The storm was over, but the wind still blew, rattling frozen branches with a surprising clatter, and sending bits of ice scattering around me. The going was not as difficult as it had been last night because the worst of the slippery ice now lay deep under fresh snow. While I sank in almost to my boot tops at every step, I found that by thrusting ahead of me with my heels I could manage as I plunged down the hill. My foot hurt less than when I had first landed in the snow bank.
I descended with some speed, and it was only moments before I was out on the shore of the lake. The day was cold and snow blew like smoke down the lake, making a hissing sound. Wind had laid it in zigzag patterns across the ice, weaving it in the design of an Indian rug, while overhead mottled, ragged clouds tore across the blue morning sky.
I beat snow from my coat and hat, stamped it from my boots, and started across the frozen plain of the lake. There were bare spots that were slippery, and I had to be careful as I went. I felt terribly exposed out here, even in my snow-white outfit, and I knew how animals must feel when they cross open country. If Glynis looked out any rear window of the house she would see me, and I had the feeling of eyes burning into my back. Though I had a head start, I would not feel safe until I’d reached the McIntyres’.
Halfway across I suddenly remembered the alabaster head with a stab of misgiving. I had run away and left Glynis alone in the house with her brother’s work—of which she was jealous. Balked of my presence, what if she decided to damage the stone head? But surely she would not. She was Glen’s twin and artist enough to respect fine work. Practically speaking, I could not, would not, go back. It was too dangerous for me to return, and I had learned what it meant to underestimate Glynis as far as I was concerned.
The stone house loomed ahead of me, directly across the lake, and I crossed drifts like rippled water and made my way toward it. Lights burned in the kitchen, which meant that Pandora must be up early and getting breakfast. I was suddenly hungry, eager for shelter and friendly company. Trent had said I could come to his mother. He had lived with Glynis himself. He knew.
The front door wore a holly wreath with a huge red bow, and the big, uneven field stones of the house framed it in tawny cream. The walk had already been shoveled clear of snow and Keith opened the door to my knock, staring as if I were an apparition.
“How’d you get here?”
“Down the hill,” I said. “Across the lake. I’m running away, so will you invite me in? Running away from your mother.”
I could sound lighthearted now, sound as if it had all been a prank, as I’d called it to Glynis. Keith backed out of the doorway and let me in, though I sensed that he was reluctant. His manner had changed since my first meeting with the boy, and I suspected that his mother must have been working against me. She would have no scruples about what she told him, or how she might harm him with lies. Motherhood had never mattered to her.
Pandora heard our voices and came into the wide hallway that split the house. She carried a spatula in one hand, and wore a smile of ready welcome. She asked no immediate questions, but hurried me out of my coat, set Keith to pulling off my boots, and then called Trent: “We have company for breakfast. Come on down, dear.”
On the first floor the house was divided into two long rooms, one on either side of the hall. Nearly two hundred years ago the house had been an inn, Pandora said, and this room she ushered me into had been the dining room. Across the hall I glimpsed a tall Christmas tree. A real Christmas tree that helped dispel my vision of those mock trees in the woods. Everywhere there was cheerful evidence of fragrant holiday decoration. The kitchen had been in a smoky hole in the cellar, but later dwellers had cut off one end of the dining room for an airy modern kitchen. Here a deal table was set with blue willow pattern china. There was country butter, Sussex honey, and a brown jug of milk to match the brown coffee mugs waiting at each place.
She put Keith to setting an extra place, asked me if I liked bacon with my pancakes, and went to busy herself at the stove. I sat in a strong wooden chair that belonged to another century, and tried to catch my breath. No one asked any questions until Trent came downstairs. He looked a welcome sight to me in his rough outdoor clothes—brown turtleneck and corduroy slacks, his dark hair brushed back from his forehead and still damp from the shower. I tried to look at him as a stranger, without emotional involvement from the past. I couldn’t face any more ridicule.
