The Secret of Mirror House

by Jennifer Blake

  Unable to resist his admitted weak spot, Amelia said, "Then, too, I thought Indians believed God was in all things-the sky, trees, the lake, even in people. How, then, could God hide from Himself?"

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. "Touché," he said with a quirk of his mouth, "you have spiked me in the raw, so now kindly take my own blade out of my side and tell me what you believe." She chuckled a little and said airily with a wave of her hand toward the clearing sky beyond the railing, "Oh, what everyone else believes, that He is up there beyond the blue, a vast presence watching over us."

  "A childish sentiment. God is life. We ourselves, because we are alive, are God in His image of life. Why ask for more than that?"

  "Don't you believe that He watches over us, even to the smallest sparrow?"

  "Why should He? We repudiated Him. Besides, we overestimate our importance. If God created the earth, He is capable of so many more wondrous things that men could be as mere gnats in the universe, with about as much impact." He was staring out into space and Amelia watched his still face as be spoke. She had never heard such statements before in her life and hardly knew whether to accuse him of not believing in God or commend him for his humble attitude.

  Instead of doing either, she asked, "Then, you think we have no one to turn to in our trouble?"

  "Yes, and no one to blame for it either, unless we blame ourselves. I am a fatalist, I think you would say." "We have no control over our lives at all?" Oh, of course. We are the masters of our souls. We decide what we will, or will not, do. We can choose to be moral or immoral in our living with, or without, the help of God."

  "Then, you don't believe in God?" Amelia asked in bewilderment.

  "Don't be dense. I believe in God. What I don't believe in is your white-bearded man with cruel punishments for his children, and after he has punished them into goodness, his held-out hope of reward. I prefer not to believe in a God who kills the innocent, the newborn, the good, and the brave. It is preferable that there be an indifferent life force masquerading in the white robes of God for the sake of those who must give this force a name. In that belief, I have my self-respect and I know where I stand. What happens to me that I cannot change with my own hands, happens because of the grinding wheels of fate, a chain reaction of man and nature."

  "I can't say I understand your beliefs …" Amelia said slowly.

  "Think about it; you will," Nelville said with quiet assurance.

  "… but, I can respect you for having them, and for not pretending to believe as we do," Amelia finished.

  He smiled at her suddenly, a friendly, completely real smile without mockery or guile, and she felt the force of his personality, his strange possession of self, it seemed, without need for other people. She was envious and oddly bereft because of his lack of need.

  "Excuse me," came an arch voice behind them, and a look of annoyance passed over Nelville's face. "I didn't know this was a little téte-e-téte."

  "Not at all, Reba," Nelville said in a resigned tone. "Join us, why don't you."

  "I wouldn't dream of it," she answered and went away, leaving an embarrassed constraint where there had been a naturalness before.

  "Poor Reba," Nelville said, staring unhappily at the rapidly clearing sky. "She must always have her drama to lighten an otherwise boring day. The Latin flare for intrigue, you know. Temper tied down like a boiler's safety valve, convention when she would prefer convulsion. The kind that can't be satisfied with having things happen to her. She must make things happen."

  "Is something wrong with her?" Amelia asked.

  "Childless, in a word. Twelve years of matrimony and staring at the backside of thirty,. Desperation. Every woman should have babies."

  "In unlimited quantities? Sort of a … safety valve? To let off steam?" Amelia asked tartly, wondering if she had read the unspoken criticism into his words herself, and then blushing at how he might interpret what she had said.

  "As to that," he answered slowly, looking away, "I suppose it depends on the woman."

  "On whether she needs a safety valve or not?"

  "On whether she wants one," he answered and darted a laughing look at her.

  Feeling as if she was floundering in a trap, Amelia said sharply, "I believe you like to disconcert people."

  "Possibly, if I want to see what someone is like-sweet, tart, cool, warm …"

  "You make it sound like tasting a pie," she said, laughing. Then, she turned her head to listen as the silvery tinkle of a small bell rang in the room behind them, the room directly across from hers where Isabella had disappeared that night so many weeks before. The room that for all Amelia had been able to see, might as well have been empty, until now.

