in the spring, or a branch of yellow mimosa. In fact, Grace, I’m quietly going nuts. And I never so much as touched her, except when we shook hands saying good-bye.”
All effort to be debonair and nonchalant had stopped some time before. I had the curious and rather awed feeling that it was the first time in Dan Winthrop’s life that anyone had seen behind that casually cheerful and good-looking façade . . . and that what was seen was good.
He reached out suddenly and took my hand in his big brown paw. “We’d better get going if we’re making Romney by dinner,” he said—just as Lilac put her black head out of the door and rolled her eyes balefully up at the threatening sky: “You-all bettah get sta’ted if you goin’ get down to th’ country befo’ this here ol’ storm break, Mis’ Grace.”
And because Lilac has dictated my goings out and comings in since I came to the house in Georgetown to live, long before I was left a widow with the two small boys she’s practically raised, I got up obediently. Besides, she was right—as always. Dan and I had sat there much longer than either of us had thought, and we were supposed to be at Romney by seven.
Dan looked at his watch, then at me.
“Let’s forget it, shall we?”
I nodded.
“I wish to God I could,” he added abruptly.
2
So it was already getting on toward seven when we crossed the bridge over the Anacostia by the Naval School of Music, where a lone trumpeter was having tough going with his upper notes, and turned out a road that runs through one of those depressed areas that cluster, drab and undernourished, round the Maryland and Virginia edges of Washington like poor relations below the salt.
Romney—it was called Romney Marsh in the original patent granted by King Charles in 1671—is near Port Tobacco, about forty miles from the District Line on the Maryland side of the Potomac. If you’ve ever been on a Garden Pilgrimage in the spring, you’ve seen it, with its white fences covered with miles and miles of scarlet roses and honeysuckle, and its green lawns and long alleys of purple and white lilacs and somber fragrant box stretching down to the river. And you were told there how Washington used to come down from Mount Vernon, moor his barge at its dock and sit on its wide verandah, porticoed like Monticello, talking with his two physicians, whose houses were within a mile or so of Port Tobacco, and the old gentleman who lived at Romney then, childless because his three sons had fallen at Valley Forge. And you’ve seen, even if you didn’t know it was the original, still hanging over the pearwood mantel in the dining room of Romney, the picture of General Washington, in the stem of his boat, waving his slow last good-bye from the river, taken by the old gentleman from memory. Romney has passed through many hands since then, and many changes, but that picture, like the river and the boxwood, has never been moved . . . or the five Corinthian columns where the starlings used to nest before Irene Winthrop took them firmly in delicate iron hand and drove them out, along with the family of land terrapin that shared the smokehouse with the rats.
It was almost eight when we turned at Duke of Gloucester Street in Port Tobacco, by the old Fountain Inn across from the Merchants Bank. We’d scarcely spoken at all since we left Georgetown. I was thinking of when I used to be at Romney a great deal, when my sons were small and my husband was living, and wondering vaguely why it was that I’d never been able to find time to go, these last few years—just once for a week end, in fact, in the three years Dan Winthrop had been away.
I glanced at him, hunched down in the seat beside me, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. I think all that forty miles he must have been taking from memory—like the old gentleman Romney—another picture, the picture of the girl with the wheat-colored hair and hyacinth eyes, waving good-bye from the sunny plain below the little hill of Vezeley. I know at any rate that he was completely unaware of the brassy yellow light that made the road a narrow metallic ribbon through the parched anæmic corn and tobacco fields of Maryland, or the rumble of thunder coming ominously nearer and nearer as we moved through that yellow unreal twilight. And it wasn’t till we’d gone through Port Tobacco, and I’d turned in, at the crossroad marker with several of its bright glass eyes missing, between the tall white gate posts with their carved wood pineapple tops and sign saying “Private—The Public are Admitted on Specified Days Only,” that he came slowly to life again. It was a curiously unenthusiastic homecoming, some way, and I was a little shocked—or was till I told myself it was clearly none of my business. As far as that went, I myself—knowing Irene Winthrop, and Rick Winthrop, and Mara for that matter, so well—wasn’t really looking forward to it with any extraordinary elation.
Ahead of us the narrow oyster-shell road stretched, snow white, between two tall dark lanes of pollarded cedars. The western horizon framed in the narrow windshield was a threatening oblong of inky black and murky yellow, the sheet lightning flashing mutinously behind it and dying in distant rumbles of thunder. It was suddenly as if we’d become part of an El Greco canvas, moving beyond mountains into the vast unknown, portentous and terrifying. And then the storm descended on us. Just as I switched on the lights, a great fork of streaked lightning split the sky, and huge splotches of rain stabbed and broke against the windshield, and it was abruptly pitch-dark, the two long fingers of light stretching out in front of us cut by slanting lines of driving rain. We craned our necks to see through the blinding screen of water that the windshield wipers were powerless against. The sudden wind, whipping and tearing at the boughs of the cedars, contorted them into black mangled arms struggling in the night, and buffeted the car until it lurched drunkenly on the slippery road.
In front of us a terrified rabbit streaked across the path into the frantic grass . . . and suddenly, from somewhere beyond the black screen of cedars, came the most ghastly shriek, rising in the night and the storm, blood-curdling, half-human, half-animal, as eerie as violent death.
I caught my breath sharply and pressed my foot on the gas.
“What on earth is that?” I gasped.
Dan shook his head, straining his eyes through the curtain of rain.
I put on the brakes sharply as a small open car, with no lights, shot crazily out from nowhere into the road, without the slightest warning, and careened crazily past, almost ditching itself and us. In the white glare of my headlights I saw a man, bareheaded, his face a ghastly white, his collar turned up, his head bent down, gripping the wheel, driving as if hell and all its black shadows were after him.
Dan sat bolt upright. “Wasn’t that Alan Keane?” he shouted above the howling wind. He swung around in the seat.
“It looked like him!” I answered.
“I thought Mother didn’t let him come on the place!”
“I didn’t get the impression of the ordered departure of an honored guest!” I said.
We slid out of the cedar-lined road into the narrow drive circling the great Romney oak that stands in back of the old house. It’s vast leafy arms creaked and groaned, mighty against the storm. A quarter of the way round it we came suddenly in view of the house . . . and we sat there, for an instant, both of us, just staring at it.
It wasn’t the Romney that either of us had thought of coming to—warm and hospitable and lovely in its simple dignity. It lay there in front of us dark and silent, and in some way forbidding. The rain lashed against the old brick, the wind tore desperately at the heavy purple and white wisteria vines until they writhed like whips. The shutters swung crazily, banging and crashing in the night, and the faint shadowy glimmer that came through the elliptical fanlight over the white door only made it eerier, as if something dark and stealthy moved inside there.
