Blue Fire

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “Will you be there?” she asked.

  “Probably not. There’s work for me away from the house. But you mustn’t disappoint him. He’s counting on this.”

  The picture of an elderly blind man, grown pitifully helpless, had taken hold of her imagination and she had been able to put aside the disturbing memory of a piercing look that saw everything and a judgment that could be merciless.

  “I’ll go,” she promised. “But remember that I’m doing it for you, more than I am for him.”

  He laughed and there was something exciting in the sound. He tousled her short hair almost roughly and tangled his fingers in it as he kissed her again.

  “You’re to let your hair grow,” he ordered. “I want to see it down to your shoulders. I don’t like being married to a crop-haired boy.” He picked her up and she clung to him as he carried her back to her bed.

  Afterwards she lay awake for a time, a dreamy contentment upon her from which all fearfulness had fled. She loved him so very much. She wanted only to please him, to serve him, to be what he wished her to be. The ancient longing of Eve, of Woman, possessed her and she wanted—for the moment—nothing else.

  Even after she rose for the second time, even after Dirk had gone to work, the sense of having at last come home remained with her. When she was alone she went light-heartedly to every window in the house and looked out upon the clear bright day, savoring each remembered view. Behind the house the Lion’s Head was free of clouds, raising its nubby rock top from the hill that separated Table Bay and the ocean beyond.

  She even got out her camera and checked her film supply, tried a shot or two from upstairs windows, just to get her hand in again and because every view filled her with delight. Once more she felt alive and eager to plan.

  Dirk had said there was a downstairs bathroom she might fix up for a darkroom, if she liked. She must purchase supplies, set herself up in business, as it were. This morning she could even remember without resentment that John Cornish had said she had talent. Perhaps she might take a few pictures around Cape Town that he would approve of. If she ever saw him again—which was unlikely. Knowing now how Dirk felt, she must take no more chances. If he came to this house again, she would not be at home to Mr. Cornish. The spell of the repentant Eve was still upon her.

  5

  In the afternoon Mara came over, bringing the new maid—a dark-skinned girl named Willimina Kock. “Willi” for short, Mara said. The girl had a gentle manner that was appealing, and she spoke English naturally as a language she had grown up with. Mara gave orders briskly about Willi’s duties as if she hardly expected Susan to know what they would be. The girl said, “Yes, Miss Bellman,” quietly and went to change into her working clothes.

  “She’ll manage quite well for you,” Mara said casually. “She’s had a bit more education than is necessary, but she needs the work. If you’re ready now, we’ll get along over to the house. Your father is waiting for you.”

  Susan felt like saying, “Yes, Miss Bellman,” to all this brisk efficiency, but she suppressed the urge. Undoubtedly this handsome, blond young woman was hired for her ability to handle such matters with authority.

  When Susan had put on her coat, she slung her camera over her shoulder, hoping to find an occasion to use it later. As they got into the car and drove along the short, narrow street to a sharp turn, Susan glanced at her companion speculatively.

  Today Mara seemed less brightly vivacious than she had been before, and while she was courteous enough, there was a chill behind her manner, and perhaps disapproval. Did this, Susan wondered, reflect Niklaas van Pelt’s feeling about a marriage between his long-ignored daughter and his ward? At any rate, remembering Dirk’s laughter at Mara’s expense, she would not be troubled by her today.

  Though the van Pelt house was not far across the ravine, it was necessary to follow the road uphill to the place where it bridged the cut and go the long way around down the other side. From this approach the house looked more familiar to Susan. It was built in a fat L, with lacy iron railings along the upstairs and downstairs verandas. The short part of the L extended toward the front and was capped by a peaked roof, red tiled. Under the eaves were old-fashioned gingerbread curlicues. A low stone wall, painted white and topped with more of the fanciful iron grillwork, was further fortified with a high box hedge, behind which towered a huge rhododendron bush.

