examples of Leila’s talent,” he said. “If you want to reach the girl, perhaps this is the way.”

  He took a huge iron key from a hook nearby and fitted it into the massive lock. The key grated as it turned and he lifted the creaking lid.

  “This is the real thing,” he said of the chest. “I found it in the remains of a sunken ship off the rocky coast near the Hampden plantation house, Caprice, and I had it brought up. The lock and key are imitations of the original, but the rest is as it was. Leila has taken it over for her own use.”

  He drew a manila folder from the chest and spread it open on a table for me to see. Here were paintings done in lovely tempera colors—portraits of shells. Leila’s representation was both imaginative and factual. The shells themselves had been reproduced with painstaking care and detail, but the groupings had been placed in odd circumstances, revealing a sense of the incongruous. A great conch shell, pink-lipped, sat on the cushion of an elegant French chair, seeming a little surprised to find itself there. An arrangement of cream and pink shells rested against a background the color of wet sand, with the small, delicate white bones of a fish nearby—reminding me of something by Georgia O’Keeffe. In another painting columbellas lay scattered carelessly across folds of sand-colored cloth that looked like the Arab burnoose Catherine Drew had worn on the terrace last night.

  The fact that Leila had done these paintings excited me and I found myself eager to learn how she felt about her talent—what she wanted to do with it.

  “These are beautifully done,” I said. “Thank you for showing them to me. A talent like this is something to build on.”

  Alex picked up the paintings and laid them back in the chest. When he had closed the lid and hung up the key he turned to regard me a bit skeptically.

  “It’s possible that you’re getting into something deeper than you realize, Miss Abbott. Perhaps a psychological struggle that you might better avoid.”

  Here was the warning again—less veiled this time—and the clear desire to discourage me, perhaps even to frighten me. I was ready enough to be alarmed by this time, but I did not like a deliberate intent to frig
hten.

  “Mrs. Hampden told me that everyone would be against my coming here,” I admitted. “I’d like to understand why. Tutoring a young girl seems a simple enough thing.”

  “Now that you’ve met us all, you don’t really believe that’s why you’ve been brought here, do you—to be a tutor?”

  “Frankly, I don’t know why I’m here!” I felt increasingly exasperated. “When I talked to Mrs. Hampden yesterday she seemed to have some definite plan in mind. But so far I don’t know what it is. At least you might tell me why you don’t want me here.”

  “I?” He shrugged elaborately. “Count me out. I’m not involved and don’t want to be.”

  At once I caught him up with his own words. “Then as an uninvolved person, perhaps you can help me to understand objectively what is happening in this house, and why Mrs. Hampden wants me here, and Mr. Drew doesn’t.”

  His lean-fingered hands moved absently about his desk until they found a cone shell with a patterned texture like brown and white fabric. He sat for a moment playing with the shell, reading its surface with a touch of sensitive fingers—the restless gesture of a man who might have troubling thoughts. That urbane poise which seemed a part of Alex Stair’s nature had, perhaps, its own flaw.

  At length he answered me. “Mrs. Hampden is afraid of the past. She’s afraid of reliving history. When she was young Catherine was sent away to school with disastrous results. I expect Maud’s fear of Leila being in trouble away from home is at the base of her concern.”

  I did not tell him that Aunt Janet had informed me of that school disaster, but I could see no connection when it came to Leila.

  “Isn’t that an extreme precaution for keeping her here?” I asked. “The girl doesn’t seem at all like her mother.”

  “Perhaps she’s not,” he said guardedly, “at least not very often. It will be amusing to see what will happen if you are given a chance to step into the middle of this fray.”