to me like an extremely nice girl,” I said.
She looked at me with a slow astonished expression on her lovely face.
“My dear Grace, how can you say such a stupid thing? Anyone can look at her and see she’s nothing but an adventuress. And this business tonight certainly proves it. You didn’t see the look on Dan’s face when he saw her! At the table in his own home, his own brother’s wife, was certainly the last place in the world he expected to run across her again.”
I smiled. That part of it was certainly true.
“And I’m glad Rick’s eyes are finally opened,” Irene went on. “I’ve made it—I think—perfectly clear to him that as long as he’s married to her, he needn’t expect anything from me. I think he sees now what a fool he was not to be the one to marry Natalie.”
“Do you think Dan is going to marry her?” I inquired.
“Of course. He’s got to.”
“Why?”
She came over and sat down in the deep love seat beside me.
“Grace . . . the reason I sent for you this week end is this.—My husband was your husband’s own first cousin.”
I nodded.
“When he died, Grace, he left his estate entirely to me, except that at my death, or before if I chose, and if the need arose, three-fourths of one quarter of it was to go to his sister’s child. The other one-fourth of that quarter was to go to your two children.”
I looked at her in complete surprise. It was the last thing in the world I should have expected.
“And . . . Natalie is that sister’s child.”
“You mean she’s Dan’s cousin?”
She made a quick impatient gesture.
“That doesn’t make the least difference—she takes after her father and Dan takes after me, so it’s exactly as if they weren’t at all related.”
It seemed very convenient, and definitely, as Dr. Birdsong had said, of the eat-your-cake school.
“Does she know about this—the will, I mean?”
Irene shook her head. “The point is, however, that she’s an orphan, and a very nice girl, and a really quite beautiful girl . . . and if one of the boys marries her, I won’t have to divide the estate now . . .”
She got up abruptly.
“At least that was my idea this morning!”
Her slim white hands moved in a limp, weary gesture.
“I don’t know, now. I don’t suppose you realize how awful that scene at the table was, with Rick and Dan and Mara at each other’s throat, hating each other . . . and me. Of course, nobody understood but Sidney and myself that Rick is bitterly opposed to my marrying. He’s always hated Sidney. I think if Sidney hadn’t been in the bank Rick would have stayed on and perhaps amounted to something. Perhaps if I gave him his money now he’ll still do something. Sidney’s opposed to it, but it’s because he doesn’t understand Rick.”
She leaned her head on the mantel and stared down into the fire, the flames lighting her filmy crimson gown, making the shadow of her body seem too light and fragile to hold up against her strident warring family.
“I wonder if any other mother ever felt the way I do, or if I’m nothing but an unnatural beast,” she said quietly, after another long pause. “But Grace . . . sometimes I almost hate Rick, and . . . Mara. And I know they hate me.”
Her voice had sunk almost to a whisper. Outside a gust of wind buffeted the windows, a shutter banged. Above it came that dreadful shrill shriek. I got up abruptly.
“You’re being stupid. Irene,” I said, rather brutally, I’m afraid. “You’d better go to bed and forget tonight.”
I went to the window to close it, and for some reason that I wasn’t quite aware of I drew the curtains aside and looked out. Someone slipped quickly behind one of the white fluted columns, but not quickly enough to escape the shaft of light falling on her auburn hair. I let the curtains fall . . . wondering what difference it might make that Natalie Lane had heard all this too.
I drew the window down and came back to the fire.
“Who was the man with the dog?” I asked.
“That’s Tom Birdsong,” she said dully.
“Is he a doctor?”
“Among other things. He doesn’t practice—nobody knows why. He’s the local man of mystery.”
I started out.
“Please go to bed, Irene.”
She kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“You probably think I’m a very wicked woman,” she said softly. “Good night.”
It wasn’t, I thought as I went up stairs, the old pine banister satin-smooth under my hand, as much a matter of thinking that Irene was wicked as of thinking that since I’d seen her last she had really changed incredibly . . . or that perhaps I’d never really known her, never had seen her before in a situation that was anything but rather charmingly casual—certainly not one as fundamentally emotional as this night’s.
I went to bed and turned out the light, but I didn’t go to sleep. Even if it hadn’t been for the wind moaning in the old chimneys and tearing like dead hands at the wooden shutters, and the eerie screaming of those birds, like souls lost in hell, Romney was still too full of ghosts for me, ghosts of my own dead past. I must have dropped off at last, however, for I’m sure I woke up hearing hushed frantic voices outside my door in the hall.
“You can’t leave now, you can’t! Don’t you see it’s just what they want you to do?”
It was Mara’s voice, urgent and passionate.
“Cheryl—you can’t go!”
“But I’ve got to go, to-night! You don’t understand, Mara! A horrible thing has happened . . . please let me go, I tell you I’ve got to!”
“But you can’t! The tree’s down over the road—you can’t walk, you can’t stay in the village all night!”
“But you can phone Alan—he can take me to Washington. I’ve got to go, Mara.”
There was a long silence. I heard steps on the polished pine floors then, and in a few minutes the tinkle of the country phone. I looked at my clock. The hands pointed to twenty minutes past one. I lay there as long as I could without going quietly out of my mind, and got up. However bad the situation was, it seemed utter folly for Cheryl Winthrop to go barging off into the night in Alan Keane’s open car . . . it would only give Irene and Rick another stick to thwack her with, and it wouldn’t help Dan.
I put on my dressing gown and slippers, opened the door into the hall, and went along the hyphen corridor
