Ill Met by Moonlight

by Zenith Brown

  I smiled, but he didn’t. In fact, he looked pretty sober—and when he does his face gets extremely hard, and it’s difficult to remember that he’s just thirty-two, not a lot older, and that he’s a grand person, not somebody you’d rather not cross. That’s the way he looked just then. I found myself a bit surprised to feel glad, all of a sudden, that he wasn’t taking Rosemary’s return simply in his grinning stride, as it were.

  He was looking past me at Dr. Potter’s old car. Then he did grin, and shrugged as if something amusing and sardonic had occurred to him. He put down his can of turpentine and pulled a blue bandanna out of his pocket to mop his brow.

  “Lord, it’s hot.”

  He squinted his light blue eyes up at the sky through the sycamore leaves.

  “Hope it holds off till after the race. Then it can rain a week and suit me down to the ground.”

  “I’d like it to rain now,” I said. But Jim wasn’t paying any attention to me. He had the bandanna still in his poised hand, staring across the street, two puzzled lines between his brows.

  “Who’s that guy over there in front of the post office—in the linen suit?”

  “Some city slicker probably,” I said. “Though it’s not one of the ground rules here that all the men have to look like unemployed painters all the time.”

  I looked anyway, and had a sudden hollow feeling in my stomach.

  “It looks like George Barrol, Grace,” Jim said incredulously.

  “Maybe it is George Barrol,” I said. I knew from Rosemary’s letter that he was coming down early, to open up the house before the rest of them came. George Barrol is Rosemary’s cousin and Mr. Bishop’s bailiff, steward, estate manager and general handy man.

  Jim was still staring oddly at him. “What’s he doing here?” he said. Then he turned to me abruptly. “Grace, have they sold the house?”

  I looked at him blankly, and caught myself just in time. Or was it? I’m not so sure now. I was sure then, because I saw the pallor that whitened the corners of Jim Gould’s mouth as suddenly as if he’d been struck. His hands trembled as he pulled a flattened pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.

  I knew instantly, of course, that Sandra had lied to us—that Jim didn’t know Rosemary Bishop was coming to April Harbor that very day. I held my lighter to his cigarette. It wasn’t very steady, but neither was the cigarette.

  “That must be it,” he said.

  I should have said then that that wasn’t it, that the Bishops were coming back to spend August at the old stand. But I didn’t. I’ve wondered a lot what difference it would have made. I should have told him. Not doing it was nothing but the ghastliest sort of passing the buck. I thought then—or so I like to think—that I was really just passing it to George Barrol, who spends his life doing other people’s dirty work. He had spotted me and was coming across the street. But even then, there’s something about Jim Gould, even when you’ve known him since he was three and you were nine, as I have, that makes it hard to go barging into his private life. And anything connected with Rosemary, in spite of what I’d said to Dr. Potter, was intensely that.

  George Barrol could do it better, I thought, watching him wait there in the middle of the street for a car to pass.

  “I guess I’ll get some cigarettes,” Jim said abruptly. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  The bell over Mr. Toplady’s door jingled before I could say “Wait, Jim.” He was gone. I wondered who’d tell him now.

  “Hello, Grace! How’s everybody?”

  George Barrol and I shook hands. George hadn’t changed in the seven years since I’d seen him, except that his light hair was a little thinner, with a touch of gray here and there. Perhaps he was a little more rotund, in a dapper way, and a little more perennially bachelorish. He was as precise and immaculate as ever, with the same slightly worried air as if things mightn’t get done in time.

  “It’s nice to see you back,” I said.

  “It’s nice to be back. Rosemary’s dying to see you. They’re getting here about four.”

  He looked about.

  “There’s a lot of new people.”

  He laughed, shaking his head. “Just think—seven years! A lot of water’s flowed out of the Harbor.”

  “An awful lot,” I said.

  He laughed again and patted his moist forehead with his neatly folded white handkerchief.

  “Wasn’t that Jim Gould you were talking to?”

  I nodded.

  “Guess he didn’t recognize me,” he said cheerfully. “I say, Grace—who’s that child in the pink hat?”