  The smile that had begun to form on Nelville's face faded, and slowly, seemingly without purpose, he lowered his feet and rose effortlessly from his chair. "If I were king," he said slowly, looking down at her, his bronze face stern and his green, fox eyes once more cold and withdrawn, "I would have nothing but blackbird pie."

  "He's mad," she thought, listening as his footsteps passed behind her and faded into the hall, not quite daring to watch him go. She thought they stopped at the door of the room from which the bell sound came, but in her agitation she could not be sure. What had he meant? Anything. Nothing. Why was it so important? She felt cold though the sun had come from behind the clouds and hovered, sending its heat once more pounding against the house. Her hands trembled and her heart was beating with quick thuds of excitement. She had, she realized, been avoiding Nelville for days, seeing him only at mealtime and after supper. His presence seemed to embroil her in upsetting emotions of fear and some strange excitement. Could she be attracted to him? He must be at least twelve years older than she, not an unsurmountable difference, but dampening, considering his erratic behavior. And there was no joy in the almost painful agitation she felt in his presence, so perhaps her instinct had been right and avoiding him was best. For a long time, she sat gripping the arms of her chair, caught up in confused speculation ' and longing that brought tears for her mother to be there to help her. Around her the shadows fell longer across the gallery, and the sun sulked as it set unnoticed.

  "Here you are," Katherine said some time later as she found Amelia still sitting there. "We're having a cold supper if you're feeling hungry."

  Amelia forced herself to smile and stretch and behave naturally. Her foot had gone to sleep and she stood, holding onto the railing a moment. While she was waiting to move, the smell of the sweetish smoke she had noticed earlier drifted out of the hall and she asked Katherine about it.

  "Smell? Oh, you mean Sylvestor's pipe. Some old Oriental tobacco he started smoking in the afternoons years ago. He says it's relaxing. Frankly, I think it relaxes him too much."

  As Amelia took a few steps and the tingling went out of her leg, Katherine turned toward the hall, leading the way, "I would like to talk seriously with you after supper," she said carefully. "Perhaps, we could get together in my sitting room."

  Amelia glanced toward her, surprised at the intensity of her voice, but Katherine had gone ahead down the hall, and there was nothing to do but follow feeling a little like a child promised a lecture.

  Supper was a light meal quickly and uneventfully over, and sometime later, when dark was crowding at the windows, Amelia went with Katherine into the room opposite the front parlor. This room looked much the same with its fireplace and grouped chairs, but there was no white marble mantle to grace the black and empty opening, only a clumsy wooden thing that looked sadly out of place.

  "Whenever I come into this room," Katherine said, closing the door and advancing into the room with a high-held lamp in her hand, "I am reminded of the scavengers that came in and stripped everything. Well, all the finest things. You can't believe how ugly people can be until you need money and all you have to offer are your personal belongings. Greed is no longer a word; it is a man and a woman with rat eyes and weasel noses. Their money was as good as anyone else's, I suppose,
but you can't believe how dirty they made me feel, touching my things, my mother's things."

  She put the lamp down on a table and turned in an absentminded gesture with her hands behind her as though to warm them at a nonexistent fire. "When they had gone through the house and carted everything away, I walked through it crying. I promised myself that no matter what it took, I would replace everything down to the last candlestick. But, what is the use if there is no one to carry on. Look at us! We are dying. Our line is dying!" Her eyes held a wash of tears, but she stared about her fiercely.

  "Why, no it's not," Amelia protested when she paused.

  "But, it is. Ten years ago, ten long years, we had better hope. James was young; even Nelville, though he isn't a Harveston, could have married and had children that we could all depend on to carry on. Even I … but now where are we? The years slip past unnoticed and nobody seems to care that we are losing our chance. We will all grow old together in this house with no one caring enough to save it, and what will happen to it when we are all dead? What will happen to the Harveston heritage?"

