From its position of honor above the sideboard, the game bird hung its limp neck over a painted table, glaring at her with one dead eye.
She nodded to it cheerfully. “You’ve made us uncomfortable long enough. Down you shall come. And I’ll find something cheerful to put in your place if I have to paint it myself.”
Ellie leaned a shoulder against the dining-room door to push it open and stuck in her head. “You call me, ma’am? I thought I heard somebody talking.” Her hands were covered with flour and dough from bread-making and she held one under the other to keep from dribbling bits on the floor.
“That was I you heard, Ellie,” Lora said. “I was talking to his nibs up there.” She gestured toward the picture on the wall.
Ellie’s eyes widened and Lora laughed softly. It was better never to laugh out loud in this house, since that would set the silver bell across the hall to ringing.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s all right as long as I talk to a picture on the wall. It’s when I start talking to myself that you need to be concerned.”
Ellie’s sense of humor was not outstanding, but since she presumed this to be some sort of joke, she cracked her thin mouth into the semblance of a smile.
Just then Mrs. Tyler’s bell rang piercingly. The long winter days had somehow made its silver note grow sharper, less musical with constant use.
“Oh, Lor’, ma’am!” Ellie wailed. Lately even her own devotion to Mrs. Tyler had worn a little thin. “This dough’s got to be babied along now, and there she goes wanting me.”
“You go back to your bread,” Lora said. “I’ll see what she wants.”
“Better not,” said Ellie, making futile wiping motions with her sticky hands. “There’s a divil in her these days—pardoning the word, ma’am. Goodness knows what she’ll do if you go in there.”
“Nevertheless, I am going,” said Lora, suddenly determined. “You just finish your bread.”
The bell rang again insistently and Lora crossed the hall and opened the door which had been forbidden to her ever since Christmas.
A fire burned low in the sitting-room grate, lending some slight warmth to the bedroom beyond, and the air was stuffy with sickroom odors. The sitting room looked unlived in without the familiar figure in black in the chair before the fire. Jason Cowles’s visage brooded from the wall more grimly than ever.
“Why must you take so long when I call you, Ellie?” demanded Mrs. Tyler in pettish tones from the dim bedroom.
Lora went quietly to the door. “Ellie’s hands are covered with dough, Mother, so I’ve come to see if I can help.”
The old woman was a hulk beneath the mound of quilts and in the dim light from a shuttered window Lora could just see her eyes, dark and shadowed in a white face, staring at her balefully.
“I will not have you in this room,” Mrs. Tyler quavered. “Where is my son? I have given orders—”
Lora went straight to the bed and stood beside it. “There’s no one else home just now. Shall I get you some water? Or your medicine?”
Tears of weak rage blurred Mrs. Tyler’s eyes. “I will not be mocked when I am ill. It is not good for me to be so upset. Go away and send Ellie to me at once. I—I’m so miserably uncomfortable.”
Lora ignored the outrage in the eyes that watched her, and felt beneath the bedclothes with a practiced hand. “Of course you’re uncomfortable with everything bunched into a wad of wrinkles. I’ll have you easy again in a jiffy.”
She returned to the sitting room with no heed for the sputter of protest which followed her and came back wheeling the big leather chair before her. Then she went to the bed, released the covers gently from the clutch of Mrs. Tyler’s fingers, and flung them to the end of the bed. The old woman lay shivering in her flannel nightgown, gasping at the violation.
“Now then,” Lora said, “let’s move fast so that you won’t get chilled.”
She reached for the thin hands, ringless now, and pulled the old woman to a sitting position.
“I’m too weak for this!” Mrs. Tyler wailed. “Go away, you wicked girl!”
“Of course you’re weak, lying in bed all this long time. But never mind that—I’m going to have you feeling better than you’ve felt in a long while. Come now—over to the chair.”
“I’m going to faint!” cried Mrs. Tyler.
“That’s all right,” said Lora. “I know just what to do for a faint. Quickly now—I won’t let you fall.”