  “Do you mean Nancy Thorp?” I inquired, seeing Lucy Lee’s daughter, aged three and in a pink sunbonnet and practically nothing else. But of course I knew whom he meant. “Or possibly you mean Sandra Gould. Jim’s wife.”

  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Really. Not bad, eh? Foreign, isn’t she? Brazilian, or something?”

  “Something, anyway,” I said.

  George Barrol looked at Sandra again. She was standing on the opposite curb, looking about for Jim.

  “She’s got Rosemary beat,” he remarked. I was annoyed. I don’t know whether it was with him for saying that or with Sandra for her definitely breath-taking effect on men of all ages.

  “What’s Rosemary’s young man like?” I asked.

  “Paul’s a good sort. Loads of money—oil concessions sort of thing—and darned attractive. Georgian, but he was educated in England. He’s completely cosmopolitan, you know, the way those chaps get. Even Uncle Rod’s sold on him. You’ll like him. Well, I’ve got to be getting to work.—Ah . . . I say, Grace.”

  He hesitated, reddening just a shade, and patted his brow again.

  “I mean . . . you’ll lend us a hand, and all that, won’t you? I mean, I don’t think Rosemary’s counted on . . . on Mrs. Gould’s being such a . . .” He stopped and shook his head a little. “I mean, she’s heard all about her being a swell boatman and swimmer, and all that, but I . . .”

  “You mean she’s not prepared to find her beautiful as well.”

  George got still redder and hotter.

  “Well, you know—she saw her, once. In Shanghai.”

  “She did?”

  “Well, not officially. It was before Jim married her. And she’s . . . she’s got the wrong idea.”

  “I wonder,” I said.

  George laughed. “You women are all cats. You’ll stand by, anyway, won’t you?”

  I nodded. He crossed the street again.

  Somebody spoke behind me: “Hello, Grace.” I turned. Jim’s mother was coming out of Toplady’s with young Andy by the hand.

  “Wasn’t that George Barrol?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  Mrs. Gould’s face is a strange combination of her two children. She looks like Lucy Lee except that her curly hair is white instead of chestnut, and her face is gentler, with more repose, as finely cut and delicate but rather determined in a way that Lucy Lee’s isn’t.

  “You know the Bishops are coming today?” I asked. “For a month.”

  “Elsie Carter told me. Rosemary’s engaged?”

  I nodded.

  “Jim doesn’t know yet, does he?”

  “Oh yes,” she smiled. “Sandra told him this morning. I don’t think anybody else would dare. Of course he had to know.”

  You can’t very well tell a woman her daughter-in-law isn’t telling the truth . . . at least you couldn’t tell Mrs. Gould that. She’s the only person who’s always been unfailingly loyal to Sandra, and if most of us have thought it was just a deeper loyalty to Jim we’ve had no reason for it.

  “Somehow I’d got the notion he didn’t know,” I said casually.

  “It’s rather difficult to know what Jim knows,” she replied, laughing. “I think I’ll go rescue Sandra. Look—I never knew George Barrol was so resourceful.”

  I followed her glance across the street. George was there with Sandra, his hat in his hand. They were laughing merrily, but it wa
s Sandra’s bundles they were picking up, so I doubted how much of the resourcefulness was his. Still, it made it simpler, George knowing her before the others came.

  The clock on the church tower at the top of the road struck eleven. Across the street Mrs. Gould was shaking hands with George and presenting him properly to her son’s wife. In a moment a little crowd had gathered, and by the time Julius had brought my car around from Dock Street George had greeted half the town.

  Only Jim Gould was still in Mr. Toplady’s general store buying a pack of cigarettes. Poor old Jim, who except for the girl in the dusty pink cartwheel hat across the road would be somewhere on the seas in a white uniform—or so they say—and Rosemary Bishop wouldn’t be coming back to April Harbor engaged to somebody else.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I ought to explain April Harbor a little, in view of what happened there later, although the papers carried maps of it for days. Most of the things they said about it weren’t true, however. Nobody there is fabulously wealthy, for instance, or ever was, and we don’t have armed guards to protect us from the natives who burn down our garages.