  Silently, Amelia watched her, watched the nervous, slightly distraught clasping of her long fingers and her fervid, bright blue eyes. She was touched by her obvious distress, but unmoved by the picture of the plight she painted.

  "The point I want to make is this," Katherine continued, taking a deep breath. "I invited you here to Mirror House to live, first of all, because you are a Harveston and have certain rights; but, secondly because I hoped you would come to feel for our traditions and this old house as I do. I hoped you would be willing to stay here, marry, and have children who would also love and cherish Mirror House."

  A hard voice rang out from the door:

  And the blots of nature's hand

  Shall not in their issue stand;

  Never mole, hare lip, nor scar,

  Nor mark prodigious, such as are

  Despised in nativity,

  Shall upon their children be.

  "Outlining your glorious plan for Amelia, Katherine?"

  "Nelville!" Katherine exclaimed in annoyance, "this is a private conversation."

  "How private can a conversation be when you are disposing of lives. My life, Amelia's, James's?" The door he had opened swung slowly against the wall, showing him leaning on the door frame with a full glass in one hand and a half-empty bottle dangling from the other. His face wore a smile that did not reach his eyes, eyes that were as wary and watchful as an animal's.

  "Really, Nelville, must you descend to melodrama? Amelia and I are discussing possibilities."

  "True, but your possibilities have a way of becoming other people's certainties, Careful, Katherine. You are playing God and doing it clumsily."

  "Oh, Nelville," Katherine said in a tone half angry, half sorrowful, "must you?"

  "Did she tell you, Amelia," he ignored the question, "that you must choose between myself and James for your marriage partner. Our children would be Harvestons of course, since you are, and well, James is your second cousin, but what does that matter so long as Mirror House stays in the family. Even first cousins have been known to marry under those circumstances."

  Amelia looked at Katherine who had turned distinctly white, and stared, as if entranced, at Nelville. "Marry one of you," she repeated tonelessly, not really surprised.

  "Certainly. That is the plan, isn't it Katherine? What could be more perfect-though James is the favorite, the Harveston name, you understand."

  "I believe you are drunk," Amelia said quietly, and Katherine laughed weakly.

  "The thought of marriage doesn't seem to be to your taste," Katherine said with a faint smile to Nelville, ignoring for the time being Amelia's interested presence, "almost as though you had never agreed to the proposition."

  "I agreed in theory only," Nelville said shortly, "before I met Amelia and before our fawning and cajoling maneuvering disgusted me. Did you think I would do it? You're a greater optimist than I thought, or a greater fool." He came walking across the room to stand beside the table on which the lamp burned. His eyes, as they stared across the flame at Katherine, were mocking, green, and glass hard. Katherine seemed suddenly older, the bones of her face standing out in the flickering light.

  "Please," Amelia said calmly, considering the frantic thoughts that whirled through her mind.

  "Why not?" Katherine said angrily, unheeding of Amelia's plea. "Why ever not? Wouldn't it settle everything?"

  "Perhaps, if you could let things alone. Why must you meddle and push at people? It might have worked if you had let it be."

  "So. That's the way it is," Katherine said with satisfaction.

  "Don't be sure. Gloating is very unbecoming to a woman."

  What is going on,?" James asked, coming into the room while Reba and Sylvestor paused at the door.

  "Another of their endless quarrels," Sylvestor said and turned away up the stairs, but Reba stood, curious, waiting.

  "Nelville is alarming Amelia with another of his dramas," Katherine said with a challenging light in her blue eyes. Her face had undergone a change, her self-possession, which had been missing when she faced Nelville, had returned as she smiled at James. "Tell Amelia that no one has any intention of choosing a husband for her. This is nine teenth century Louisiana, not old France or even old New Orleans."

  "I would put no faith in that," Nelville said to Amelia before James could speak.

