Columbella

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  When we reached the house King was the first one out of the car. He paused only to ask if I was all right, and when I nodded mutely he ran up the steps and into the house as if he did not trust himself to speak again to Catherine.

  Neither Leila nor her mother paid any attention to me as they got out of the car and I heard their brief interchange.

  “I’ll carry Steve’s box of shells around to Edith’s workroom,” Catherine said, sounding as calm as though nothing had happened. “If she’s there, I’ll keep her talking. That will give you a chance to run upstairs to her room and get my columbella locket back. She’s had it ever since she carried it off last week. I want it to wear tonight. I’ve lost my darling diamond earrings, but at least I’ll have my locket.”

  “Why don’t you ask her for it yourself?” Leila said. “She won’t like it if she catches me in her room.”

  “She won’t catch you. She’s hiding it because it was a gift from Alex—and she’s jealous. But I want it for tonight.”

  Leila gave in, though with a slight air of exasperation. “All right, Columbella. Don’t worry. I’ll get it for you.”

  As Catherine lifted out the carton filled with shells and wet sand I eyed it intently, but I could not tell whether it was one of the same cartons I had seen at Caprice. Leila watched her mother carry it off around the side of the house, and then turned to where I stood waiting.

  “Tell me what really happened,” she pleaded.

  At least she was not putting the incident entirely aside. I told her exactly what Catherine had done and she listened in growing dismay, so that I began to hope she had been stirred to revulsion, perhaps rebellion. But when she spoke, her words shocked me.

  “I’ve got to stop her,” she murmured. “That belt thing—and now this! I’ve got to stop her before she hurts herself. But what am I to do?”

  I wanted to keep her there, talk to her, shake her from so foolish an acceptance of responsibility for her mother’s behavior, but I knew this was not the time. I reached into the car and drew out the box containing the yellow dress.

  “I’ll take this up to your room,” I said.

  I think she did not hear me. Her preoccupation with Catherine seemed to have shut her off from everything else. When she turned her back on me and ran into the house I followed more slowly, almost as much shaken by Leila’s reaction as I had been by the incident itself.

  My next thought was to consult with King. When I went to his office I found him there with Maud Hampden. She looked weary and discouraged, and I knew he had given her an account of what had just happened.

  She beckoned me in at once. “Do come here, Jessica. I need you on my side. How are you feeling after that dreadful experience?”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “The car didn’t touch me.”

  King pulled out a chair for me and I sat down.

  “She means to destroy us all,” Maud said, “in order to destroy King.”

  This was the thought I’d had—that Catherine wanted King’s destruction above anything else, that this was her true, vindictive intent.

  “She never forgives anyone who sees through her,” Maud went on. “Even now she romanticizes herself—just as she did when she was young. Columbella—delicate and lovely as a shell. At least that’s one of her roles. She has others less innocuous. You found her out in all her deceptions and pretenses, King. In your eyes she is scarcely the center of the universe, and she can’t endure the injury to her tender ego. Now that Leila is older, Catherine can get at you through her. She’s out to smash the mirror you hold up to her—by breaking you. It’s as simple as that.”

  What it cost Maud Hampden to say these things showed in her eyes, in the very slackness of her shoulders. It could not be easy for a mother to face these shattering truths about her child as realistically as Maud had forced herself to do.

  King flung out his hands angrily. “I won’t have Leila’s life ruined as it will be if she isn’t sent away. Nor will I stand by and see Jessica hurt because she’s trying to help my daughter. For the last few days I’ve thought of going away myself. But now I know that’s out of the question. Whatever my responsibility is, it lies here. No one is safe from Catherine’s malice now.”

  This was the change of course I feared. “But what can you do here?” I pleaded. “It’s far better for you to go away!”

  He did not look at me. “I can at least see that Catherine harms no one before the time when Leila is sent away. Once the child is gone from the house, Jessica will leave. We can’t breathe easily until then.”

  My outburst had caught Maud’s attention and I saw quickened awareness in her eyes. There was very little this woman missed.

  “Catherine knows exactly where you’re vulnerable,” she said to King. “If you send Leila away now, she will still win. She’ll write and phone and visit her—so that distance will make everything worse. She may really want her away now, thanks to Alex’s needling. But she won’t release the child emotionally, even if she’s sent away—because Leila is her one best weapon against you.”

  King did not answer. I think his mind was made up by that time and he would not change it for anyone’s argument. He glanced at the clock on his desk and shrugged.

  “There’s nothing further to be done now. I need to get back to the office.”

  But before he left he made one last effort with me. “Haven’t you had enough by this time, Jessica? Do you begin to see what she is capable of?”

  The smile I attempted had a tendency to slip. There was only one answer I could give him, and he seemed to read it in my face. He touched my shoulder lightly, as if in salute, and went out of the room.

  Maud Hampden sat where she was, her eyes closed, and there were tears on her cheeks.

