Читать книгу Ill Met by Moonlight - Leslie Ford - Страница 5

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 tiller 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.

“Oh . . . how grand!” she cried, and came towards us, her arms outstretched.

“Oh, Grace! It’s marvelous to see you . . . I went by, through the old hedge, and they said you were here. Hello, Jim! Hello, everybody! It’s so nice to see you all!”

Sandra, leaning languorously back in the chintz fireside chair, introduced herself before any of us had a chance.

“And I am Sandra Gould . . . because, you see, he ees my Jeem now.”

I suppose it would have been all right in a New York speakeasy in prohibition days, with everybody making a point of not having any manners. Here and now it wasn’t only ill-bred, it was stupid. It brought into a suddenly sharpened focus just the difference between herself and Rosemary. It was so obviously throwing the glove in the rival’s face before it was decent.

Rosemary smiled.

“You’re a lucky girl—your Jim’s a very swell person!” she said, a barely perceptible emphasis on the “your.”

She looked at Jim and smiled again. Poor Jim! He tried to smile too, but he couldn’t.

“I . . . I didn’t know you were coming back,” he finally blurted out.

“Why, Jeem, darling! I told you this morning, at breakfast, and you said . . . what is eet so naughty you said? You said, ‘What the hell I care?’ Don’t you remembair, Jeem?”

There was a little appalled silence as she looked at him, so wide-eyed.

Then Rosemary laughed. “Sounds just like him,” she said. “Doesn’t it, Grace?”

“Precisely,” I said.

“But wait, here’s Dad.”

Rodman Bishop hadn’t changed, even if his daughter had. He was a little thicker, perhaps, but he had the same tanned rugged square face under the same thatch of thick white hair. But Rosemary had changed in seven years from an extremely pretty girl to one of the loveliest women I’ve ever seen. Not particularly tall, but marvelously slim, with cool gray eyes, warm eggshell skin and pale gold hair. It wasn’t only that she was lovely. There was something else; something cool and immaculate and well-bred about her that made Sandra’s rather lush exotic beauty seem suddenly almost imperceptibly common. I looked at Sandra involuntarily. I think she realized it too. Her dark eyes smoldered. Two spots burned in her cheeks. But they might have been from the wind, or from the julep she had in her hand.

Rosemary looked around. “Where’s Paul, dad?”

“Just coming, with George. Here they are.”

If I hadn’t been looking at Sandra at just that moment, I’d never have seen the sharp surprise in her face as she looked up at the door, or the unbelievably malicious smile that flicked one corner of her red mouth and died, and was then suddenly marked in the depths of her dark eyes. She opened her bag, took out a gold enamel cigarette case and opened it.

“This is Mr. Dikranov—Grace Latham, Paul, I’m always talking about. Mrs. Gould . . .”

Sandra looked up, her face blankly innocent.

She held out her hand. “I’m so stupeed about names,” she murmured.

“Dikranov,” somebody said. I watched him looking at her. He didn’t seem to know her, or if he did he was a better actor than she was. There was nothing in his face that I could see. And a very handsome face it was, with fine chiseled features and olive skin, and black hair and brows. Paul Dikranov was tall and quite slender, and mature looking—I should have guessed he was nearer forty than Rosemary’s age. On the other hand, he didn’t look as old as George Barrol. Still, I should have been more sure that he hadn’t recognized Sandra if he hadn’t been so completely suave about Jim. Or maybe, of course, he’d never heard of either of them.

Just how Rosemary and I disentangled ourselves from that group I don’t know—to powder our noses, I suppose. We wandered down the path towards the old mansion orangery.

“You haven’t changed, Grace. Not much, anyway. You must miss Dick a lot. Why haven’t you ever married again?”

“I haven’t time, darling. And the boys are trouble enough just now.”

“Where are they?”

“One of them’s on a student tour in Europe, and the other’s taken the boat and three friends for a week up the bay. I’m having a rest—or that’s what I’d planned. And what about you?”

We’d stopped and were looking at each other. Rosemary smiled the cool smile that barely stirred the surface of her wide-set gray eyes.

“Nothing, darling, nothing.”

She looked away. I saw the corners of her mouth quiver.

“She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she. Are they . . . happy?”

A long savage streak of lightning split the sulphur-gray sky across the dark water. A hideous clap of thunder shivered the air.

“They seem to get along well enough.”

“George said she was beautiful and that all the men are mad about her.”

“Your Paul’s very handsome.”

She nodded. “He’s rather a dear. He wanted to meet Jim . . . that’s one reason we came. I suppose I wanted to . . . see her.”

She took my hand suddenly and held it very tight.

“I wish I hadn’t. I knew the minute he dropped that glass it was all a horrible mistake. I shouldn’t have come.”

“Why don’t you go back, tomorrow?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“He’d understand. Your Paul, I mean.”

“Dad wouldn’t. Paul wouldn’t either, not really. I . . . I couldn’t let Jim down, anyway. Not in front of her. She’d love it, if she knew.”

“She’s not a fool.”

“No, I suppose not. She’d never have got him if she was. You know about it, don’t you?”

“Some of it.”

“It doesn’t matter now, I guess. It’s absurd. I . . . I didn’t care, yesterday—or today, till he dropped the glass.”

If I’d told him in front of Mr. Toplady’s store that morning, I thought, he’d never have dropped it. But something else would have happened, so I didn’t worry about it just then.

Another flash of lightning slit the sky and grounded in the bay. It was quite dark all at once. In the club the lights went on first in one window and then another. We could hear the faint sound of laughing voices and the children shouting on the porch. Large drops of rain began coming down.

“We’d better go back—buck up, darling,” I said. “Look out for Sandra. She’ll make trouble if she can.”

We went racing across the lawn between drops of rain as big as marbles. It was still poisonously hot and sticky, and the rain was cool on my arms and face.

“We’ll all feel better when this is over,” I said practically.

Rosemary’s laugh was a strangled half-sob in her throat. “I hope so,” she said.