  But, James smiled a warm smile and limped toward Amelia. "Any man would be honored to have you for his wife," he said, "and I'm sure that includes Nelville as well as myself. But, many whom you please or marry no one at all. The rest of us have had that choice, I don't see why you should be denied it."

  "That's a relief," Amelia said shakily. "I was beginning to believe I was in some kind of nightmare."

  "You haven't awakened yet," Nelville said, and taking his bottle and glass with him, left the room.

  Sometime during the discussion Reba had left too, for she was no longer visible beyond the light.

  James sat down beside Amelia and took up one of her hands. "Don't be afraid, Amelia," he said. "Nelville means well, but sometimes he gets queer notions." His hands were warm, but Amelia thought they trembled slightly. His voice held nothing but comfort, a brotherly, unassuming comfort, but still Amelia drew her hand away, made acutely uncomfortable by his attempt to comfort her.

  Katherine stood with clasped hands, staring at James with a brooding look on her face, as though she was not really thinking of him. Then, the look changed to one of unease and she rubbed her hands together. Feeling uneasy herself, Amelia watched her, trying to think, made to think by Katherine's strange expression, of the things she and Nelville had said. Suddenly, she felt alien to the house and its occupants. Mentally, she withdrew from the barren, quarreling, incomprehensible existence of which she had come to be a part. What was there for her in it? What place was she to fill? She felt stifled, not with heat and the closeness of the seldom-used room, but with something else, some weight of premonition, the residue of things half heard and only partially understood. You don't have to stay here, she told herself. You are free to go and do as you please. But, as she made an involuntary move toward the door, Katherine turned quickly with her, and a foreboding chill swept along Amelia's veins. Whether it was real or imaginary she felt trapped.

  Later, in her room, the feeling she had had so strongly had dissipated, but there remained an uneasiness that made itself apparent in a nervous wakefulness. She bathed and dressed for bed and brushed her hair, fuming impatiently because it was filled with electricity that made it cling like fine black spider webs to the brush and the fabric of her gown. She blew out the lamp and threw open the jalousies to the night coolness and stood there breathing in the fragrance of dusty earth and growing things tired with heat. Down by the lake a chorus of frogs tried to drown out the fiddles of the grasshoppers and crickets so that the night was alive with sound. A quarter-moon shone clearly, reflecting in the still water of the lake
, but scarcely penetrating the thicket of pines that held the little stone summerhouse. Because it would be stifling under the mosquito net, Amelia drew the chair up to the window and curled up in it, covering her feet and legs against marauding mosquitos. Idly, she thought of the Cajuns along the bayous who, on a hot night like this, often took their beds out into the yard to sleep away from the trapped heat in the house. It seemed a nice idea and she wished she dared at least take hers out onto the gallery.

  She sat there for some time, occasionally waving away a mosquito from her face and listening to their angry whine; and then she saw movement below, a figure, someone leaving the protective shadow of the porch. Cautiously it moved, but as it turned back to gaze apprehensively toward the house, the moon caught on the upturned face and Amelia recognized Reba.

  Then, Reba moved swiftly across the open ground, her red skirts billowing out around her. Curiously, but without conscious thought, Amelia watched her enter the pine grove of the little love temple, and saw the tall, slim shape of a man detach itself from the deep shadows. For an instant, the two figures blended. Then, like ghosts, they faded into the dark shadows of the pines and disappeared.

  Quietly, Amelia watched the grove, but they did not reappear. The night closed in upon them. Wearily, she closed her eyes. Reba was over thirty and she was twenty, and really, she didn't think she had the right to feel outraged for the sake of society. The most she felt was a wistful envy. Where was her adventure, her splendid love affair. By the tape measure of times, she was nearly an old maid. In less than a year, she would be twenty-one, past the freshness of youth, beyond that special tender bloom that was so important. Maybe it would be best to surrender and hope that Katherine did have matrimonial plans for her. Did she? Or was she just a concerned woman, a little more intense than most, with a little more family feeling? But, where did that leave Nelville? Mistaken? Insane? Drunk? Mischievous? Malicious? Which?