Savage bride

by Cornell Woolrich; Internet Archive

  He tried to turn the little wheel of the oil lamp, to bring it up higher. He turned it the wrong way first, and it nearly went out altogether. Then he corrected himself, and brightened it the way he wanted to. The spokes of shadow lessened and the rays widened. Her face came into view more clearly. Her eyes were liquidly vivacious; that lacklustre quality that had clouded them so often down on the coast was gone. And her face itself wore that most infrequent of all its expressions, which he had so seldom seen on it before now: She was smiling.

  "How's this?" he said. "Better?"

  "Better. Much better."

  He didn't mean the oil lamp, and he could tell she didn't either.

  Maybe I took the curse out of it, he thought.

  Chapter Twelve

  There was a fourth place laid at the table, Jones noticed when they came in. He thought for a moment it must be intended for some assistant of Mallory's, perhaps a foreman or overseer that he had on the place. When the three of them had seated themselves, however, it still remained vacant.

  Mallory gave a crooked grin, as if enjoying some little private thought of his own. "Bashful," he murmured elliptically. "I suppose I'll have to go in there and— We don't get to see many people out here, and when you're alone too much you get sort of skittish of strangers."

  He got up, went over to the door opposite the side from which they had emerged, and called through into some distant and hollow-sounding beyond: "Chris!"

  His son, Jones supposed. There had been a note of paternal pride discernible underneath the mock impatience.

  There was a wait. The doorway remained empty for a moment longer, while Mallory came back to the table and reseated himself. Then suddenly there was a lovely, slim thing standing in it, confused, uncertain whether to come forward or dart back out of sight again.

  The clothing was that of a boy, the form wearing it a girl's. She may have been eighteen; she looked about sixteen, and acted like fourteen. Her hair was as blonde as Mitty's was black; her eyes as blue as Mitty's were dark. There was a little bowknot of freckles high up on each cheek, and they formed a bridge across the top of her nose. But they weren't very thick or distinct; just a scattering, like gold pollen on the apricot-tan bloom the sun had given her fair complexion.

  She was as tall as she would ever be, but she still had to fill out; she had retained a child's spareness of figure. She looked as though the span of a single hand would have been enough to encompass her waist.

  It was her youngness that was so breath-taking, as she stood in that doorway, unconsciously framed there for them to look at. She was youngness itself, in all its awkward grace, all its gauche charm, all its eternal evanescence; abashed, self-conscious, embarrassed, tormented— yet able in an instant, at a smile or a word, to become daring, sure, self-oblivious, ecstatically delighted. And most often being a little of both at one and the same time.

  Youngness personified, looking in at them. The number of her years had nothing to do with it; it was her spiritual state.

  "Come in, Chris," her father encouraged. "These people won't eat you." He dropped Jones a deprecating wink, on the side of his face away from her.

  She came forward faltering, "I couldn't find my—" She didn't finish the lame little excuse, which none of them believed anyway. She had probably been ready for hours before, and watching for their arrival from behind the shutters.

  "Chris, this is Mr. and Mrs. Jones," Mallory introduced.

  "You promised," she breathed, in a private little rebuke to him that she tried to keep them from overhearing.

  "Oh, I forgot," he blurted out clumsily. "Excuse me— Christine."

  The apricot tan deepened momentarily to full-fledged rose, then hghtened again to what it had been. "Chris is a boy's name," she said defensively. "It was all right when I was young, but—"

  Mallory nodded in grave accord. "That's true, I see what you mean; but now that you're venerable and state-

  "Christine's a lovely name," Mitty ofiFered tactfully. "I used to know a girl—" She began to talk to her, to put her at her ease.

  Jones, turning his own attention exclusively to Mallory, to permit the effort to proceed even more successfully, but glancing at her occasionally, could see the diffidence melting away like snow in a hot sun. The only regrettable thing about it, he reflected, was that it would never come again, it was gone for good—at least with them. That first minute in the doorway was already gone. They had made her that much older. It was like quicksilver, that quality of being young; even as you looked at it, it had already grown a little older before your very eyes.