She gave all her support to Mrs. Tyler’s dead weight, half carrying her the few steps to the chair. Then she lowered her into it, quickly wrapped a quilt about her, tucked it around her bare feet, and turned her attention to remaking the bed. The old lady did not faint, but she watched her tormentor with eyes bright with helpless rage.
When the sheets had been pulled taut and every wrinkle banished, Lora turned cheerfully back to her charge. “I know how much you’d like to punish me, but you can’t punish anyone when you let yourself go to pieces like this. If you want things your way you have to get up and fight for them. Now then, back to bed, and I’m going to give you the best back rub you’ve ever had. Fainting won’t do you a bit of good.”
There was alcohol among bottles and jars on a shelf and Lora turned the old woman quickly over on her stomach, pulled the covers up to her waist and pushed up her nightgown so that her thin back lay bare. If there was one thing Doc had taught her how to do well, it was to give a back rub to a bedridden patient. She went vigorously to work, rubbing and kneading with palms and strong fingers, seeking out nerve centers, relaxing knotted muscles.
The stiffness went gradually out of her patient, gradually the old woman relaxed and resisted Lora’s hands no longer.
“You’re going to feel wonderful now,” Lora said. “You’re even going to stop being indignant with me for helping you.”
When she had completed her ministrations and had her patient covered and warm again, she hurried to the kitchen for a basin of warm water, winked at the alarmed Ellie, and returned to wash Mrs. Tyler’s face and hands and comb her thin, snarled hair. Through it all, the old woman lay with her eyes tightly closed, weak, helpless, with her impotent anger fading in spite of herself.
“Gracious,” said Lora, drying Mrs. Tyler’s fingers, “you don’t even take care of your hands any more. Do you know your hands were the first thing I noticed about you? They made me so ashamed of mine. Where’s that rose water and glycerine?”
She found the bottle and made a ceremony of rubbing the lotion into drying skin and roughened knuckles.
“Now for your rings. They’re in this case on the table, aren’t they? We’ll have you all dressed up by the time Wade comes home. What a lovely diamond this is. I used to watch it shine in the firelight when you moved your hands. But nothing shines in this dark room. And you can’t get well with no fresh air to breathe.”
“Fresh air is dangerous when one is in a weakened condition,” Mrs. Tyler protested.
Lora went to the window. “My father didn’t hold with that idea,” she said as she opened the shutters.
The March wind seized the unexpected opportunity and whooshed into the room, setting window curtains flying and book pages fluttering. Lora permitted it to play havoc for no more than a minute, and then slammed down the window right in its face. But she left the shutters open and arrows of sunlight did swift battle with the room’s dark corners, lancing cheerfully from polished wood, warming bright quilt squares to life.
Mrs. Tyler drew a deep lungful of cold fresh air and shuddered through her entire being.
“Now what do you plan, may I ask?” she demanded fiercely of her tormentor.
Lora laughed out loud. “There! I knew I’d have you feeling better. You sound practically like yourself. Would you like to sit up in bed for a while and read? Here’s your Bible on the table and I’ll fix the lamp for you. You may have your bell back now and I’ll return to my own work.”
“Work?” Mrs. Tyler echoed. “What work?”
Lora paused in the bedroom door. “Right now I’m taking that dreadful picture of a dead bird off the dining-room wall. I’m sure it is giving us all indigestion.”
Mrs. Tyler pulled herself up in bed. “I will not have that picture touched! Do you hear me? That painting—”
Lora put her hands saucily on her hips. “How can you stop me if you stay tied to your bed?”
She whirled out of the room and returned to her task, tingling from the encounter. She set a newspaper on a chair and climbed up to take the picture from the wall. She was holding the thing in her hands when Jemmy came running in, just home from school. Usually he went straight through the house and around to the yard where Hamlin had a home in the stable. But when he saw the dining-room door ajar and Lora balancing on a chair with the picture in her hands, he came in to find out what she was doing.
“Hello, Jemmy.” Lora held up the picture for him to see. “This is not going to stare at us any more while we’re eating,” she told him.
