CHAPTER TWO

I couldn’t tell at the moment whether Cheryl Trent, blue-eyed, with a mass of shining curls showing under a jaunty little dark blue hat that matched her blue tweed suit with white piqué waistcoat and her blue slippers, resented my being there, or just my being there with Dr. Sartoris. She needn’t have, certainly, because it was perfectly obvious that so far as the handsome blond doctor was concerned, only one woman existed at that moment.

I followed them up the steps and across the street to the large coffee-colored Cadillac that was being inspected by several red-caps and a couple of taxi-drivers. Dr. Sartoris opened the door.

“Will you ride in front with me, Miss Gather?” Cheryl Trent asked coolly.

“No, thanks,” I said.

She looked a little startled, and Dr. Sartoris intervened promptly.

“I’ll sit with you, Cheryl,” he said. “Miss Cather’s had enough of me for today—haven’t you?”

“Quite,” I said.

Cheryl glanced at him. I couldn’t make out whether the girl was beautiful, but not particularly bright, or what. She seemed rather confused. I wondered a moment if she knew who I was, or thought I was just something Dr. Sartoris had picked up and brought along.

I got in, and the porter and Dr. Sartoris arranged the bags.

Cheryl Trent, at the wheel, leaned back.

“Do you mind putting that parcel up on the seat,” she said. “It’s something of Dad’s and it might break.”

I picked the parcel up off the floor. It felt like a box of writing paper, and not in the least fragile; but I deposited it carefully on the seat. I’ve often thought since then of that plain brown-paper-wrapped parcel, and its importance—so long unsuspected—in the events that occurred during my short stay at Ivy Hill.

I looked at Cheryl Trent with some curiosity as we went along. Whatever else she might or might not be able to do, she could certainly manage a motor car. It was little short of miraculous the way she slipped through the traffic on Baltimore’s famous Charles Street—which is more like Bond Street at eleven o’clock in the morning than the leading thoroughfare in a wealthy American city. Again, when she passed a double-tanked oil trunk on a curve at the top of a hill on the Annapolis pike, and missed by about half-an-inch, and without batting a silky eyelash, six Negroes who were apparently rebuilding a Model-T Ford, I decided there was more to her than you’d think.

She obviously had something to say to Dr. Sartoris, and I was equally obviously in the way. I thought of pretending I was deaf, or something, but I gave it up when my eye happened to catch hers in the oblong mirror over the windshield. For an instant we regarded each other with calm impersonal appraisal. Before she dropped her eyes to the road, which she evidently knew well enough to drive blindfolded, there was something like a smile of acceptance in her face. And then she turned to Dr. Sartoris, who had been talking cheerfully about New York.

“Mother’s been raising hell since you left,” she said calmly.

“Really?”

I thought Dr. Sartoris was a little startled out of his corn-placement charm.

“Hutton’s been simply poisonous. Mother’ll cut her throat some day. If somebody else doesn’t do it first.”

“What’s Agnes been doing?” he asked. He didn’t glance back at me and say, “You see?—I told you so”; but he might just as well have.

“Oh, the usual things. Nothing you can take hold of and go to Dad and say ‘Agnes Hutton said this to Mother, and you’ve got to fire her.’ It’s nothing like that. You simply can’t say to Dad that Agnes kept calling the yew trees the Jew trees without making him laugh, and then he says it serves Mother right. She’s always getting words wrong, and Agnes never does anything but smile, and then use them the first time there’s anybody around. And the stuff Mother reads and thinks is Literature, and all that. You know how she makes fun of her, openly, all the time. About her having her face lifted, and all that sort of thing.”

“I know,” said Dr. Sartoris sympathetically.

“And you can’t blame Mother for hating her, and being half-afraid of her at the same time,” Cheryl went on. “Agnes is awfully clever, and attractive too, and she’s so sweet to Dad it makes me sick at my stomach.”

The determined sort of ruthless nonchalance in the girl’s manner gradually disappeared.

“Of course really I don’t give a rap about it. It’s Mother’s own fault. But she oughtn’t to stand for it,”

You could see that she did give a pretty big rap about it. I thought she was rather sweet, under this mask of not caring about anything.

“I’ll talk to Agnes,” Dr. Sartoris said gently.

“I wish you would,” Cheryl said. “If you don’t, somethings going to happen—and it’s mess enough with all this new business hanging over us.”

Dr. Sartoris half-turned to look at her, slim and nonchalant, flicking cigarette ash out of the window with one small white-gloved hand.

“What new business?” he asked.

“Don’t you know?”

Her voice had sunk, and instead of pretending I was deaf I found myself straining my ears to hear her above the smooth hum of the motor.

“About Michael Spur?” she went on.

Dr. Sartoris shook his head—or I thought he did.

“He’s coming back.”

Something like awe or dread, or just plain fear, sharpened the edges of her voice, which was normally rather husky and pleasant.

“When?”