  Mitty was already up and stirring when he opened his eyes the next morning, although the mists of dawn were still swirling about the place, inside and out. The coolness of the early morning at this altitude was delicious. It smelled of ferns and dew.

  "Some improvement, isn't it?" he greeted her cheerfully. "After that caldron we've been stewing in until now. I'm glad I called that doctor fellow in that night."

  "Come on," she said. "Do you want to come with me for a ride? I've been outside already, and that boy that rode up with us yesterday is bringing a couple of the horses around."

  He groped for his shoes along the floor, interrupted himself to plant a hand against his writhing back. "I'm still stiff from yesterday, but I suppose one of the quickest ways of getting rid of it is to get stiff all over again today."

  She shifted weight from foot to foot in the doorway. "Hurry up, don't take so long. Oh, never mind your tie!"

  "That was just habit," he grinned, casting it behind him. "Gosh, you're impatient, aren't you?" He liked to see her that way. It was better than all that broody stuff down on the coast.

  The two horses were outside waiting for them, Pascual afoot between them. Early as he'd thought it was, he found Mallory already on the veranda.

  "Going for a ride, I see. Want me to send Pascual with you?"

  "No, why bother? You might need him around the place here. We'll just lope out a way, turn around, and come back again."

  She was already mounted. She shook her unbound hair back, like a rippling mane. "Come on, Larry, you take so long to get started."

  "I haven't got the sleep out of my eyes yet," he grimaced.

  She wheeled and trotted off, without waiting. She and her horse cast a great blue shadow athwart the ground, against the preliminary rosy fuming of the still unrisen sun.

  Mallory said, with an air of casual indifference that somehow didn't quite go over altogether successfully, "Might be a good idea not to go too far off the finca. Plenty of room for you to work out your horses inside its limits."

  Jones stopped with his foot to the stirrup. "Why?" he asked. "Any particular reason?"

  "Oh, no, no particular reason. Just that I figured you were riding on empty stomachs and wouldn't want to be out too long. You know, distances can be deceptive in this clear mountain air."

  Jones had a feeling he hadn't quite meant that, but saw no reason for lingering there to lock conversational horns with him, especially since Mitty was by now nearly out of sight.

  He overtook her only with a good deal of difficulty, and as he finally came up alongside he inquired ruefully, "Hey, are we supposed to be riding together or separately?"

  "Why, I was holding him in waiting for you," she jeered.

  "Oh, you were. Miss Valkyrie! Well, try to catch up with this." He spurred to a slingshot velocity for a brief, dust-raising stretch. In no time she had shot past him.

  "Try to catch up with what?" she inquired coolly when she had again allowed him to overtake her.

  "Where'd you leam to ride like that?" he grunted.

  "Fredericks taught me."

  He promptly let the subject drop, as he invariably did whenever that name came into it.

  "Look," she said presently, as they ambled on, "isn't this worth coming out to see?"

  A curious piebald shadow and lividness had developed across the landscape as the sun progressed in its ascent. There was somethi
ng unreal about it, like a stage setting bathed in colored spotlights and viewed from the dimness behind the footlights. For they were so close in under the slope of the mountain, in fact midway up on it and of it itself, that the sun for them had not yet been able to top its crest, and where they were was still blue shade, save for a few flesh-toned fissures here and there. Yet miles below and behind them, sunhght already blazed in undiluted strength, and luminous zones of coral-pink, fuchsia, magenta, and orange-gold glowed up at them, like vivid tiles or the patches of a shimmering crazy quilt.

  "We get it later than the lowlands do," he murmured.

  "It looks later down there to the eye, and yet we can already see it right now from where we are, before we've caught up to it ourselves. That's what gives you that curiously unreal feeling," she analyzed.

  They went on again. There was no such thing as a bridle path, of course. They had to pick their own way, improvising as they went, but the terrain was fairly passable. They were already too high up here for any full-fledged jungle.