  Mara turned the car into the driveway and ran it around to the garage in the rear.

  “I’ll take you in,” she said shortly, and Susan let herself out of the car and walked beside the brisk-moving Mara toward the front of the house.

  There were a few flowering shrubs, Susan noted as they walked through the yard, but the rare proteas her father had once raised and which gave the house its name were no longer in evidence.

  As they neared the steps wings of nervousness began to flutter inside Susan. This sudden attack of anxiety was nonsense, she told herself. It was ridiculous to be seized by a groundless fear that bordered on panic just because she was to meet this old man whom she really did not know.

  Mara seemed unaware of Susan’s uneasiness. She went up the front steps and across the wide veranda, with Susan following after. The front door had narrow panes of glass running down a strip on either side. The sight brought recognition. Susan could remember a child peering out at the street through one of those panes on a rainy day when she could not go outside to play.

  A maid, wearing the usual white kerchief, opened the door at Mara’s ring and they entered a wide hall, with a stairway running up at one side. A small Oriental rug lay against the dark floor, and a chest of drawers made of some dark, handsomely grained wood stood against the wall, a ladder-backed chair beside it. On top of the chest brass candlesticks flanked a tall Chinese vase filled with glowing pink flowers.

  “If you’ll wait here a moment,” Mara said, “I’ll tell him you’ve arrived.”

  Susan was glad enough to wait in the dim light of the old-fashioned hallway and try to get her own bewildering emotions in hand. Something in her accepted the house in warm recognition, remembering the hallway, the very stairs, the glimpse of a dining room beyond, with more flowers on a long sideboard. Yet when it came to facing the man who was her father she could feel nothing except a tendency to panic and she did not know why.

  The colored maid took her coat, but Susan kept her camera over her shoulder as if its very presence helped to identify her with a world she knew and belonged to. When the maid had gone she turned to the vase of flowers with a further sense of recognition. So spring proteas were blooming in Cape Town. The waxy petals of this variety were thick-fleshed and stiff, the centers a solid, prickly mass. Woody stems supported the blossoms and the green leaves were waxy like the blooms. She touched a tentative finger to a leaf, knowing that the surface would be faintly sticky.

  Behind her, at the far end of the hallway, the assured click of Mara’s spiked heels sounded and she turned about.

  “Come this way, please,” Mara said. She had taken off her coat and wore a blue knitted suit that revealed her figure effectively.

  At the rear the hall turned at right angles, ending with an open door. As they approached the door, Thomas Scott came out, carrying a sheaf of envelopes. Susan said, “Good morning,” and he bowed his head, murmuring a scarcely audible response. For an instant she was aware of dark eyes that held a hint of anger in them. Mara paid no attention to him as they went through the door of Niklaas van Pelt’s study.

  Now the sense of engulfing recognition brought with it a dread that was nearly overpowering. There was something disturbing about this room, some association it held for her. Yet it was a pleasant room, with French doors opening upon a terrace, the walls done in soft grays and grayish greens. It was not the colors of the room she remembered, however, or even the pictures on the walls. These things had been changed since her childhood. The great desk of native stinkwood stood in the same place. The heavy dark bookcases were the same, and the slipp
ery chairs that were difficult for a child to sit upon without sliding. All these she saw at a glance as a background for the man who occupied a great red leather armchair behind the desk. Toward him she had no feeling of recognition at all, and the very fact helped to quiet the fluttering of anxiety as she faced him.

  “Here is your daughter, Mr. van Pelt,” Mara said.

  The old man behind the desk barely lifted his fingers in a gesture of dismissal and Mara went softly away, silencing her clicking heels, closing the door without a sound behind her.

  “Susan?” he said. There was a resonance in the deep voice that was not unmusical, but there was no warmth in the sound, no eager greeting. It was merely a question addressed to a yet-unsensed presence.

  “Yes,” she said, equally cool. “I am here, Father.”

