The Quicksilver Pool

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  “Why not? You’ve been helping up here, and I came too late to be of any use. The least I could do was return after I’d set Mother’s mind at ease. I thought I might see you home and keep the dragons in the woods away from you.”

  Remembering the betrayal of her own lips in the moment when Adam had kissed her, she winced. She could not accept Wade’s consideration as sweetly as it was given. If he knew, he would not be here.

  But when he offered her his arm as formally as if they’d been going for a Sunday stroll, she took it and went down the steps with him. Her knees felt shaky and more than anything else she wanted to reach the haven of her own room, fling herself across her bed and forget everything in the oblivion of sleep.

  Wade spoke only once on the way down. “So Morgan is haunted too,” he mused. “I hadn’t suspected that.”

  “You mean you think she blames herself in some way for—”

  He nodded unhappily, and Lora wished she had the strength and wisdom to argue with him. She doubted that Morgan felt the slightest self-reproach, even though she suffered some aberration about the picture.

  No dragons appeared in the woods and they made the rest of the trip downhill in silence. He seemed to understand her weariness, and though he could not know the mingled emotions which had swept through her that day, he sensed her need for withdrawal and made no effort to intrude small talk upon her.

  Back at home he left her at the foot of the stairs and returned to his mother’s sitting room. Lora went up to find Jemmy waiting for her at the head of the stairs.

  “I wanted to go up to Morgan Le Fay’s!” he cried. “I wanted to see the fire, but Grandmother wouldn’t let me. She said I’d be in the way. Is Hamlin all right, Lorie?”

  “Quite all right, Jemmy, and you’d better not go there today. It’s all over anyway and everyone is tired and busy. You can go up tomorrow and see what has happened.”

  He leaned toward her, sniffing as she reached the top step. “You smell real strong of smoke. Was it scary, Lorie? Tell me about it. Papa shut me out when he came back to tell Grandmother. She said it was too exciting for me. But I like excitement.”

  “Of course,” said Lora. “All boys do, even when it isn’t good for them. But now I need to get a warm bath and lie down for a while, Jemmy. I’m so tired and my head hurts. Tomorrow I’ll tell you all about everything, and that’s a promise.”

  Any appeal to his sympathy always reached him, and Jemmy pleaded no further. Lora undresssed and bathed herself from head to toe in the zinc-lined tub in the bathroom. She brushed her long hair to bright luster and rubbed her head roughly with a towel, striving to be rid of the sickening odor of smoke. Then she closed the shutters in her room and got limply into bed.

  There could hardly be a more grateful moment in life, she thought languidly, than the first instant of consigning a weary body to the softness of a feather mattress, the moment of relaxing mind and body, of surrendering as quickly as possible to sleep.

  For a little while the events of the day flashed in muddled sequence through her mind. Then slumber came and washed away the senseless pattern. For a long while her sleep was so deep that it did not seem that she dreamed at all. But when her consciousness hovered near waking she had an awareness of the passage of time. When she lifted her heavy lids she found the room dark except for a faint glow of moonlight edging the shutter slats. She had slept into the night.

  She blinked the heaviness from her eyes and they became gradually accustomed to the gloom. Something in the room was changed, was not as usual. She turned on her side, the better to see the shadowy bulk not far from her bed. A rocker creaked and she came widely awake. There was someone in the nearby chair, watching, waiting for her to waken.

  “Jemmy?” she inquired softly.

  The figure in the chair moved and threw aside a quilt which had wrapped it.

  “Not Jemmy,” Wade said.

  He went to her dresser for a candle, and she closed her eyes for a moment against the sharp arrowhead of light. When she opened them Wade had returned to his chair and was rocking gently back and forth.

  The candle flame made only a small aura of illumination behind him. It left his figure in shadow, faintly outlined, his face invisible. The senseless flashing in her mind had ceased. She was quiet now and there was peace.

  He is my husband, she thought. I do not want to be angry with him, or to pity him, or to condemn him. I want only to learn to love him.