  "There it comes now," she said. "Watch. It's breaking cover."

  It topped the crest, like a geyser, spraying the slopes with white and silver brightness, and suddenly all the remaining shadow had been swept off them at once and was gone, not to reappear again until night brought it back.

  He squinted, turned his head aside, and said, "Whewl It's sure strong."

  Almost immediately, as in a desert, heat became noticeable. Not the enervating, humid heat they had escaped from on the coast, but a dry, baking heat, absorbed by the boulders and rocky, arid mountainside soil and given back again, as by bricks in an oven, in refracted exhalations that caused the air to quiver.

  She turned and pointed behind them down the mountainside. "Look. Look how far we've come. Look back, you can see nearly the whole finca down there below us. Look, see their little hats, where they're picking the berries? Like pin points. And you can see the roof of the house—and those little things around it must be the shacks. It's like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope."

  They had already put a considerable distance between themselves and the outermost limits of the plantation's cultivated area, discernible from here solely by the difference in coloring, the dark green of the bushes.

  "We'd better turn back now, hadn't we? He said not to—"

  "Not to what?"

  "Not to stay out too long if we want anything to eat."

  She curled her lip. "I'd rather keep on riding than eat, wouldn't you? It's early yet. Come on, just another quarter of an hour."

  He offered no objection, although his acquiescence was somewhat unwilling. The terrain around them was diamond-clear in the sunlight. It seemed ridiculous to think there could have been any guarded warning implicit in Mallory's parting remark. Probably he'd only been afraid they'd lose their way, on their first unaccompanied ride around here.

  She'd gone ahead again. He watched her from the rear. She rode with her head tilted back, scanning the moun-taintops, imminent now and not remote, with a good deal of that same fixed intensity she had so often shown at their window and on their balcony down on the coast. It was less disturbing up here because, for one thing, it was more natural for her to look on ahead like that, and for another, the act of riding took some of the static melancholy out of it.

  His horse's bit began to lather. He reined in. "Mitty, this is far enough," he called out to her. "Let's go back. The horses need watering."

  She waved a casual, reassuring hand to him without turning her head. "There's a little spring in a hollow just over the next rise. They can drink there. Come on, I'll show you."

  He didn't get it for fully a minute or two. Most likely the offhand manner in which she had said it had something to do with the blunting of his perceptions. She had gone down out of sight into one of the frequent recessions they had been encountering all along. By the time he had topped it in turn and joined her down at the bottom, she was already off her horse and watering it at a little struggling freshet that spilled from the rock formation, formed a little pool, meandered for a few laborious feet, and then disappeared again underground, whence it had come.

  He was already in the act of dismounting before it finally hit him, as if by a sort of delayed timing. It rocked him. He left his saddle unsteadily and stood there looking at her half frightenedly, his hands against his horse's neck, as if to help him support himself.

  "How did you know file spring would be here?" he asked hoarsely.

  She looked from him to the spring, uncertainly. "I don't know. Well, it is here, isn't it?" . "I know it's here. But how did you know it was going to be? We only got here last night! We never came up this way before in our lives!"

  "Larry, don't get so frightened always!" she tried to remonstrate. "Your face is starting to sweat."

  "It's the ride," he said, brushing an inattentive forearm past it. He tried to pull himself together. "I guess Mal-lory told you, is that it?" But how could he tell her just where? He wondered, even as he said it.

  She shook her head. "I didn't speak to him before we left. You saw me go."

  He slumped down on a flat rock and let his shoulders go concave. He tried to light a cigarette, and he lost it between his fingers. The second one he caught just in time.

  She came over and put a hand on his shoulders in a sort of mute consolation. He didn't look up at her.

  "Maybe you heard it before it came in sight," he said gloomily, looking down at the glinting, mica-flecked ground.

  "Yes, maybe. I—I guess that must have been it."