He came to where I sat and for a moment he stood looking down at me gravely. Then he drew a chair opposite me and leaned forward, not touching me, but studying me, so that I knew I would have to tell him everything. He was never an easy man to fool.
It was a relief to talk. I had no loyalty for the Chandlers just then. I told him about Colton’s “judging” of the work of both twins, and of Glen’s alabaster that had restored his talent and would win a name for him in the art world. Pandora listened from across the kitchen as she worked. Keith stared at the wall.
“Glynis saw herself in what he’d done,” I told them. “She destroyed Glen’s sense of escape from her domination, his feeling that this was something he had created wholly out of himself. So he ran away from her. He got into his car and drove off, and Nomi went with him.”
“He might have taken you along,” Pandora said, indignantly turning pancakes.
“I asked him to take me, but I don’t think he even heard me. During the evening Glynis started to bait me, so I went upstairs and stayed in my room. Then, in the middle of the night, she locked me into my room. This morning I was still locked in. When she came to the door and talked to me she said I’d have to stay there until she decided what to do about me. I—I suppose for a while I was a little frightened.”
Trent made an angry sound. “She’s ungoverned to the point of being dangerous.”
I glanced uneasily at Keith, wondering how much we dared say before him. His face was as darkly angry as his father’s, but I knew his sympathy did not lie with me.
“But why?” Pandora said. “Why should she go to such extremes as this?”
“Partly, I think, because her own work is going wrong,” I said. “She’s been trying to paint Keith and nothing she does comes right, so that she’s frustrated and she strikes out at anything that crosses her path. Mainly me, at the moment.”
Pandora set breakfast before us, and joined us at the table. I found that I was hungry and able to eat. Telling someone had been a release and a relief. Trent and Pandora were eating too. Only Keith stared at his plate, not touching his food, and when I paused he broke in with a fumbling question of his own.
“Is—is it my fault that Glynis can’t paint me the way she’d like? Is it my fault that her work is going wrong?”
“Of course not,” I began, but Trent stopped me.
“I can answer that. It has nothing to do with you, Keith. She’s failing because she can’t bear to have Glen do anything better than she can. And she believes the best way to stop him is to make him feel so guilty that the confidence will go out of him.”
Keith flushed darkly. “Just because you hate her—”
The ringing of the telephone stopped him, and Pandora went into the hall to answer. I listened eagerly, hoping somehow that it might be Glen calling. It was not Glen, but Glynis, and she wanted to talk to Keith. He went to the phone in the hallway, and we could not hear his mumbled replies. When he came back to the table he did not explain, but finished his breakfast hurriedly, and the moment he was through he stood up, breaking into my words again as I went on with what I had to tell. I think perhaps he had heard nothing I’d said since the telephone rang.
“She wants me to come over,” he told his grandmother, not meeting his father’s eyes. “She needs me for something.”
Trent would have spoken to him, but the boy was gone before there was time. I saw the pain and worry in his father’s face and knew his helplessness.
“You did the right thing in coming here,” he told me when the boy was out of the room. “Don’t stay in
that house alone with Glynis. She’ll never share Glen with anyone, if she can help it. She’s been devouring him bit by bit ever since they were children—and if it weren’t for the fact that you are the girl concerned, I’d say it was a good thing for him to break away and find himself a wife. But for you—”
Pandora reached across the table to touch her son’s arm. “Hush, dear. Dina loves him. It’s stamped all over her. Can’t you see?”
“I can see,” Trent said, and gave his full attention to pancakes and bacon.
Now I turned to Pandora for answers, for reassurance. “But if Glen and Nomi have driven to New York, what am I to do?”
“Stay here with us, of course,” she said. “Though I don’t think you need worry. Nobody could get far in that ice storm last night. The chances are they pulled into the nearest motel after it started and stayed there for the night. There are only two or three around here. Suppose I phone them and see if we can locate your family.”