“We don’t know—that’s the horrible part of it,” she said quickly. “Today, tomorrow—we don’t know. We’re just living in terror of it. Mother’s almost beside herself. Everybody’s on edge. It’s perfectly ghastly.”

There was a long silence after that. We had left the dreary expanse of service stations and chicken coops, and were traveling swiftly through great banks of snowy-petaled dogwood.

A little cry of joy broke from Cheryl’s smooth rouged lips.

“Isn’t it lovely!”

Just ahead was a sudden deep red slash in the snowy mass. I saw her looking at it at the same time that I did; and she gave an involuntary shudder.

“What’s that red stuff?” I asked practically.

“Judas Tree,” she said softly, “it looks like blood, in the snow.” Dr. Sartoris smiled at her.

“I should say you are rather jumpy,” he said, and she laughed a little. “I’m sorry,” she said.

She turned to the right, and in a few moments turned again, into a narrow dirt road marked only by a couple of cylinders, with the names of Baltimore papers painted on them, perched on posts that were stuck at crazy angles into the ground. In a quarter of a mile or so we turned again, through a pair of beautifully wrought but rather medieval iron gates, between two brick pillars.

The unkempt dirt road had not prepared me for the gates—with a ducal crown worked in slender metal in the centers of them—nor for what was on the other side. Just ahead of us was a tiny lake, shimmering green and mauve and yellow in the setting sun. Three stately white swans moved idly across it to the shelter of a tall weeping willow with young green streamers gesturing gently in the dying breeze. Beyond stretched lawns and gardens and arbors and trees, and beyond them lay a silent bay opening into the broad waters of the Chesapeake. A slim white sail floated in the distance, and far beyond it a steamer with black smoke coming from its funnel moved down the Bay. From the car window I saw a screen of pollarded cedars, and beyond it a house. A very astonishing house.

Just why I had assumed that Ivy Hill would be red brick and Georgian, I don’t know. I suppose it was because I hadn’t met Mrs. Trent. It wasn’t red brick, and it wasn’t Georgian. It was pink brick and tile, and it was frankly and appallingly Tudor Gothic, with high arched windows and flattened flying buttresses. It was an extraordinary building, and it must have cost tons of money.

Dr. Sartoris turned back to me as we came up to it.

“The Trents built this place before the present interest in the Early American,” he said. “The decorators scoured Europe to keep it in period, but fortunately Mrs. Trent has great independence of spirit.”

Something like a plain grunt came from the girl at his side.

I got the idea that they were preparing me for the worst.

And in its way the house at Ivy Hill was as incredible as the things that happened in it. In fact, I suppose, it was the kind of house that strange things have to happen in, as a sort of ironic destiny. I didn’t, of course, know any of that when Cheryl Trent brought the big car to a stop in front of an elaborate oak studded door. A colored butler, white-haired, in plum-colored livery, greeted Cheryl with a broad grin.

“Is yo’ back, Miss Cherry?” he squeaked in a pleased falsetto. Then he bowed to Dr. Sartoris.

“We didn’ speck yo’, suh.”

Dr. Sartoris smiled genially.

“I came quite suddenly,” he said.

“We’s always mighty glad to have yo\ suh.”

“This is Miss Gather, Magothy,” said Cheryl.

“Evenin’, miss.”

I handed him Cheryl’s parcel and got out. I had a brief chance to look around while he was sorting my baggage from Dr. Sartoris’s. It was then that I decided it was an incredible place and that incredible things could easily happen there; in fact, a strange thing happened almost immediately. I was looking up at the tali narrow leaded windows when I saw a curtain just above us fall suddenly—not suddenly enough, however, to keep me from seeing a woman’s hand making elaborate signals to one of us there in the drive. I looked around. Cheryl was busy, with her back to the house; and as for Dr. Sartoris, his gray eyes and fine clear-cut features were as bland and innocent as you please. In fact, he was looking the other way too. I had a curious feeling of something out of the way going on; but Mag-othy’s high amused cackle at something Cheryl said to him seemed so innocent and friendly that I decided it was the large pink building with the queer leaded windows that was doing it. It was incongruous enough, Heaven knows, there by the clear smiling waters of the Chesapeake.

“We dine at seventy-thirty, Miss Cather,” Cheryl Trent was saying to me. “Aspasia will be up there to show you the ropes, and I’ll be along before dinner.”

I said “Thanks,” and followed Magothy inside, into an enormous high-ceilinged hall, paneled in dark mellow oak, with a wide staircase going up ahead of us and a balcony running around three sides of it. The staircase had three suits of armor, two holding spears, stationed on the landing. The balcony rail was hung for all the world like the chapel in Les Invalides, with tattered banners of faded blue and gold and red. The only thing missing was a tomb in the center of the floor below, and we got that before we were through with it. The whole place was dimly lighted through the high windows, but warmly lighted—there was a rose window over the landing.