His eyes widened. “What will Grandmother say?”
“She has already said it. Oh dear—there’s a dark blotch on the wall where the picture has hung for so long. We’ll have to find something right away to cover it. Have you any ideas, Jemmy?”
“We could take a picture from somewhere else,” he suggested. “Maybe the one of the Parthenon from the library. But then I suppose that would leave a spot on the wall there. Or that Three Graces one from my room. I’m awfully tired of that Or—Lora, I know! There’s a lot of old stuff in the attic. Pictures, too, I think. We could go up there and find something.”
Lora handed him the picture and got down from the chair. “Fine—if you’ll help me. Do you want to go tell Hamlin you’re home first?”
He ran out to the yard and was back again while Lora was getting a shawl from her room. Jemmy showed her a door in the upper hall that opened onto ladder steps and she brought a candle to light their way. He went first to push up the trap door and climbed ahead into darkness.
“Ooh, it’s shivery up here!” he cried. “Hurry, Lora, bring up the candle.”
She climbed to the top of the ladder, kicking back her skirts lest she trip, and set the candleholder on the door. Then she climbed the last steps into attic space. The roof pitched upward in dark beams above them, and Jemmy’s shadow sprang up the wall, long-legged and grotesque. All around were gathered the collections of generations past Trunks and boxes, pieces of broken furniture, piles of discarded books. It was an orderly array, however, as was to be expected in Amanda Tyler’s house.
On a wall rack were set several guns and some pistols and Jemmy regarded them with interest.
“My grandfather—Papa’s father—used to go hunting quite often. Those are his guns. They used to keep the ammunition up here too, but once I tried to load a pistol and after that Papa hid every bit of it. Of course I’m older now and I know I’m not supposed to touch guns, though Adam lets me sometimes.”
He found the pictures stacked with their faces against the wall. While Lora brought her candle over and held it close, Jemmy acted as showman, turning frame after frame out from the wall. There was a grim print of the stabbing scene from Hamlet, and a fiercesome one of Lady Macbeth sleep-walking.
The latter fascinated Jemmy, but he agreed that it would be no better than the bird for a dining-room decoration. There was a still life of fruit which might have been more suitable, except that the painted articles bore little resemblance to reality.
“Morgan Le Fay painted that,” said Jemmy. “I guess she used to paint quite a lot when she was a young girl. I can remember a much better one than this.”
He turned another half-dozen candidates around and then brought out a garden scene, with a stiff little girl in flounced skirts daintily sniffing a spray of lilac.
“There! This is the one Aunt Morgan did when she was older. That’s my mother in the garden. Mama liked it. She used to have it hanging in the downstairs hall. Let’s put this one up, Lorie.”
Lora regarded the picture with some doubt. True, it was bright and gay, and if the hand which painted it had been less than expert, it was still preferable to the picture of dead game. But she did not want to hang a picture of Virginia, even when it so little resembled Virginia, where they must all look at it every day. Especially since that picture had been painted by her sister Morgan. But how was she to explain the matter diplomatically to Jemmy?
She held the candle high, playing for time, and its flame wavered and guttered as wind buffeted the house, wailing gustily through attic cracks.
“We don’t have to decide now, anyway, Jemmy. I’m getting cold up here. If the space goes empty for a while it won’t really matter. Perhaps you can go to New York with me soon and then we’ll find something together that will be just right.”
Jemmy shook his head. “I think this one’s fine. Lorie, when it’s warmer do you suppose we could come up here and look in some of the trunks? Just for fun.”
“I don’t see why not. We’ll ask your father if we may. But, Jemmy—about that picture—”
He was already lugging it toward the stairs, however. “I like this one. Let’s go down, Lorie. It’s cold.”
She started after him uncertainly, wishing now that she had never tampered with the picture until she had another ready to take its place.
“Of course your mother liked the picture, because Morgan was her sister. But we can’t expect your father to like it as much when it isn’t a very good painting. You know how he—well, he doesn’t exactly approve of your Aunt Morgan.”