  He reached toward a chair beside the desk and removed a heavy silver-headed cane that leaned against it.

  “Sit down, please,” he said.

  She obeyed, her eyes never leaving his face. It was a thin face with deep grooves in the cheeks. The beaked nose was the same, strong and aggressive. But the keen eyes she might have remembered were hidden behind dark glasses. His hair had grown grayer than she recalled, but it was not yet white, and it still grew thickly back from a fine brow. She knew him and she did not know him. Around her the room watched and bided its time.

  “I am glad you have returned to South Africa,” Niklaas said, his tone formal. “Though it is a surprise that you return as the wife of Dirk Hohenfield. That is something I neither planned nor expected.”

  “I’m sorry if you’re not pleased,” she told him. “I know you like to plan all matters close to you yourself.”

  She had not meant to say that. The words had presented themselves unbidden and they sounded rude in her ears. But there was no way to take them back.

  A flicker of some expression that was not a smile crossed his face and was gone. “I see you are still outspoken. You were a gentle child, yet you had a surprising way of speaking your mind at times.”

  “I had no business saying that,” she apologized. “Dirk has been like a son to you for years, and you don’t know me. There’s no reason why you should be pleased to see him marry me.”

  “Your voice is a woman’s voice,” he said, as though he had listened only to the tone and not the words. “But the image in my mind is of a straight-haired little girl with bright reddish plaits, brown eyes, and a stubborn chin. I must change that picture.”

  For the first time she sensed what he might be experiencing and was moved. She at least could see the change in him, she could comprehend the fact that they were strangers. He could see nothing of the far greater change in her.

  He put out a hand and touched her shoulder, felt the strap of the camera, followed it down to the case, and she knew he was seeking to replace his eyesight by means of his fingers.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “A camera, Father,” she told him.

  “Yes, of course. Dirk has said you were working at picture taking on a newspaper in Chicago, and that you wanted to keep it up.”

  He touched her shoulder again, reached upward lightly to her short hair and then withdrew his hand as if the feel of it distressed him. Tears stung her eyelids. Tears of pity for a once vigorous man who was no longer whole.

  He made no further exploration through his fingers, but sat back in the deep chair, his hidden eyes turned in her direction, his expression impassive, remote. She had the feeling that he had put her aside as someone he did not know. A silence grew between them, as if he withdrew into his own darkness and forgot she was there.

  Waiting for him to speak, she looked about the room and saw the touches of Africa that were new since she had been here as a child. On the wall behind her father hung a mask carved in some dark-brown wood: a face with the thickened lips and flattened nostrils that made it almost a caricature, yet a face that possessed dignity. The earlobes were elongated, with tubes of ivory thrust through them, and the eyes were lost in hollows. Yet there was a vitality here that made one know a man like this had lived in proud authority and been respected by his fellows. In a corner of the room stood a native assegai, and against one wall a tall, cylindrical drum waited for fingers to beat old rhythms upon the tightly drawn skin.

  But the silence grew too long and Susan stirred uneasily, finding herself at a disadvantage. After all, he had summoned her here; she had not asked to come. He had no business treating her as if he had gone away and left her here alone.

  “Why did you want me to come to South Africa?” she asked him boldly. “Why should you want to see me when so many years have passed?”

  He seemed to return from a distance as he touched a paper on the desk before him. “Your mother did not tell you she had written to me? She did not tell you what she asked of me before her death?”

  Susan was startled. Her mother had written to Niklaas van Pelt? And without letting her know! She felt shocked and a little betrayed.

  “I didn’t know she had written,” she said. “What did she write to you about?”

  Raised blue veins marked the hand with which he pushed a letter toward her across the desk.

  “Here it is. Read it for yourself.”