She was a wonderfully efficient and effective little person, and she moved quickly, though with an economy of motion that kept her from seeming hurried. Her small head, with its unlikely-colored crown of honey hair, tilted at me pertly as she removed me with soothing words from the ghost-ridden atmosphere of High Towers.
Trent cocked an amused eyebrow at me. “You might as well let Pandora handle this. Mother can bring order out of any blizzard.”
Methodically she set about calling the nearest motels. On her second try she found Glen and Nomi registered, and we waited while the proprietor called Glen to the phone. I suppose I must have looked panic-stricken at the thought of trying to explain anything to him on the telephone, for Pandora nodded at me reassuringly.
“I’ll talk to him—don’t worry.”
And talk she did. She told him gently that an emergency had arisen that had necessitated my coming over to this side of the lake. I would wait for him here. When the plows went through and Glen started home, he and Nomi could stop by and pick me up.
Glen asked no questions, and he apparently agreed, because Pandora was put to no argument. “He knows,” she told me when she had hung up. “Glen knows he shouldn’t have left you alone with his sister, and he can guess that she’s been up to something. The plows will be on their way by now, and this road is more traveled than the side road across the lake. By ten o’clock or earlier, Glen should be able to get through.”
We stood in the wide hall with its generous, hand-hewn planks under our feet, and small-paned windows at either end, filtering in the morning sunshine. The storm was really over. When Pandora put the phone down I asked the question which had been haunting me.
“Has Glynis ever really hurt anyone? I mean is she likely to—”
“Only her mother,” Pandora said, the lilt gone from her voice. “And my son and grandson.”
Trent answered me. “That’s not what Dina means. Yes, she is likely to do almost anything if the urge in her is great enough. No one has ever been able to curb her, and she’ll go her own unbridled way until somebody breaks her neck—as is likely to happen one of these days.” He sounded as though he would like to break it himself, but as he looked at me his eyes were soft.
I turned away, both comforted and disturbed. Once I had wanted him to look at me as if I were a woman. Now it was too late.
When I offered to help Pandora in the kitchen, she shook her head. “Not a bit of it! You’ve been through enough for one week. Trent, why don’t you show Dina around the house. It may be something new to her, for all her museum work.”
It was new. I had never been inside a two-hundred-year-old house that was lived in before, and I was interested in all I saw. The huge main room boasted two fireplaces, their bricks set deep and wide enough to cook an entire roast when hungry travelers had to be served. The paneling was fine black walnut, and deep-set windows showed the thickness of the walls. Wide hemlock beams with beaded edges ran the width of the ceiling, supporting the floor overhead. Upstairs there was again a wide, broad-planked hall, and what had been two long rooms on either side.
“Travelers didn’t expect private bedrooms in those days,” Trent said. “When the stagecoaches stopped, guests were put into the room for men on one side, or the room for women on the other—dormitory style. But these have been cut into smaller rooms since.”
I looked into each room in turn, admiring the handsome mantels and arched cupboards with their decorative carved keystones at the top of each arch. The house had something sturdy about its character. A house built for the years, with loving care and beautiful simplicity.
One room, on the side looking out toward High Towers, was obviously Keith’s. A boy’s things lay about and there was sports equipment of various kinds, hunting paraphernalia, and the mounted medals he had won as a marksman. Before we moved on, Trent crossed the room to a desk by the window. From it he picked up a framed picture and turned it for me to see.
It was the picture Glynis had painted of the lake, with the inn burning at the far end. That unhappy picture with the woman in white shut behind a locked window and flames bursting into scarlet plumes behind her.
“I didn’t know he had this,” Trent said. “She must have given it to him recently. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”
I found it as ugly and threatening a picture as I had the first time, and I turned away.
Trent replaced it on his son’s desk. “Yes, I can see why it upsets you. It’s a good thing Pandora isn’t given to fancies, or it might give her bad dreams. Glynis has only let the boy have it so that it will disturb us. Come along, Bernardina. I’m sorry I showed it to you.”