  This was a thought so strange that she could only wonder at it. Oddly, it carried no sense of disloyalty to an old love. The girl she had been in the past would always belong to Martin. But that girl was a cocoon from which someone new had grown and the new entity was lonely and longed for love. Nevertheless, a desire for love was not love itself, she thought warily, but at least it gave her an increased tenderness toward Wade.

  “Why did you stay with me?” she asked. “Why did you watch while I slept?”

  “I was lonely,” he said simply. “I wanted to be near you.”

  He too, she thought, and was touched. She wished she might go to him easily and naturally, as a wife should; put her arms about him and her lips upon his in this new tenderness. But there was a shyness in her, a lack of certainty that held her back. She must not be betrayed into the pretense of giving when there was so little in her to be honestly given.

  She raised herself on one elbow. “What time is it?”

  “Near midnight,” he said. “Lora—” There was a warmth, a softness in his voice, almost an affection. She swerved away from it quickly. She was not ready, nor was he. Tenderness was not enough.

  “I’m ravenously hungry,” she said. “I’ve had only a bite to eat this afternoon, and no dinner at all. Do you suppose we could raid the kitchen for a midnight meal?”

  He withdrew almost perceptibly, so that the thing which had been there a moment before was gone. But he was not resentful, despite his withdrawal. There was still kindness in his tone.

  “Of course we can. I’m hungry too. Here—let me get your wrapper.”

  He brought it for her from the wardrobe. Not her old, worn one, but the feminine gown of pale blue which had been his gift, opened days after the unhappy fiasco of Christmas and never worn. Now she slipped it on and let him bring her the blue slippers he had given her to match.

  “There!” he said. “You look frivolous now, and small and helpless.”

  “And you’d like me that way?” Lora could not resist the challenge.

  He had moved toward the door, the candle in his hand. Its yellow flame gave his face a golden warmth, as if the gray cold behind it had begun to thaw a little. He shook his head at her, smiling.

  “Only if frivolous and helpless is what you are,” he said. “I’d like to know you as you are, Lora.”

  She followed him into the hall without answering, while he lighted her way. There was danger in this new softening toward her. Because she felt suddenly guilty, she tried to make their midnight meal a gay adventure. They closed the kitchen door with secret laughter, lest they awaken his mother, and behind the shutters they lighted only candles, lest one of the servants see brighter lamplight and come to investigate.

  There was cold chicken left from dinner in the icebox, and a bowl of potato salad. She poured glasses of rich milk, dipped that very morning from the huge cans brought around by the milk cart. Lora ate hungrily, while Wade nibbled a bite here and there without the appetite he had claimed.

  “Did you get Morgan quieted after I left?” he asked, when they came to a halt in their self-conscious effort to be gay.

  “We had no trouble,” Lora told him. “I put on my schoolmarm manner and she turned right into a weepy child and did what I told her to do. She went to sleep almost at once.”

  “No more accusations or dramatics?”

  Lora considered the question and decided on frankness. There had been too much of secrecy and subterfuge in this house.

  “She blurted out that she still wanted you and
would fight anyone for you.”

  Wade flung down his napkin. “Why must she always want whatever is denied her? Even as a child, the thing over which she was balked was the thing she must have. There’s no affection in her feeling toward me, not even liking. She had only contempt for me, really. And I dislike her heartily.”

  Lora bit the last speck of meat from a chicken leg and wiped her fingers free of grease. “Since we’re being truthful with each other tonight, will you let me ask you something?”

  “I know,” he said ruefully. “You’re thinking of that time in the woods when Jemmy saw us. You want to know why—”

  She nodded. “That’s the one thing that doesn’t fit any pattern I can find for you. You would never have turned away from Virginia.”

  He made a quick, despairing gesture. “No, I would not,” he said. “And yet—”

  And yet … Lora thought, remembering Adam.

  “I’ll try to tell you what happened,” he said, and there was sudden urgency in his voice. “Do you know that there was a time when I might have married Morgan?”