“Oh, yes he does,” Jemmy said, resting the frame on the floor near the trap door. “He likes her a lot, really. Else why would he be kissing her the way he did that day in the woods? Bring your candle for the stairs, Lorie.”
She followed him, stricken. This was just the talk of a small boy. Jemmy had a vivid imagination at times and didn’t always distinguish between truth and fantasy. But she had to ask the question that came to her tongue.
“When did this happen, Jemmy? How long ago?”
He answered her guilelessly. “Oh, it was way last year—no, before that. Before my mother—” He broke off and started down the steep flight ahead of her, still carrying the picture.
She went after him, blowing out the candle as she reached the bottom step, and closed the door carefully behind her. She kept her voice steady, casual, as she asked the next question.
“Can you remember, Jemmy, whether you ever told anyone about this?”
“I told my mother,” Jemmy said, his interest still on the painting. “Lorie, I like this picture. If you don’t think it’s right for the dining room, could I have it in my room, please? Could that old Three Graces one go down in the dining room for now?”
“A very good idea,” Lora said, relieved to have the problem so easily settled.
They went into his room to remove the old picture and hang Morgan’s water color in its place. All the while Lora kept a careful guard on her thoughts, her expression, her words. Not for a moment must Jemmy suspect the turmoil within her. When Jemmy sat down on his bed to admire the painting in its new place, Lora, carrying out the one he disliked, paused in the doorway.
“Did your mother say anything special when you told her?”
“Anything about what?” asked Jemmy blankly. “Oh—you mean about Papa and Morgan Le Fay in the woods? She just said she was glad Papa liked Aunt Morgan. The hollyhocks in the picture are especially nice, don’t you think? Do you like hollyhocks, Lorie?”
“I love them,” said Lora, and carried the Three Graces down to the dining room.
Jemmy did not come with her this time and she climbed upon the chair, held the picture experimentally over the darkened spot on the wall. It wasn’t quite right, but it would do for now. She slid the wire over the hook until it was exactly balanced. Then she stepped down from the chair and stood off to study the three rather buxom Graces without really seeing them at all.
It was as if she f
eared that the moment she stopped working actively at something, stopped pretending to be busy, a whole dark field of thought might engulf her, and she was afraid of what it might bring.
If Jemmy had actually come upon his father in a love scene with Morgan Channing in the woods, if he had told his mother innocently enough—what had this knowledge meant to Virginia?
Lora crossed the room to French doors that opened upon a little side veranda, and stood looking out upon whipping branches and dry leaves tumbling across the yard. This house, tucked against the hillside, had some shelter, but how wild and windy it must be today up on Morgan’s hilltop.
The thoughts swept back, engulfing her. Serena had said there had been some whisper of suicide. But she wouldn’t, she mustn’t think of that. How terrible would then be the blame heaped upon Wade. Had Jemmy told his father? she wondered. Did Wade dream of what Virginia knew? Lora was sure that whatever had happened had been Morgan’s doing, yet Wade could not be completely exonerated. If this was the burden he carried in secret—the fear that his wife, because of his own action—!
No wonder he detested Morgan, did not trust her. But surely Virginia must have known what her sister was like. Surely she would have put no stock in Jemmy’s words. Not when she was so confident and sure of Wade’s devotion.
Or had she been? What depth of attraction existed between Wade and Morgan to have burned anew after the passing of so many years? Had it perhaps never died out entirely?
Carriage wheels crunched upon the drive. That would be Wade now, coming home. She ran upstairs to her own room. Not until she had sorted these troubling thoughts into some semblance of order could she face him again. He must not read this guilty knowledge in her eyes.
XIX
After dinner that night Mrs. Tyler summoned Ellie to her room to assist her into the wheel chair for the first time in weeks. She ordered a fire built in her sitting-room grate and had herself wheeled into the dining room where she could see exactly what vandal’s act had taken place behind her back. Having looked at the substitute picture, she sent for Wade, lecturing him thoroughly and then asked for Lora.
The Quicksilver Pool Page 21