“Bernardina!” I said. “No one else ever called me that.”
Trent smiled and I realized that I had never seen him look really happy since I had come to the lake. The smile gentled the harsh lines of his face, drove the trace of cynicism from his eyes.
“I always liked it. It’s a good mouthful of a name, and it smacks of your forebears. Not that you’ve made a very good Viking.”
Everyone had always laughed at my name, except Trent. It did not fit me, as it did my mother, but names are personal things, and I had always felt absurdly touched that Trent should like mine.
I seized this gentler mood to ask him a question. “What is it you and your mother are trying to do to the lake that makes Glen and Glynis so bitterly angry?”
He led me to a hall window where I could look down the shore in the direction of the inn.
“Everywhere people are moving out from the cities, spreading out to look for land. Places like this are being used up badly with shoddy houses built too close together, spoiling the wild, natural aspects. Yet the need for a place to live is growing all the time. That’s what I’m writing about in my new book—the vanishing countryside.”
“Don’t you do the biographical thing any more?”
“This is a sort of biography—about various places which have been ruined, or saved—by men. It’s a subject that makes me angry. Because the countryside doesn’t need to vanish—with a little more care and planning, more integrity in the use of it. Places like this can be opened to those who need homes, yet preserved as they are to a much greater degree. That’s what Pandora plans. There’ll be no cutting down of all the trees, and there’ll be good acreage around each house, and restrictions as to quality in the building. Not expensive homes, but good homes. It’s to be a thought-out community where a number of families can come to raise their children in a relatively countrified atmosphere. The woods and the lake will be cared for—and allowed to remain wild in great part.”
The plan did not seem objectionable, and I said so. “Then why are the Chandlers so set against it?”
“I’m not sure that Colton is,” Trent said. “But Glynis and Glen are possessive about whatever they touch. They’ve never cared to share. They want it all, thousands of acres if they could have them. They want it to remain wild, not because of its beauty or for the sake of the animals and birds who live here—but be
cause by every right they understand, it is theirs. As wild as they are, too. You can see how Glynis feels in that picture of the inn burning.”
A great grumbling roar reached us from the road that ran high above the lake on this side. I looked out to see a red snowplow truck roaring toward us, shoveling snow away in spinning arcs on either side as it came.
“They’re clearing the road!” I cried. “Glen should be here soon now. With Nomi.”
Trent stood behind me, watching. When I turned, he spoke what he was thinking.
“What will you tell Glen about your coming here?” He was not smiling now. The hard look was in his eyes again.
“Why—the truth, of course. I’ll tell him exactly what Glynis has done. That she locked me into my room and tried to frighten me.”
Do you think he’ll believe you?” Trent asked harshly.
His challenge made me suddenly angry. “Of course he’ll believe me! He knows I’m not a person to lie. He won’t stand by and see his sister torment me. I know he won’t!”
“I suppose you could refuse to pose for him,” Trent said dryly. “That would twist his arm a bit—wake him up.”
I flung away from the window, growing more angry by the moment. It was one thing for Trent to help me when it came to rescuing me from Glynis’s tricks, but quite another when he attacked my husband. He was the outsider now.
“What are you trying to tell me?” I demanded. “Whatever it is, I won’t listen if you speak against Glen.”
There was nothing soft about him any more. “It’s good for wives to be loyal,” he said, and his tone was sharply ironic.
“Do you know what I think?” I was the challenger now. “I think something in you has corroded so that you don’t believe in anything. In anyone. I’ve felt sorry for you because this could be Glynis’s fault—what she did to you years ago. But I don’t know her side of the story. Perhaps you drove her away, for all I know. Perhaps—”
There was no use in going on and I did not feel happy about what I was saying. A moment ago there had been gentleness between us, a tenderness such as I remembered. Now it was gone.
The Winter People Page 15