  “I know. And your mother has told me about that day when Morgan struck at her with the curling iron.”

  He winced. “She is so many things—Morgan. Anything is possible. Just as anything is possible with my mother. Even now I do not know the truth for certain. But Morgan came to me that day in the woods in the quiet, gentle way she sometimes used to adopt as a child and which always appealed to me. She grasped at nothing, asked for nothing, except that I listen. Then she told me that she had never struck my mother that day. Mother had come to upbraid her and threaten her, but though Morgan was angry, she said she did nothing at all but listen.”

  “What of the burn across your mother’s hand?”

  “She told me she’d tried to go on curling her hair and had picked up the hot iron when Mother suddenly darted toward her and grasped it with her bare hand. Then Mother screamed for help and when I came she made her accusations against Morgan. And she had a burned hand to prove it.”

  “But if what Morgan says is true, why didn’t she speak up at the time?”

  Wade shook his head wearily. “She knew no one would believe her. It was Mother’s word against hers, and she had a reputation for doing violent, unpredictable things. I could remember how queerly proud and quiet Morgan was at the time, offering no defense of any kind, but constantly accusing me with her eyes. And I didn’t understand.”

  “She could still be lying,” Lora said.

  “She had an air of honesty about her. She spoke quietly and simply. In a sense not like herself at all. It seemed to me that she was telling the truth and, that we had both been bitterly tricked by my mother. She was crying when she finished telling me, and somehow all of my old feeling for her came back and I held her close to me and kissed her.”

  He was silent and Lora reached across the table to touch his hand comfortingly.

  “But later of course Morgan became her old self again and tried to use that moment to reinstate herself with me. After Virginia’s death. I could only feel repelled by her then. By that time I knew that Virginia might well have died because I’d held Morgan in my arms for those few moments. I told Morgan that I wanted nothing more to do with her. Lora, you know that I truly loved Virginia?”

  Lora nodded. She knew indeed. “But your mother? If this is true then she did as terrible a thing as she accused Morgan of doing.”

  “She believed she was saving me from great injury. Perhaps she was. But I knew I had to escape from her after that. My need for escape was one reason for my enlisting. During those months away I promised myself a hundred times that if ever I returned it would be as my own man, owning my own soul.”

  “You are your own man now,” Lora said softly.

  He went to the kitchen door and pulled it open, and she rose and stood beside him. The moon stared palely through a thin veiling of cloud and the April night was mild, with only a touch of sea chill to it. He took her hand and drew her out into the soft gloom.

  “Spring!” he whispered. “You can almost hear things growing, getting ready to surprise us in the morning.”

  “Do you feel that too?” she said, both touched and surprised. She had not dreamed that his thoughts could turn along such lines. How little she knew him really.

  He drew a full deep breath that swelled his lungs. “It makes me feel the way I used to as a little boy. As if something mysterious was ahead of me. I can remember a place where the spring sun used to warm a broken wall in the old Hume house. I’ve gone there sometimes to sit alone and feel myself part of the growing. Part of every living thing.”

  She leaned her cheek against his arm for just a moment because there were no words to give him. She could love that little boy he had once been just as she could love Jemmy. He traced the curve of her cheek with his fingers and felt the coolness of her skin.

  “You’re chilled. Enough of this mooning in the back yard. Back to bed with you. Ellie will never get over it if she sees us here.”

  They laughed together lightly and hurried inside to put things away, conceal all evidence of their repast. If Ellie found some of her chicken gone tomorrow, she could think what she liked, but at least they would leave no betraying signs.

  Together they went upstairs, their shadows marching tall beside them in the candlelight. He saw her to the door of her own room and for a moment her breath quickened with the beat of her heart. But he said good night as politely as if he were some swain bringing her home from a ball, and went away to his own room and his own bed.

  As she blew out her candle and returned to her rumpled sheets, an unwanted memory forced itself into her mind. The memory of Adam’s mouth demanding upon her own—unwelcome, but asking no permission, unafraid of her refusal.