  She picked up the sheet of airmail paper almost reluctantly. The sight of her mother’s rather childish handwriting opened a wound that was far from healed. The letter began on a slightly frantic note, and she sensed the despair with which it had been written. The doctor had felt it wiser to keep the truth from Claire, and Susan had agreed. But now it seemed that her mother had not been fooled after all. The letter began with the statement that she had not much longer to live, that she had never asked anything of Niklaas for the child before, but that she must ask it now. When she was gone Susan would have no one. Claire’s own family was long dead. There would be no one to advise the girl, protect her, care for her.

  Susan looked up from the letter at her father. He had withdrawn again. The blank, smoky surface of the glasses told her nothing. From a humidor on his desk he took a cigar and snipped the ends, then lighted it with the ease of a man long used to managing all small actions by touch. Susan watched in uneasy fascination, as she considered the words she had just read. Her mother’s concern in the letter was touching, but not very realistic.

  “You needn’t have sent for me because of this,” she said. “I’m not so helpless as she represents.”

  He puffed his cigar and said nothing. She read on. Now her mother was speaking of some personal matter that lay between herself and her husband. Susan did not understand and read the words through a second time:

  I know you always thought it my fault that the Kimberley disappeared. You believed I tricked you. You believed I was a thief. How could I bear that, Niklaas, when I truly did not know what happened to the stone? How could I stay on in South Africa as your wife when you thought I had betrayed you in such a terrible way? I told you the truth—though you never believed me.

  Susan looked up from the letter. “What is she talking about?”

  “Have you read it through?” her father asked.

  Her eyes returned to Claire’s words sloping along the page:

  At the time I had a feeling that the child knew something about the diamond. That perhaps she had witnessed something, or was unwittingly in possession of some knowledge about it. But she was in a wildly distraught state during the period before we left the country. When I tried to question her she would only sob hysterically. The only thing to do was get her away from South Africa where she would not have to grow up under a shadow.

  I encouraged her to forget. I taught her never to look back. Just as I had to forget and never look back. It was the only way. Though many a time I’ve wondered what might be locked away in her childhood memories—something she might know without knowing that she knows it. Perhaps you can draw it out of her, if ever you see her again.

  There was nothing of further consequence to the letter. It closed stiffly, for
mally, and then the writer hurled herself into an emotional plea for Susan’s welfare in a postscript that was typical of Claire.

  Susan put the letter back on the desk within reach of his hand. “I don’t know what she meant by all this. I’ve never so much as heard of a lost diamond.”

  “She was referring to the Kimberley Royal,” Niklaas said. “One of the famous diamonds of South Africa. It disappeared many years ago and that was the end of it.”

  His tone was even, without emotion. He felt for Claire’s letter and returned it to a folder while Susan pondered the words she had read. A glimmer of the reason for them was beginning to form in her mind and she spoke the thought aloud.

  “I believe I know what my mother meant to do. She couldn’t be sure that you would interest yourself in me after all these years. So she tried to offer you a clever bribe. At least she must have thought it clever. She could weave the most fantastic notions at times.”

  “I don’t understand,” her father said.

  “I know it sounds a little silly,” Susan said apologetically, “but I knew her so well. It’s exactly the sort of thing she would dream up. If she could convince you that I knew something about this lost diamond, then perhaps you would interest yourself in me. You might go out of your way to take me under your protection. Isn’t it possible that is what she intended?”

  Once more the silence between them lengthened. He did not answer her suggestion. He neither admitted nor denied. Yet the more she thought about it the more logical such reasoning seemed. It would never have occurred to Claire that Susan might hate to be brought to South Africa by means of such a ruse. Or that it might be a tiresome and disturbing thing if her father and others began prodding her into trying to remember something she could not possibly remember, never having had any knowledge of it in the first place.

  Apparently the ruse had worked. Niklaas van Pelt had sent for his daughter promptly. Even Dirk—who had undoubtedly read this letter—had asked her back in Chicago if she had ever heard of the Kimberley Royal. But Dirk had not been truly interested, she remembered thankfully. He had not pushed the matter and never returned to it.