CHAPTER FOUR

The rich heady odor of Mr. Trent’s Havanas and the sound of men’s voices followed us out across the hall, and died away as the old butler closed the door. Mrs. Trent settled herself fretfully behind the coffee tray in front of the fifteenth century Florentine fireplace. From the determined lines of her mouth I thought we were in for a lecture on psychology. It was logical enough, considering her, and what they had been talking about. I had never seen any of these people, of course, before I’d left New York, but a newspaper woman sees too many Mrs. Trents in the course of a year not to recognize the type at once. If she hadn’t believed in psychology she’d have believed in something else, and in another six months she’d have “done” psychology and would be getting around to “doing” the Technocrats—though I doubt if you’d find a Technocrat as good-looking as Dr. Sartoris.

But I was wrong—about Mrs. Trent, not the Technocrats. I was just beginning to learn that Mrs. Trent never talked, when she could help it—not even about psychology—when her husband’s secretary was around, unless Dr. Sartoris happened to be there too. She had been so imposing when we left the dining room that it was a shock to see her deflate, as if her confidence in herself and psychology were seeping out of her like air out of a big red balloon.

Agnes Hutton, cool and aloof, sat at one side of the fireplace in a high-backed Jacobean chair, smiling what struck me as an irritatingly superior Mona Lisa smile, her large blue eyes half-veiled under heavily shaded lids. She apparently never spoke, I thought; but when Mrs. Trent put too much coffee in the little gold Lennox cup so that it slopped over, she moved her body ever so slightly, as if she’d had a sudden pain somewhere. She was quite maddening. Personally, I thought, I should have thrown something at her. I imagine Mrs, Trent must have wanted to many times.

The odd thing was that she really hardly ever said anything, so that one scarcely had a chance to be rude to her. Ï think the only time she really disturbed her smile to speak was when, just after she had murmured “No sugar, please, Mrs. Trent,” Mrs. Trent, vapid and preoccupied, promptly dropped two lumps in the small cup. Agnes Hutton’s delicately arched brows raised, and the smile deepened at one corner of her mouth. She turned a little toward me.

“That’s psychology, isn’t it?” she said. “Dr. Sartoris would say Mrs. Trent really wanted me to get fat.”

Cheryl Trent, who had been restlessly fiddling with the radio at the other end of the room, caught her lower lip between her teeth and gave the dial an angry twist that filled the room with a savage blast of sound. She turned it down again and sauntered over to her mother.

“We don’t have to worry about our figures, do we, darling?” she said, kissing her lightly on the top of the head. “It’s a gorgeous night, Miss Cather. Let’s go outside.”

“All right,” I said.

Mrs. Trent hastily put down her coffee cup and pushed back the tray. It was plain that she had no intention of being left alone with Agnes Hutton. Miss Hutton watched her coolly with that maddening smile. As Cheryl and I stepped through the long window onto the tiled terrace, we heard Mrs. Trent’s high sharp heels strike the uncarpeted hardwood floor of the hall.

Outside I took a deep breath. It was like a sharp sudden relief from pain to get out of that house into the cool sane night. In front of us stretched a long moon-drenched garden; at the end of it, between two tall perfectly matched poplars, lay the Ivy Hill bay, and out beyond the Chesapeake. On both sides of the garden was a high thick wall of closely clipped box. Its faintly exotic perfume was lost in the warm odor of the great crescent-shaped bed of blue and red and pink and white tulips just beyond the low terrace that led down to the long garden.

Cheryl, standing beside me, pointed to the white marble bench gleaming faintly in the moonlight a little way down.

“That’s where it happened,” she said quietly. “The blood stain is still on the bench. Mother was upstairs. She’d wanted Michael sent away to a sanatorium, and his father and Dad and Major Ellicott were in the library talking with Dr. O’Brien from Annapolis about it. He was shellshocked, and did all sorts of funny things, but only at night when he was supposed to be asleep.”

