and the eye takes in a whole impression at a glance while the ear has to wait for parts to be transformed into meaning—I saw the long polished mahogany table, with its white lace and crimson flowers, its sparkling crystal and gleaming silver under the soft light from the Georgian candelabra, as an island in the shadowed room, a solid core of beauty and warmth and security that blotted out instantly everything that had gone before . . . the storm-driven sky, the weird racked cedars, the white-faced man tearing through the slanting rain, the shrill cries and the shuttered house, and Mara, dark and elfin and bitter. They were all gone as if they were something I’d imagined, that had never happened at all.
But that was only for one brief instant . . . and I still don’t know whether what I saw then was because all of that really wasn’t gone at all, was still in my mind, so that I was just fancying things out of a disordered brain, or whether it was a trick of the yellow candle-light that cast long oblique shadows on the people standing round the table . . . or whether in the moment I stood there I had a sudden insight into the characters of people I’d only known pleasantly, as one knows most charming people. But the faces down there, except for two, looked suddenly angular, and predatory . . . and cruel. It was almost terrifyingly uncanny, to see Irene Winthrop’s delicate patrician face hard and hawklike, her quick-moving hands with their scarlet-lacquered nails like talons tipped with blood. Rick Winthrop, her elder son, at the far end of the table, was like a brooding bird of prey, too, his thin nose elongated by its own shadows, which deepened the circles under his harassed sullen eyes and gave the tiny mustache above his thin lips an almost sinister look.
The auburn-haired girl next to him—that would be Cheryl, I supposed, whom he’d married and brought to Romney in expectation of an allowance that hadn’t materialized—was sharp-beaked, with strange brilliant eyes and high sunken bony cheeks. Major Tillyard, next to Irene, was sleek and round and too well-fed, his bristling eyebrows prominent over his pursy cheeks. Mara and the other girl there, their backs to us in the doorway, seemed small and fragile and drooping. It sounds perfectly fantastic to say it, but for one crazy instant it flashed into my mind that this wasn’t real at all, that it was some kind of nightmare, and that in it Dan and I had wandered not into the dining room at Romney but into a den of . . . something . . . and that those two were the sacrifices at a strange altar that was not an altar.
It not only sounds fantastic, of course, it was fantastic; for instantly the whole illusion was dispelled as I stepped down the three steps onto a level with the candle-light that softened and smoothed each of those faces back into faces that were recognizable, and civilized, and even handsome, each in its own way.
As we came, Irene Winthrop rose to her feet, light as thistledown, and held out her soft bare arms.
“Grace, darling! You’ve brought me my son! My son! Danny, my sweet!—But you’re enormous!”
And he was, beside her fragile Dresden-china figure in crimson chiffon, her white hair piled in Vigée-Lebrun curls on the top of her delicate head. He lifted her gaily off her feet, gave her a resounding kiss, and set her down again, flushed and radiant.
Rick Winthrop had got lazily up and come forward. There was something so grudging and perfunctory about his slow “Hello, how are you?” and his handshake that Dan’s good-natured grin froze again, so abruptly that even Irene, who makes a point of never noticing anything that doesn’t please her, noticed it. Her purling laugh wavered for just an instant as she turned with Dan to Major Tillyard.
“You remember Dan, Sidney.”
“Yes, indeed!” Major Tillyard said. They shook hands cordially. Major Tillyard turned to me. “I haven’t seen you for a long time.”
“I’ve been away a lot,” I said, thinking it was odd how well I seemed to know him, seeing him as little as I did, and how very well he looked—prosperous and satisfied with himself.
Irene was babbling merrily along. “Dan, darling! I do want you to meet Natalie—”
That was as far as she got. Mara’s dark flat little voice interrupted.
“I should think he ought to meet Cheryl, first,” she said.
3
In the instant’s silence that fell I saw her look across at the auburn-haired girl, who was astonishingly good-looking, now that I was seeing her properly, and in some way exactly the kind of girl I should have expected Rick Winthrop to marry. She smiled, but ever so faintly, her green eyes changing, and I gathered more clearly than if she had spoken that there was no love lost between her and Mara. Then Irene’s light laughter gaily wiped the slate.
“Of course. Your sister-in-law . . . Cheryl, dear—this is Dan . . .”
And knowing—because Irene, without saying anything, had managed to say so much about the young woman who had married her elder son expecting a sinecure—what that “dear” was costing her, I looked again at the handsome auburn-haired girl beside him. I saw the smooth but firm set of her jaw, and her hazel-green eyes, and her mouth, not tight-lipped but definitely not soft and yielding; and I found myself wondering, with the first amusement I’d felt since I’d arrived, if it could be possible that Irene had at last met her match, and more than that, had it permanently—like a hair shirt—under her own roof.
The girl still hadn’t moved, or changed the faintly smiling curve of her red lips. I realized abruptly that there was something wrong in the room, something more than odd about the deafening silence that had fallen on it as this girl was looking at Dan. I turned and glanced up at him. He was standing, his back a little to his mother, absolutely rooted to the floor, his face quite colorless, his eyes blank, his lips parted stupidly, staring—not at the auburn-haired girl, but at the other girl who stood beside Mara, her back to us.
Irene’s voice cut the silence almost sharply.
“Cheryl—this is Dan!”
The girl turned, supporting herself lightly against the solid Chippendale chair, her hands gripping the back until her knuckles were like a row of white marbles in her brown hands.
I saw then for the first time that her hair was gold, her eyes as blue as sapphires . . .
I looked back at Dan Winthrop. I wouldn’t know how a man looks when he merely finds the Holy Grail . . . but I do know how he looks when he finds it only to know he has lost it forever, because it belongs to another man. For I realized, with a lurch of my heart and a feeling almost too sick to bear, that the auburn-haired girl was not Cheryl Winthrop, that she was Natalie, whom Dan was supposed to marry, and that Cheryl was the slim fragile girl who stood next to Mara . . . and that she was the girl of Vezeley, with hair the color of ripe wheat in the sun and eyes blue as faded hyacinths.
It seemed to me an eternity that they stood there, looking at each other. I could feel, rather than see, Rick Winthrop’s sullen sleepy eyes moving from one to the other of them, slowly. They were still motionless, and speechless. Irene wasn’t. She couldn’t have fluttered more charmingly, but her voice had a steelier note than I’d ever heard in it before, through all the years I’d known her:
“Cheryl . . . why have you never told us you and Dan were . . . acquainted?”
It must be hard indeed, with a whole golden universe lying shattered around you, to feel the sudden flick of the lash, on a spot where your heart is the most vulnerable . . . and neither of them could have failed to recognize that note in Irene’s voice.
Cheryl stood an instant, stunned and hurt, like a child struck full in the face by someone quite strange, and turned slowly around.
