by Craig Rice
He had reached the bottom of the stairs before he began to wonder how she had recognized him when he had not said one word.
“How did you know me?”
He wanted to take her hand, and dared not.
There was a flicker of surprise on her face. “Of course I knew you. I had met you before.” She turned in the direction of the little parlor. “Will you show me Telefair? I cannot remember the house.”
Then she had been here before, though it must have been very long ago.
He gave her a stiff and well-mannered smile, conscious only of the effort it took, forgetting that she could not see it, nor ever know it had been on his face.
“I shall be delighted.” Much as he had wished to see her again, now suddenly he hated her coming—she was an alien at Telefair, a stranger, asking to be shown the house—and all at once it seemed to be an outrageous intrusion; he himself was a Telefair and he belonged to this house, but those who lived across the inlet should never cross its glassy waters.
His momentary sense of violation was drowned in his next thought. He must, for the sake of good manners, play host at Telefair, and his guest was blind. He felt a sudden paralyzing incapacity. Should he take her arm and lead her about—should he describe this chair and that painting, guide her around corners and through doorways? Was he to say, “The carpet is coral, nearly cherry, with blue roses intermingled with a kind of gray,” when Laurel Stone had never seen coral, nor blue, nor gray, nor any other color? “The Dresden china doorknobs in this room have a pattern of forget-me-nots—” to Laurel Stone, a forget-me-not must be a damp smooth petal, and a rougher leaf. “The portrait of Edmund Telefair the younger, painted by—” How could he speak of men’s portraits to one who had never seen men’s faces? If he did not tell her of what she could not see, he would be unmentionably rude, yet to act as a guide, to describe every color and every detail would be to call attention to her infirmity, and that he could not endure.
She laid a hand gently on his arm.
“You need not tell me of colors,” she said softly. “I know and feel colors that you cannot perceive. It is not I who cannot see. Please, David, if we are to be friends, you must not pity me.”
As she said it, “if we are to be friends,” he forgot his resentment at what had seemed to be her intrusion. “We are already friends,” he said suddenly, and in the next instant forgot himself and said what was in his mind, “but the darkness—and never anything else—”
She turned to him, and he wondered—but did not realize it until afterward—that the blind look into the faces of those to whom they speak.
“It seems like darkness to you, of course. You think of it as an eternal dark, a blackness, walls and roofs and floors of black, shutting one in so that one sees, yes, but one never sees anything but the blackness.”
He said nothing, but it seemed to him that she was reading his face with her sightless eyes.
“The black, the dark, is something that must be seen,” she said, smiling a little. “To the blind, it does not exist. How can there be darkness to one who has seen no light? Blindness is not a thing that one sees.”
“I can see,” David said. He wondered why he could not speak like this to amiable Doctor von Berger, to the friendly Edmund, or to old Philip Telefair who had been so kind to him. “But I do not always understand what I see.”
“I know it,” she said very quietly. “While sometimes I can understand what I cannot see.”
Suddenly her long, graceful hand tightened ever so little on his arm, and she said, “You and I know the same things, David, but you are not yet aware that you know them. This to our left is the little parlor, is it not? I have heard of it, as a child.”
David did not lead her into the little parlor; he followed her there.
It was twenty-six steps from the doorway to the old carved mantel. She took twenty-five, paused, undecided, one tentative foot on the shaded carpet ahead of her but not yet bearing her weight, then took the last step and stood there, one hand outstretched, its slender, sensitive fingers running up and down the delicate carvings made more than a hundred years before. She traced the design slowly and almost lovingly, touching leaf, branch, flower and fruit, assembling them in her mind, and then she turned away, paused before the satined Napoleon chair, her fingers lingering over the form and smooth upholstering as though not only to learn the pattern of the brocade but its color.
Across the room she paused again, one hand not quite touching the rubbed and polished wood of an old desk, seeming more to inhale the gloss and smoothness through her skin than to feel, and then her fingers fell on one exquisitely engraved glass vase, whose deep-etched flowers were outlined and pictured by her touch.
There was that room, and then another, and one more. She brushed a fingertip across the wall, felt of a carving here and a vase there, touched her feet lightly on the carpeting as though she knew its very pattern. David followed her, saying nothing, yet always aware that she knew that he was close behind, and as he watched he felt that she was showing him the old house, pointing out this and that, drawing his attention to patterns and shapes, gesturing to him of vistas yet unguessed in the old rooms, making him newly aware of woodwork and of texture, and laying his fingers on colors that could not be seen by the eye alone.
Then, before he realized it, they were back in the great hall again and she had paused in the shadow of the stair, breathing as though she would take all Telefair with her in her veins when she crossed the inlet and left the Island again.
“How long has it been since you were here?” he asked.
She turned her blind face to him, blind in the movements of its nostrils, the changing lines about its mouth, the faint lines on its brow. “I cannot remember ever being here before.”