  The waxy smell of the snuffed candle pervaded the room as she lay in the dark. She had no wish to think of Adam—yet there the thought of him was, strong and clear as the feel of his mouth had been. And there was no will in her to put the thought away. What would happen if Wade should take her like that—not gently asking her assent, but claiming as a right? She didn’t know. She couldn’t tell.

  The following week saw May blooming full and green across the island. Already forsythia and crocus were gone and dandelion heads were turning white. Along the lane the dogwood blossoms which gave the road its name burst into white magic, and a delicate scent of apple blossom laced through the dark harbor smell that blew across the island.

  But now the surging of anticipation, of energy, like sap coursing through green things, had given way to a certain languor, which too was part of spring. For Jemmy it meant doses of sulphur and molasses which he detested and was certain he did not need. For Wade it meant a restlessness that drove him into trips about the island—but whether these were in the interest of the Circle Lora did not know. Sometimes he sat for long hours at the desk in the library, but whether he strove again to write he did not say. And the desk was always carefully locked when he left the room. Not again had there come such a moment of sympathy between them as on the night of Morgan’s fire.

  Today was so warm that Mother Tyler had asked to be wheeled outdoors. Peter had made a small wooden ramp which he placed against the rear veranda and down this he wheeled her chair. In the garden green sprouts were already piercing the brown earth and Lora had found some satisfaction and release for her own energies in either working with Ambrose when he came to tend the garden, or alone when he could not come. Morgan’s stables were being rebuilt and Ambrose often lent a hand, or a supervisory eye.

  This morning Mrs. Tyler sat in the shade of a blossoming apple tree, her hands for once idle in her lap, her eyes observing Lora as she knelt to work with trowel and gloves, digging the scourge of dandelions out of struggling grass.

  Rebecca had gone back to work for Morgan a few days before, though somewhat uncertainly and fearfully. And now that Lora had seen in Morgan the transformation of a supposedly poised woman to a tantrum-throwing child, she
could understand Rebecca’s uneasiness. Lora had seen the girl yesterday and Rebecca had said in her veiled way that everything was fine. Even now she did not accept Lora’s interest with complete trust. What had happened about the man she had been seeing, or how important he was in Rebecca’s eyes, Lora had no way of knowing. John Ambrose had told her that Morgan had no inkling of that matter and it was better if she did not know about it for the time being. But if Rebecca had to steal away secretly for visits to McKeon Street, her position with Morgan would not be too secure.

  Lora dug the point of the trowel into the soft earth and pried up an offending plant, her thoughts coming nearer to home. Only this morning before he had gone to school, Jemmy had looked at her with reproachful eyes.

  “I’m not going to get my dog back, am I, Lorie? Papa is never going to let him come home. I know.”

  She could not promise him outright again. So far Wade had resisted her every effort to bring up the subject. As far as he was concerned the dog could come back if she wanted to take the responsibility with his mother, wanted to work out the whole matter herself. Was she wrong, she wondered, in not taking that easy way out for Jemmy’s sake? It was beginning to seem that Wade would never make the step of his own free will. He wanted only to be let alone. When opposing individuals began to put pressure on him his one instinct seemed to be toward escape—not toward fighting the matter out with one or the other.

  “You look as if you were talking to yourself,” said Mother Tyler suddenly, “—the way you’re frowning and pursing your mouth!”

  Lora gave a resisting dandelion plant an energetic tug and sat back on the grass, dropping her trowel and stripping off her gloves. “I didn’t realize I was giving myself away. But you’re right. I was arguing with Wade just then. About Jemmy’s dog.”

  “That matter was settled long ago,” Mother Tyler snapped.

  “I’m sorry,” said Lora quietly, “but it was not. I told Jemmy at the time that I would get his dog back for him. And Wade has given me permission to do so if I manage the whole thing myself.” She looked up at the old lady with a challenge in her eyes. “He means that I must take all the blame and responsibility when you have an accident or take to your bed again.”