  Actually April Harbor Colony is a group of people most of whom have grown up together in the summers there, merely by the accident of their fathers’ and mothers’ having bought part of the old Lloyd estate on the bay, which was called Poplar Hill. My father had been chiefly interested because he wanted me to be some place near Alice Gould during vacations, after Mother died. Rodman Bishop came in later for much the same kind of reason, although it was Elsie Carter’s notion that it wasn’t for Rosemary and Chapin so much as for himself. But that was Elsie, even then.

  I don’t think any of us ever spent a summer away from the Harbor until Jim went to Annapolis. I married here when I was twenty-two, and I was here when Dick was killed, Rosemary had gone by then, and the days when I’d chaperoned her to hops in Annapolis were gone too. I remember the two of them so well one afternoon in a walled garden there, young and serious and sure of their own future, asking me if I’d come to China and stay with them. And of course it was in China that Sandra happened. I’ve always been sorry I didn’t go. One of my youngsters was sent home from St. Paul’s with whooping cough, and whooping cough lasts a long time. When he was over it Jim was married to Sandra, and Rosemary and her father and George Barrol were flying across Tibet or something on their way to Paris.

  It’s odd how all the houses in our row seem almost doomed. Judge Gould was drowned when his catboat capsized in a sudden squall. Chapin Bishop was drowned too, though not in the same way, and Dick was hurrying home from trying a case in Chicago when he crashed in the Ohio. Only the Carters seemed to flourish till they have an odor of sanctity like the green bay leaf—and they aren’t in our row anyway.

  The Colony has a water frontage of something like a mile and a half, including an inlet where the yacht basin and swimming beach are. Overlooking it is the clubhouse, which was the old Poplar Hill mansion, with wide pillared porch and green lawn where the children play. It’s all very rural and lovely—old trees and old gardens, and a couple of peacocks that sit on the marble urns that were brought from Italy before the Civil War. There are a lot of giant magnolias about, with their great white waxen blooms laden with yellow bees, and lilac trees, and tangles of roses and trumpet vine and wisteria.

  To get down to the sandy beach and the big float there are stone steps, not elaborate but adequate, and there’s a road too, down behind the clump of dogwood and wild cherry. The children play on one beach, under the watchful eyes of a couple of official nurses and a lifeguard; and out in front is the basin, dotted with gleaming sails and housing a few yachts—not so many as there used to be, but a few, and a new one or two this year.

  The white cottages are dotted over the estate, most of them with an acre or so of private ground. Some of them are elaborate, like the Bishops’, with oil furnaces and servants’ quarters. Others are simple. Ours is, so we manage with a colored man and his wife. The Gould place is like ours. Sandra and Jim live in the main house with Mrs. Gould. Lucy Lee and Andy have a separate cottage that used to be a guest house when they were growing up. It happens that my cottage is between the Bishops’, on my left, and the Goulds’, on my right. To get to the Beach Club I drive out my back gate into the road, turn left past the Goulds’ and another cottage that belongs to the Chetwynds, then left again at the Corner and on about a quarter of a mile to the club. When I walk, which most of us still do, I cut through the Goulds’ yard past their garage, through their front yard and past Lucy Lee and Andy’s cottage into a lane that runs along the bank the length of the waterfront.

  I can, of course, go directly to that lane from my front garden. So can the Bishops, but normally they’d cut through my yard and through the Goulds’, and into the lane that way. It’s considerably shorter, and then we always went everywhere together, so it worked out most conveniently that way when we were younger.

  I can see the Bishops’ chimneys from my upstairs window, out across our tennis court over the hedge of crape myrtle through the tops of the trees. I’d intended running over around five, but I didn’t have a chance to. In the first place, Colonel Primrose, with his alarming bodyguard Sergeant Buck, arrived at the Chetwynds’ where they’d been invited for the week end, and unfortunately all the Chetwynds’ aunts and uncles arrived, uninvited, simultaneously. As I was one of the few people with a room available for the week end, Bill and Louise naturally overflowed into my house. They offered me an octogenarian aunt and uncle, but I have them of my own, so we compromised on Colonel Primrose and his sergeant.