She hesitated. Then she said, ‘Tve never told Mother this. One night I was supposed to be asleep, but I sneaked downstairs to get a bar of chocolate Major Ellicott had given me. I’d hid it from the governess—I was only six, you see. It was dark, but I got the bar, and I was going back upstairs when I saw somebody on the landing. 1 was scared stiff. I got behind one of Mother’s chairs in the hall and hid. I was dreadfully frightened. It was Michael. He came down the stairs and stood looking up at Mother’s rose window, his eyes wide open and staring and wild. He kept saying something like ‘They’ve taken my gun, but I’ll get him.’ His voice was horrible. Then all of a sudden he reached out and took the spear out of the knight’s hand, and crept on down the stairs. He was coming straight at me. I could see him because it was bright moonlight, just like tonight. And I had on white pajamas, so he could see me too. He got closer and closer, and the spear raised in his hand, and I knew he was going to kill me, but I couldn’t scream or do anything. I just waited. And I saw his arms go back—he had it in both hands, like a bayonet—and the spear came slowly at me; and then suddenly his arms relaxed and he dropped the spear on the rug. Then he rubbed his hand over his eyes and pushed back his hair, the way he always did, and he knelt down beside me and picked me up in his arms and held me tight. He said ‘Cherry, honey, I’m sorry, did I scare you?’ He was so sweet, and I said, ‘No, Mikey.’ He said Til take you upstairs. Will you forgive me, Cherry?’ and I said I would. Next day I got spanked for getting chocolate all over my pajamas, but I never told on him. And it was the next night he shot his father. Then they took him away.”

Inside someone had turned the radio on. Outside the only sound was the croaking of the frogs in the distance.

“But you see, don’t you?” Cheryl asked.

“See what?” I said.

“I mean, he must have wanted to kill his father, or he would have stopped before he did it. The way he did with me that night. I didn’t tell Dr. Sartoris, but I sort of made up a case, and he said that such a person would always stop before he did anything he didn’t really will to do. He said nobody could make a hypnotized person do anything against his own deep-grained convictions. I mean you can’t hypnotize a person and make him commit murder unless he really wants to do it.”

“Listen, Cheryl,” I said. “Don’t you see what’s happened to all you people? You’ve been thinking about this thing till you’ve all got the jitters. You forget that Michael Spur has been away fourteen years. He’s probably cured, in the first place. And even if he isn’t, and even if he wanted to kill his father, you don’t suppose he’s going to want to kill everybody else here, do you?”

She shook her head reluctantly.

“He’ll probably walk in a successful bond salesman, or something, and you’ll all be ashamed of yourselves for letting a . . .”

I started to say “a charlatan” but changed it quickly.

“. . . for letting Dr. Sartoris get you in this state.”

“It isn’t only Sartoris. It’s Agnes Hutton too.”

“What’s she got to do with it?”

“Michael used to be engaged to her. Oh, that’s not really it, but you know how you get worried about things.”

I started to say something more when suddenly her hand closed tightly on my arm. I looked at her quickly. She was staring down the garden, her eyes wide, her breath coming in quick short gasps. I followed her eyes.

A tall dark figure was moving out of the deep shadow of the box, slowly, like a man in pain. His head was bare. He came forward with slow heavy steps until he stood by the marble bench. I saw him raise his hand to his head and brush back his hair like a man in a dream. Suddenly he knelt down and touched the bench.

We stood there breathless, watching him. There was a noise behind us. I looked back. It was Agnes Hutton. She was looking down there too, a lighted cigarette arrested midway to her lips. I felt Cheryl’s body stiffen. Miss Hutton looked at her; her cigarette completed the graceful arc to her mouth. She took a deep puff, exhaled it slowly, then, with her onaddening smile flicked the cigarette into the tulip bed. She turned without a word and went back into the house.

“God, how I hate that woman,” Cheryl whispered savagely.

“Let’s go in,” I said. She held my arm.

“Wait,” she whispered. I looked back down the garden.

Michael Spur had risen, and was coming toward us, slowly. On the other side of the flower bed he looked up, and saw us standing there. Between us the thin blue line of smoke from Agnes Hutton’s cigarette coiled into the air.

Michael Spur reached down and picked it up.

“Perry doesn’t like cigarette butts in the flower beds, Cherry,” he said with a smile. “Hello!”

“Hello, Michael!”

He came round the tulips and looked down at her.

“You’ve grown up, haven’t you, Cherry.”

She nodded. A tear caught in her long silky lashes, glistened a moment there, and fell.

“Yes,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

“Yes, I knew. That’s why I came back.”

Cheryl Trent caught her breath in something like a little sob.

“Michael—this is Louise Gather.”

“Hello, Louise,” he said, with a grin.

“Hello, Michael,” I said, and we shook hands.