  “Most small children have barbaric instincts to start with,” she said. “Growing up, becoming civilized and educated, means learning how other people feel. But Catherine has a flat side, a blank side, that nothing has ever changed. Leila isn’t like her—yet. That’s why you’re my one hope, Jessica. You may still be able to reach Leila in this really desperate struggle. You can help her to escape. Not physically—from the island—but emotionally from this dependence on someone who will harm her.”

  “I can only try,” I said. “But don’t you think King ought to get away?”

  She looked at me for a moment and then held out her hand in her generous, affectionate way. When I gave her my own she pressed my fingers lightly.

  “You might work on that too, my dear,” she said, and drew herself wearily from her chair. It seemed to me that she had aged since the first time I had seen her. When we went to the door together she permitted herself to lean upon my arm.

  With so much happening, I had almost forgotten about the supper party tonight. In the big main hall Edith was giving instructions for the placing of buffet tables, the rearrangement of furniture, her gaunt, rather bony person flitting anxiously from table to table. Though she managed efficient enough results, it was always with too much expenditure of nervous effort.

  Since Catherine had disappeared and Edith would not stop for food, Maud and Leila and I had a quiet lunch on the gallery fronting the terrace. What Catherine had done that morning went unmentioned between us. Leila seemed remote and thoughtful, and I wondered what success she’d had in recovering the columbella from her aunt’s room.

  Once she mentioned the theft of her mother’s earrings in San Juan. “They would have been mine someday—like Caprice,” she told her grandmother. “I would have had my ears pierced to wear them.”

  Maud roused herself. “I remember when your grandfather bought her those earrings. They’re better off lost. They were intended to make amends for Catherine’s hurt feelings—when she should have been punished. I hope they’ll never be recovered.”

  “Oh, Gran!” Leila cried. “I know what you mean. Cathy has told me
about that bracelet she took at school. That was only a prank—to tease a girl she didn’t like. And then everyone made such a fuss, and you came to whisk her home in disgrace.”

  Maud said nothing for a moment and I could not meet her eyes. When she spoke I heard deep pain in her voice.

  “A prank, dear?” she asked softly. “A prank? Like running Jessica down in the car this morning was a prank?”

  Leila stared at her grandmother in shock and outrage. Then she jumped up and ran off to her room.

  Maud and I had little to say to each other for the rest of the meal. I knew how deeply she was suffering, and I could offer nothing to lessen her pain.

  After lunch Edith put Leila to work and Maud stayed downstairs to help supervise arrangements as long as her strength lasted. No one needed me, and Edith clearly did not want me about. I spent most of the afternoon in my room, still trying to quiet my nerves, after the thing that had nearly happened to me at Catherine’s hands. But it was hard to be inactive, and at length I went outside to wander for a while in the little tropical forest. There was, however, something about the place that I was beginning to dislike. After a few steps into its maze of paths, I felt suddenly alone and too far from the house, closed in by that dark and sinister-seeming growth. It was not a place where I wanted to meet Catherine alone, and I did not stay there long.

  Wandering about closer to the house, I came upon the place where Edith Stair cleaned and prepared seashells for her husband. I had seen the single-roomed stone building she used, but until now I had never gone inside it. I found my way along a path walled by a hibiscus hedge and went to the door. It was unlocked and I pushed it open tentatively. No one was inside and I went in. The building had once been a separate kitchen for the main house and there was a great brick chimney into which a Danish oven had been set. Now it was used for a totally different purpose.

  The marble top of what had been a kitchen table, the soap-stone slab beside the sink, cupboard shelves, and even the wide stone window ledges were laden with shells in every condition of processing. There were shells in pails of water, probably being kept alive; shells drying in the sun on window ledges, shells ready for final polishing. The stone floor beneath my feet felt gritty with sand, and the same peculiar shellfish smell that I had found in Catherine’s room at Caprice tainted the air. Beyond a window ledge, stephanotis bloomed white and waxy, and when I drew the casement open, its jasmine scent lent a grateful fragrance to the room.

  All about were the instruments used by Edith in her work. Curved tweezers lay upon the table, and there was an assortment of stiff wire brushes. On a two-burner gas stove a big pot for boiling water waited for its next batch of shells. On a shelf stood bottles of preserving alcohol. I was reminded on every hand not only of the handsome housing a shell could form, but of the slain tenant as well, and I could understand why the fastidious Alex disliked this part of shell collecting.

  From a wall hook Edith Stair’s brown work smock seemed to watch me with bright yellow sunflower eyes, and I knew I had no business in this place. Yet the feeling that the room had something to tell me persisted, and I moved on in my inspection. Now and then I picked up a shell to examine it carefully, but learned nothing, and went on, still tantalized.

  On a worktable stood a carton half filled with sand in which a number of shells remained nested. But if the box Steve had brought this morning contained those carelessly gathered shells from Caprice, there would seem no need to protect them by bedding them in sand. Knowing little of the subject, I could not tell whether the shells in the sandbox were of any value. To my inexpert eye they looked ordinary enough.