  I didn’t, at the moment we were arguing about it and I was quietly but firmly declining the aged relatives, recognize that the voice was the voice of Grace Latham but the hand was the hand of Fate. At least, I thought, their colonel wouldn’t be as completely embalmed in snuff, orris root, lavender, old lace and starched horsehair as all the elderly Chetwynds I’d met . . . and if anyone says horsehair isn’t starched, then he’s never met one of the Chetwynds of Richmond, Virginia. I was getting a pig in a poke, of course, but I did at least know that Colonel Primrose and Bill’s father, whom I’d adored, were classmates at West Point. Bill and Louise had met him, years after, in Washington, where he still lived in the yellow brick house in Georgetown that Colonel John T. Primroses had lived in since the first one built it in 1730. It was confusing too, since they’d all been bachelors, but according to Bill it was part of their glory and quite easily explained by brothers or something.

  However, if such a choice is ever offered me again I shall invariably and unhesitatingly take the aged aunts and uncles—snuff, stuffed shirts and lorgnettes included. If you take them, the probabilities are against somebody’s taking pot shots at you in the middle of the night, just to mention one point. They also go to bed and stay there and are still there in the morning.

  So I waited for them on my porch, watching the white wings of the sailboats dip and turn and dip again along the two-mile course in the bay. There must have been thirty sails out there. Even though I don’t like to sail, and am terrified when the water rushes past with me balanced perilously on the gunwale, I like to watch at a distance. This afternoon, against the sultry horizon, lowering, steel-gray with the threatening storm, they gleamed white and lovely, almost unbearably graceful and swift across the dark water.

  My guests came just as I’d about decided to give them up and run over to see Rosemary, and after that a lot of other people came in, until it ended by all of us, Colonel Primrose included, going down to the club. It’s rather a custom, everybody gathering there before dinner, and it was even before the days of cocktails. As I’ve said, the clubhouse is the old Lloyd Poplar Hill mansion. The big eighteenth-century drawing room is the cocktail lounge now, with no one under seventeen allowed. There were a lot of people there, otherwise I suppose we should have found a sofa and a table by ourselves. As it was, we joined Sandra and Jim and Andy Thorp. They were glowing with triumph. Andy’s boat with Sandra at the t
iller had come in first in the afternoon race. Lucy Lee, who’d been working like a beaver in the ladies’ sailing class, wasn’t there. She wasn’t good enough yet for that race, of course, but anyway she’d never be as good as her sister-in-law. Wherever Sandra Gould had been born, it was certainly on the water. She was better than any of the men, any except Andy.

  “Gosh, she was marvelous!” Andy was saying. “You should have seen her when old Bill’s dory caught us astern! Have a drink, Grace—it’s my night to howl!”

  “We’ll all have one,” I said. Louise Chetwynd introduced Colonel Primrose. They shook hands.

  “He’s in the Army, or something,” Louise said. “Jim here used to be an admiral, but they didn’t like him so they put him out.”

  “I was much too good for them,” Jim said, grinning. But he flushed a little as he shook hands with the rotund little man, who looks less like an officer than almost anyone I know.

  “They put me out too,” Colonel Primrose said with a smile.

  Someone pushed up a deep chintz-covered chair, but he shook his head. “That’s why they put me out. I can’t get up and down in club chairs like I used to, I’m afraid.”

  He sat down in a straight-backed chair and took the tall frosted julep growing with fragrant mint which the boy offered, his black eyes snapping with pleasure. Sandra, having looked the men over, moved to the arm of Bill’s chair by him, and said, “Are you really a soldier?”

  “Watch it, Colonel,” somebody said. “She’ll have your iron cross before you know it.”

  Everybody laughed . . . everybody but Jim.

  Jim wasn’t laughing at anything. He was sitting suddenly bolt upright in his chair, his face white as a sheet under its surface bronze, staring at the door.

  I looked that way too. Rosemary Bishop was there.

  I said, “Steady, old man,” under my breath, but it was too late. The julep in his hand hit the floor with a shivering crash.

  “Why, Jeem!” Sandra cried.

  Everybody in the room looked around, including Rosemary.