  She hadn't, and she knew it. She was just saying that to try to make him feel better. The spring made hardly any sound. Even this close to it you could hear only the slightest occasional gurgle.

  "Maybe your horse—"

  But her horse hadn't spoken, she had.

  She had gone back again and was letting drops fall through her cupped hands. "Try some," she offered. "It's refreshing."

  "I don't want to drink from the damned thing!" he exclaimed with a resentful cast of his arm toward her. "It's spooked!"

  For him all the peace and joy had gone out of their ride. That was starting in again. That—he didn't know what to call it—that strangeness.

  They were silent for a while after that. She was busy with her thoughts, and he with his. His had to do with her, but somehow he knew, he could have sworn, that hers had nothing to do with him; he had no place in them. What they were he couldn't think, and almost didn't want to know. His belly was full enough of this strangeness already. He wanted no more of it just then, if he could help it.

  He slumped on the edge of this flat, slablike-stone, his back to her and the brimming concentric circles of the little pool, his hand bent over and weighted down as if by the heaviness of the disregarded cigarette that dangled from it. Though he didn't look at her to see, he could tell what she was doing, what posture she had fallen into, by her sharply inked shadow on the sun-whitened ground, which fell well forward beyond him. She was sitting at the pool's edge, with her knees bent upward before her and her arms folded about them. She was not looking down at the pool before her. Her head was tilted upward, almost back, and he knew what she must be looking at to elevate it so. There was only one thing higher, and that would have been the open sky itself, directly overhead.

  She was looking up at the outlined crest of the mountains—of this mountain, at any rate—just up ahead of them. It seemed very close, now, very easy to attain.

  His teeth locked, then shifted over so that the two parts of his jaw were askew, then locked once more. What was this never-ending nostalgia for the unknown and the beyond and the just-over-the-rise? This triangle formed by him and her and the metaphysical, in which he came out a poor third!

  He looked at her broodingly, as she lay upon the ground, cut out in black htmus paper. A strange aberration, a momentary optical illusion coursed through his mind and then left it again. There was something aboriginal about the silhouette. Perhaps
the arid surroundings, the little pool, the shadows of the two horses in the background had something to do with it. The attitude of patient contemplation, the crouched figure she made suggested a Bedouin huddled waiting at a well in an Old World desert or a Navajo squatting immobile by an Arizona water hole.

  Then the impression flitted on its way again; he was getting like her, he told himself.

  He got up and went over to the pool and stood looking down at it. It was very small. There was a permanent dimple in the middle of it, and circles kept spreading out from this, never resting, never stopping. He tapped his foot along the margin of it, with a sort of latent animosity, as if to see what it was, what it was doing here, how she had come to know of it. It told nothing. It was nothing; just a finger's width of water running out of the mountainside, circling a little, then draining off again back where it had come from.

  He flung his cigarette down into it. The paper turned gray as it took the water. It went slowly around three times, each time in a wider circle, then found the rill that drained off the pool, escaped through it, and was lost to sight.

  He felt like spitting into the water, as one does into an enemy's face, but he didn't.

  She continued to look upward, only upward.

  "Come on," he said. "It must be nearly eleven. We'll never get back."

  "We could have gone farther," she said dreamily. "Do you see that cleft up ahead there? I wonder where that leads to. I bet you can see right through to the other side."

  "Come on. Never mind that now." He was terse about it.

  He mounted, waited long enough to see her gain her feet, then wheeled and started up the shallow saucer-like tilt on the downward side, over which their way back lay.

  He glanced back from the top, and she was putting foot to stimip. He dropped on down out of sight, on their homeward way. Then in a moment more, when she should have overtaken him and there was no approaching trot in the wake of his own, he stopped, circled, and went inquiringly back to the top again.

  Her horse's head and her own came up above the ridge simultaneous to his own arrival, but she was on the far side, continuing on up the mountainside, going from him instead of coming toward him. He couldn't believe his own eyes. "Mittyl" he called hoarsely. "What are you doing?"