“Them armors is from Europe,” Magothy said, pointing to the mailed figures. “An’ that there window come out of a thedral, also in Europe.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes, miss. In fac\ ebrything we got in the house come out of somewheres.”

We were passing a series of elaborate carved linenfold chests and armoires in the upstairs hall. We turned right, and Magothy opened a stout oak door.

“Here yo’ is, miss. Now I got to tell the Madam that there doctuh, he back.”

I was inside a room that might have come out of a museum, and really ought to have been left in it. A high curtained bed, a prie-dieu with a rushlight on it, a carved oak chest, a carved oak bench in front of a high stone fireplace. The fireplace was a lovely paneled thing, and there was a cheery little blaze behind a pair of fine wrought-iron firedogs. I can’t say that even then the place was particularly homey, and there wasn’t anything to sit down on that had a cushion on it. And there was certainly nothing inviting about the heavily curtained bed except the steps you had to use to get into it.

However, the bathroom adjoining, with polished rose quartz, inlaid jade and amber water lilies, more than made up for it. By the time I’d had a bath in the delicate aromatic stuff that gushed out of the concealed faucet, I was a new woman.

Aspasia came, a neat mulatto in brown poplin, and put my things away. She said, “Is there anything else, miss?”

I said, “Yes. One thing. Who is Michael Spur?”

She said, “Michael Spur, miss? Is he white or colored?”

He might have been Siamese, for all I knew, so I let the matter drop.

I’d finished dressing when Cheryl Trent tapped at my door and came in, a slim, charming daffodil of a girl in sea green tulle with quaint puffed little sleeves and a long slim skirt flowering out into a billow of ruffles at her gold shod feet. The yellow curls still clustered at the back of her neck, but the rest of her head was set in sleek shining waves, with just a curl escaping here and there to prove she wasn’t too sleek and shining.

“Ready?” she asked.

“When I get a handkerchief. Now.”

But she had sat down on the bench in front of the fire and was looking at me with two wide-set unsmiling blue eyes.

“I didn’t mean to be so rude to you this afternoon,” she said seriously.

I smiled.

“I wasn’t, really. I mean, I was just surprised,” she went on. “I didn’t expect to see Dr. Sartoris, in the first place, and I didn’t know you knew him . . . and, well, I didn’t expect you to look like . . . I mean, I thought you’d be about forty, and maybe fat, or awfully thin, and wear glasses, and talk about your work. You know? “

“Yes,” Ï said, “Í know.”

There wasn’t any use telling her I was practically thirty, and that anyway forty wasn’t horribly old.

“That’s what the women who write things that come to see Mother look like. They all give me a pain in the neck. When Dad said you were coming, and for me to meet you, I thought we were in for it again. Dad said you wouldn’t be so bad, because he knew McCrae wouldn’t send anybody terribly poisonous down.”

She was talking quite as if she were speaking about somebody out in the garden. I gathered there was nothing personal intended, really.

“How long have you known Dr. Sartoris?” she asked abruptly.

“About six hours, roughly, I should say.”

She looked at me with a surprised puzzled expression in her eyes.

“Oh!” she said. “I mean, really? I don’t mind, you know.”

I saw she hadn’t understood me.

“I ran into him, literally,” I said, “at noon today, outside Mr. McCrae’s office. That’s the first time I ever laid eyes on him. Then he was on the train coming down, and we introduced ourselves and talked. You know how you do on trains.”

As a matter of fact my only other experience of the sort had been with a very young missionary returning from China, and I talked with him from Seattle to New York.

“I’ve never been in a train alone,” she said simply.

“It’s fun,” I said. “You ought to try it some time.”

She nodded.

“Did he tell you anything about us?” she asked, as abruptly as before.

“He said you were all terribly nice, except somebody. I’ve forgotten just now who it was.”

“I guess it was Dad. Or maybe Dick—that’s Major Ellicott. Or maybe he meant Mr. Archer, Dad’s lawyer?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Did he tell you about Michael Spur?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“And you really never knew him before? Not really?”

“Never,” I said patiently.

She traced the pattern in the Aubusson rug with her little gold shoe, and bit her under lip thoughtfully.

“Then you wouldn’t know, would you,” she said, after a moment.

“Know what?”

“Whether he’d know.”

It was too confusing for me. I sat down on the bed steps, hoping she’d explain just what she did mean.

“I mean, if you never knew him before, you wouldn’t know whether he’d be apt to be right when he says Michael Spur will murder one of us when he comes.”

“Good Lord,” I said, “what are you talking about? “

She looked wide-eyed and surprised.

“Of course,” she said; “I forgot. You don’t know about Michael, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, you see, he murd-”

There was a tap on the door. She stopped abruptly. I said “Come,” and Aspasia looked in.

“Your father is waiting for you-all, miss,” she said.

“All right,” Cheryl said. She got up. “Let’s go. I’ll tell you after dinner.”