  As I stood there, wondering idly, I began patting at the sand in the box, playing with it absently as I had played in sand as a child. It was damp enough for the building of a passable castle, though a bit rocky, and not like the finegrained sand one found at the water’s edge. When my castle had taken on bulk and height, and I had built a rampart with serrated walls, I decorated it with bits of shell and stone, hardly attending the work of my hands because of the growing sense of uneasiness that possessed me.

  I had felt like this in my room, for all the new locks on the doors, and again in the dark paths of the little forest. Now the feeling had crept upon me once more, and I recognized it as fear, making me jumpy, giving me a tendency to look askance over my shoulder. This was the beginning of terror and I must not give in to it.

  Nevertheless, so attuned was I to watchful uneasiness, and so quick to pick up the slightest sound, that once or twice I had the sure feeling of someone looking in at the windows behind my back, watching me build castles in the sand. Each time the sensation came I turned about quickly, and once I even went to look outside, but there was no one in sight. Hibiscus hedge and the very walls of the stone building offered concealment, so I could not be sure whether someone had really looked in on me or if the jumpiness of my nerves had betrayed me.

  Since the room and its belongings told me nothing, and since my uneasiness continued to increase, I was about to give up and return to the house when I heard a definite and unconcealed step on the cement walk that led to the door. At once the thought of Catherine, the memory of a stone wall at my back, swept over me, leaving me to stare shakily at the door.

  To my relief it was Alex who stepped into the room. He seemed surprised, and not at all pleased to see me.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here,” he said, with a possible challenge beneath his words.

  I explained a bit feebly that I had been exploring, that I had found this place and was curious about it. He listened impassively, his fingers at his beard, and I think he did not believe that I had come here idly.

  “Edith seems to have disappeared,” he said. “I had expected to find her here.”

  I’m not sure why I had the instinct that he was lying and that it was not Edith he had come looking for.

  “I haven’t seen her,” I told him. “There has been no one else here.”

  He came to look down at my mounds and walls with their shell trim and shook his head doubtfully. “If I were you I wouldn’t let Edith know what you’ve been up to here. She’s jealous of her prerogatives, you know. No one touches her instruments. She doesn’t allow the servants to come here to clean, but takes care of the place herself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “The building seemed open and empty—not at all private.”

  I reached out to flatten my sand castles, but Alex stopped the movement of my hands. “Never mind—let them be!” he said and I heard the whip of some resentment in his voice.

  Standing so near, I could look into his eyes at close hand and I noted something a little strange about them—tiny neckings of yellow in the pale blue of the iris, as though some fire burned behind, offering sly glimpses of flame. It was a strange conceit and I blinked and moved away, wondering if he wanted me to leave the castles so Edith would find out about my meddling and direct her wrath at me instead of at him. I wondered too if he was aware of what Catherine had done this morning, and what his reaction might be—but I had no wish to tell him if he did not know.

  I was half turned toward him, with the window on my right, and from the corner of my eye I caught movement there. Something that came into shadowy, unfocused being at the periphery of my vision—and was gone at once. A face? Someone who had stepped to the window to see us there? This time the feeling was even stronger than before.

  “I think someone’s looking for you,” I said. “Perhaps I’d better go.”

  He seemed to hesitate, then change his mind. “I’ll walk to the house with you. Since Edith isn’t here.”

  So much for Catherine, I thought, if it was she who lingered behind the hibiscus hedges, waiting for a chance to see Alex alone. I was glad enough of his company as we went back to the house together.

  Just before we reached the door he halted me beside him on the path. “Be a little careful of medd
ling with what you don’t understand,” he said in a low voice, and I had again the conceit of hidden flame showing slyly behind pale, opaque eyes.

  “What do you mean by that?” I asked. “How have I meddled?”

  “How have you not?’ His bearded lips smiled not too pleasantly. “You’ve stepped between Catherine and her daughter and I think you put yourself in a more uncomfortable position than you know.”

  “But I do know,” I said. “This morning Mrs. Drew came very near to running me down with her car.”

  He met my words impassively, as if such news did not surprise him, but I could not tell whether he had already heard about what had happened. I hurried away from him up the steps and into the house. What Alex Stair was about, I did not know, but I trusted him less than ever. It was, perhaps, not only Catherine whom I needed to be on guard against. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that Alex was all too anxious to see me gone from Hampden House, even though this was something he had disclaimed in the beginning.

  12

  When I reached my room I left the door open so that I could hear Leila when she came up the stairs. By now it was early evening, though still light, and in an hour or so the first guests would be arriving. This was the time for bathing and dressing and getting ready for the supper. I heard Catherine come out of her room to take over one of the bathrooms. Once when there was a sound on the stairs, I went to my door in time to glimpse Edith coming up, with Alex beside her. They were not speaking and I sensed a chill between them.

  When Leila finally appeared she came slowly, reluctantly, as though every step she took toward her room brought her nearer to something she dreaded. Near the top she glanced up through the stair rail and saw me waiting.

  I smiled at her, making an effort to be cheerful, casual. “Let me know when you’re ready to be zipped,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to wear that dress tonight.”

  “Because of what your mother said? But she hasn’t seen it on you. How can she know how well it suits you?”