She stood beside the portrait of Claire Telefair as she spoke, that Claire who had wagered that she would swim her horse across the inlet, and was drowned, and suddenly David knew why, as he had come down the stairs a little while before, it had seemed to him that the apparition of some long-dead Telefair stood there in the hall. For the face of Laurel Stone and the pictured face of Claire Telefair were the same save for the blindness, feature by feature, line by line, shadow by shadow.
“We are very like, are we not?” said Laurel Stone, and she turned toward the portrait. Her hand reached out and moved over the painted canvas, lingering here and there as though she knew its color. “I have always been told we were very like. Nor is it so strange, after all.”
It was then that David saw old Philip Telefair in one of the doorways to the hall.
He did not move or speak. He stood there, one old, white, graceful hand poised on the door, the great yellow sapphire on his finger catching what little light there was, his colorless face expressionless.
Laurel did not seem to be aware of his presence. She moved lightly from where the portrait of Claire Telefair hung on the wall to the newel post of the staircase and stood there, one finger idly tracing the perfection of the carvings in the smooth and polished wood.
Yet there was a change in her blind face, a change that David could perceive and still could not understand, a change that did not move the muscles about her mouth, nor the delicate nostrils, nor the smooth forehead. It was only in her sightless eyes.
She stood there, her hand resting on the carved wood, just one finger following its elaborate and beautiful carving. It was as though that finger outlined the very pattern of the house itself, its architect’s design, the shape of its Grecian pillars, its silver by night and whiteness by day, the shape of its rooms, and the fine balance of its wide stairway, the Dresden china doorknobs and the little porcelain shepherdess on the right-hand corner of the mantel in the small parlor.
David wished that she might never go away, never return to the mainland, but that she would remain at Telefair forever.
He did not know how he could endure it without her.
But when she spoke, it was not David that she addressed.
&
nbsp; “It is a beautiful house,” she said very softly. “What a pity it must end as all houses end, in ruins.”
When David looked again, Philip Telefair was gone.
9
David scarcely heard the first words spoken by the Reverend Arthur Stone. His first sight of the chapel since its restoration held him completely absorbed; he was dimly aware that he knelt in one of the old pews, an exquisitely tooled prayer book in his hands, and that the white-clad figure of the minister had appeared before the altar, but his mind was examining and considering his surroundings.
He saw, now that the accumulation of dust and cobwebs had been swept away, that the walls of the underground chapel were paneled in dark, satiny wood, so richly and marvelously carved that, even in so dim a light, he could see each detail of their decoration, every kneeling figure, every tendriled leaf, every curving petal. Above him, the frescoed ceiling had been cunningly designed so as to appear domed; its rose and blue and gold glowed faintly in the reflection of the candles. The delicate silverwork of the candles on the wall had been patterned into graceful branches, with leaf and stem and blossom; in the carvings of the pews the design was repeated. David rested his hand on it and felt its depth and perfection, smooth against his touch.
“I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son.”
The face of the Reverend Arthur Stone was almost blue-white in the candlelight. Behind him, small yellow pin points flickered above the richly ornamented candelabra, and seemed to create a mist of light about the gold filigree cross. For a moment David caught a vision of the chapel as he had first seen it: thick with dust and veiled with cobwebs, dim in the glow from one single candle held in the graceful hand of old Philip Telefair. There had been then that heavy white cloth laid, like a shroud, over the cross, making it appear like a ghost of a cross.
A faint chill seemed to penetrate to his every nerve, and as he rose to his feet with the others, he glanced around at the members of the strange congregation as though to reassure himself. He saw old Philip Telefair, his handsome, ivory-colored face as impassive as wax, standing very straight and tall, his long, pale fingers twisting and turning the immense yellow sapphire. He saw Edmund Telefair, leaning on his cane, a twisted half-smile on his deeply tanned, saturnine face. Edris was there, and in the faint light she appeared to be entirely colorless, her grave small face, her tiny hands and thin little wrists as white as her hair. Even her pale gold hair seemed white, and almost luminous. Of Laurel Stone, David could see only her shoulders and the back of her head, where the dark, heavy hair was caught into a great, gleaming coil, and it seemed to him suddenly that even her body and the back of her head were blind.
Doctor von Berger’s protuberant blue eyes appeared to be trying to watch, simultaneously, everything that was taking place, and every face in the room. To David, he seemed restless, even a little uneasy. Certainly he paid no attention to the service.
Suddenly David had a strange feeling that someone who should be present was not there. Again he glanced over the people in the little chapel and saw that every member of the household was in the place. Yet there was that unaccountable sense that someone was missing. He had no idea who it could be. He turned, and saw the house servants of Telefair ranged along the back of the chapel, their dark faces impassive, almost hidden in the gloom, with the gray-haired old Jonas at one side to keep order. Just in front of them stood Zenobie, and for a moment David stood, his head still turned, his eyes frozen to her face.
There was no expression on her heavy, almost brutal features. Her wide mouth was set in an impassive line, the muscles of her massive jaw showed through the sallow, coarse-grained skin. Even her large, big-knuckled hands were still. But her black eyes were wide, blind with what David recognized as fear—no, more than fear, it was terror.
The Reverend Arthur Stone’s voice was soft and almost gentle.
“Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places—”
Few stranger places than this one, David thought. The underground chapel and its history had been discussed at great length in the past few evenings. He mused over the men who had preached there, from the Reverend Roger Gray, brought from England by an early Telefair, to the man who stood before the altar now. They had been mild, gentle, subservient men, most of them. The parson in residence at Telefair ranked somewhere above an overseer, but a little below the steward. In the weekdays he tutored Telefair children in Latin, Greek, French, mathematics and a little music; he sat with the family at table but he did not speak till he was addressed. Only for an hour on Sunday did he assume any position of authority.
Yet there had been some notable exceptions. A few younger sons of Telefairs had taken orders. David remembered the story of the hunting parson, who came to the chapel with his muddied boots showing below his surplice, and a pair of hounds at his heel. There had been another who had insisted on replacing the wine of the chalice with brandy. To David it seemed neither sacrilegious nor strange. The God they preached preferred brandy to wine, rode to hounds, and spent his winters in Paris.
A little murmur of voices rose in the old chapel, in the reading of the Confessional. Hearing it, David hunted for the place in the prayer book Philip Telefair had given him. A scent of old paper and rich, worn leather came to his nostrils. The voices around him seemed to rise in a little wave.
Suddenly he stood still, one finger paused between the pages of the book, feeling that overwhelming sense of familiarity, of being in some place where he had been, not once, but many times before. It was the same, the odor of the old prayer book, the dimly flickering lights, the voices of the congregation. Yet it was not the same.
The voices stopped, and in the moment of silence following, David closed his eyes. In that instant he was remembering something from a long time past, not a memory so much as an impression, vague, and half real. There were white bare walls, a large room, there was the odor of old prayer books, and the sound of many voices speaking softly together, rising as in a little wave. For a little while he stood there with his eyes still closed, his mind turning in upon the memory and exploring it, as, on waking, he might try to remember and fix in his mind a rapidly fading dream.
But there was nothing more. Only whiteness and an immense room, an atmosphere and a sound. He tried to think what it could have been.
A church. That was it, he had been in a church. That was what he had remembered. Or was it memory, was it something he’d dreamed? The sensation was gone now; he could not bring it back. But what had it been? Why had it come to him now?
As a boy in school, he had gone to chapel, infrequently—attendance was not compulsory in the schools Philip Telefair had selected for him—and half-heartedly, only enough to learn correct and decorous behavior. But he could remember those chapels without effort, the hard seats, the windows, the monotonous voice of the schoolmaster, the backs of the heads in front of him. The memory, if it had been a memory, was of another thing.
When David had been a very little boy, he had lived with his mother’s people. Thinking of it now, he tried to bring some chronological order into his knowledge of that time. His mother had never come to Telefair. His father, cut off from his own people by his marriage to a New England girl, had stayed in Boston. A year after the marriage, David had been born, and his mother had died. Her parents had taken him into their home, and his father had returned to Telefair and remained there till his death.
It must have been in that time, he told himself. He had remained with his grandparents until he was two, then Philip Telefair had arranged for his life and his education. After that, he had never seen any of his mother’s people again, nor had he ever missed them. Sometimes in his childhood he had turned his mind back and tried to search that time, trying to uncover and remember some devotion or affection, but there was none. He, an orphan, had been a burden and a responsibility in the household of a poverty-str
icken New England minister. Only old Philip Telefair had been kind to the child.
Yet in those few years he must surely have been taken to church. A bare, white-walled church. David wondered why he should remember it now.
Suddenly he raised his eyes and saw that Philip Telefair was watching him fixedly, the beautiful dark eyes seeming to search his face for signs of his thought. He felt the color coming into his cheeks, as though he had been surprised or overheard in some disloyalty. Philip Telefair was very grave and exceedingly pale, yet mostly he seemed to be watching, almost as though he were waiting for something that he knew would come.
“—be with us all evermore. Amen.”
A little stir—though no one actually seemed to move—ran through the chapel. David realized that the service was at an end. He looked up, and saw the Reverend Arthur Stone standing before the altar, closing the prayer book that he held in his hands. His surplice seemed to glow, to be almost luminous in the light of the candles around him. His gentle face was serenely quiet and composed, and when he looked out over the group in the chapel he was not seeing any of their faces nor did he even seem to be aware of their presence. In that moment David saw Laurel Stone rise to her feet, almost involuntarily, as though she might speak—and then stand there wordless. He saw old Philip Telefair’s face change, though not a muscle appeared to move, and his long, pale hand gripped the arm of his pew until David almost feared the wood might splinter under the pressure. He saw that Doctor von Berger’s lips had seemed to form some protest, though the little German doctor was silent. He saw too that Edmund Telefair had turned very pale.
David realized suddenly that no one of them was looking at the Reverend Arthur Stone; they were all looking at him.
The old minister laid the prayer book down gently on the altar rail with more of an air of finality than the closing of it had been.
“I come here,” said the Reverend Arthur Stone, his voice low, and very serene, “I do this, to wipe away the great wrong I have done.”