the wheel involuntarily, and I saw Dan’s big hands tighten on his knees.
“What in God’s name is that, Grace?”
It’s silly to say it, but I definitely had to steady my voice. “It sounds like Cassandra,” I said.
It’s absurd, now, to say that the weird memory I had then of something I hadn’t thought of for years and years would have had any significance, if it hadn’t been for the incredible things that did happen at Romney. For Cassandra, you remember, was the seeress doomed by the gods to be always right, never to be believed . . . and when she comes back with Agamemnon, after the fall of Troy, she stands before his fated house, screaming, stricken with the fearful vision of the eaves dripping blood and the smoke of blood rising from its walls, and herself and Agamemnon murdered by his queen.
The headlights moved across the porch and the silent bricks and stretched, as I put my foot on the brake, down a long grassy alley between wind-racked lines of somber box. They rested, as I came to a full stop and switched off the engine, on a great blue and red and white target, and picked out, clearly visible to my astonished eyes, a single arrow stuck and left in its golden heart. And with that sight coming as it did, so abruptly on the weird memory of that other far-off homecoming that had raced through my mind, I sat perfectly still, staring at it.
“I must,” I thought, “be losing my mind entirely.”
Dan’s voice, sane and practical, came to my ears with almost a shock of relief.
“I see Mother still plays Robin Hood,” he said. “Wonder if she still wears that Lincoln green get-up with the feather in her hat?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “What I wonder is if the rest of us have to take all the skin off our arms playing Robin Hood too?”
“Certainly,” Dan said. “Unless, of course,” he added, in his mother’s most perfect manner, “you don’t want to cooperate.”
I looked out at the dark house, eerie and forbidding in the violent night.
“I’m not sure there’s anybody around to co-operate with,” I said. “Are you sure this was the day?”
“Or is this the place, Mrs. Latham?” Dan said. “Wait. I’ll get you an umbrella.”
“I’ll make a dash for it,” I said.
I slipped over to the right side of the car and out, and made a bolt for the porch, and drew a deep painful breath of relief when I cleared it.
Dan, following me, tripped and lunged forward, caught himself, swore quietly and gave something a violent kick across the porch. I went on over to the door, put my hand out to open it and stopped, my heart suddenly gone quite still . . . because, as if all this wasn’t already too much, the door quietly and slowly opened itself. Or for a moment I thought it did, until I made out, standing beside it in the dim candle-lit hall, Dan’s young sister Mara, her dark pointed little face lost in the glow of her great somber eyes and the halo of her dark cloudy hair.
She didn’t smile or hold out her hand. She just looked at me, and beyond me at her brother, and said, in that strange, almost poignant voice of hers, “You’re late. Mother’ll give you holy hell.”
She didn’t smile or hold out her hand to him . . . and Dan, who’d started toward her to kiss her—after all, I thought, he’d not seen her for three years—stopped abruptly and stood staring at her.
Then he bent down and picked up the long bow, still strung, that he’d tripped over in the dark, and flung it angrily across the porch.
“If this is your bow,” he said, “I wish you’d put it in the rack, instead of leaving it around for somebody to break his neck on.”
Mara Winthrop’s pointed chin went up, her eyes blazed.
“Paris hasn’t changed you a bit, has it, darling!”
Her voice was cold and perfectly flat, but her big somber eyes were suddenly filled with tears that she blinked back resolutely.
“Anyway, you’d better come on in just as you are, or the fatted calf’ll be all eaten. Everybody’s been waiting hours for you . . . including Natalie, the glamour girl.”
She turned and started toward a door off the wide elegant hall. I looked around at Dan. His face was set, hurt and angry, and he certainly looked like anything but the returning prodigal. We went on in. I glanced around the familiar long passageway, full of old mahogany, with the strapped leather mail pouch hanging on its hook by the door, and the Sheffield urn full of scarlet roses under the Adam mirror. Dan tossed his hat on a sofa and pushed back his crisp unruly hair with both hands.
“What’s come over that girl?” he said. “Would it be this guy Keane?”
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense, some way—at least those sudden smarting tears didn’t. I found myself wondering about Mara—actually, when I came to think about it, for the first time I’d ever done it. Up to this time I’d always seen her through her mother’s eyes, moody and difficult, resisting with the thoroughness of a wilful demon all the efforts made in her behalf. I could see Irene Winthrop, a corsage of yellow orchids pinned on her mink coat, stopping me just outside the British Embassy one afternoon, her eyes raised in amused despair, saying, “Darling, that child will be the death of me!” and the woman I was with saying when she was gone, “You know, Irene’s wonderful to that girl. You know, it really hurts her terribly, the way the little wretch acts!” I wasn’t, some way, so sure of that, now. I had the sudden definite feeling that Mara hadn’t wanted to be so horrid to Dan. Maybe it was because he was late, or because I was there. Then the picture of that bareheaded young man crashing through the storm in his open car came back to me.
“I mean, what the hell have I done?” Dan said.
“She’s probably just upset about something,” I said. “Come along. Wipe the rain off your face and let’s go in. I want to see the glamour girl.”
“Yeh?” Dan said. He grinned suddenly and took my arm. “Me, I can hardly wait. Let’s go.”
Mara Winthrop had stopped at the broad carved pine door at the end of the hyphen that connects the dining room wing with the main house. I saw her push back her cloudy hair from her forehead, almost as if bracing herself for something to come, and then, remembering, hurriedly tie the dangling ends of narrow green velvet ribbons that made the belt of her smart brown cotton dinner frock. We weren’t then, I thought, the only ones late for dinner, and I thought again of Alan Keane careening crazily through the rain, and wondered if Dan and I would be the only ones to get holy hell that night.
As we came along Mara threw open the door.
“Lo, the bridgroom cometh!” she announced.
I couldn’t hear what Dan said through the sudden blur of excited voices beyond us, but I knew from the grin on his face that Mara was not only forgiven but was even definitely one up. Then I could hear the sound of Irene Winthrop’s high-pitched lilting laughter rippling along the top of the dinner table talk and the subdued wellbred clink of silver on fine porcelain that all stopped abruptly as her voice came out to us:
“You waited for them, Mara! You sweet angel!”
Behind me Dan made some kind of not too polite noise as
