Another Woman's House (4 page)

Myra's hand was digging into the ruby-red arm of her chair. The word was out, the word that all of them knew, and could not escape, that had made itself an inextricable part of the house, that had taken up its dreadful residence within those walls, and yet that none of them ever spoke. The one instance of Alice's imperfection.

She had been startlingly imperfect about murder.

Richard said, in a matter of fact way which was too terse and too matter of fact, “People asked me if I intended to stay here. Naturally there was nothing else to do. This is my home. These are my friends. Why should I leave?”

Suddenly Myra remembered the day Alice was sentenced—that final, terrible day. It was autumn by then, the trial had dragged along for months. Aunt Cornelia had broken her hip, ironically, the week before the murder, ironically, again, she had emerged from blitzes in London only to slip on a wet flagstone of her peaceful country garden in Devonshire. It was months before she could be moved to a wheel chair, months more before she was permitted by either doctors or priority needs to return to America and Richard. On the day of the final sentence she had been still in a nursing home in the country, waiting for a cable. Myra had brought it to her; Myra had had to read it: “Sentence life imprisonment. Thorne.”

She had not known then that terrible and tragic though that message was, it would actually one day so drastically affect her own life.

She had sent Aunt Cornelia's reply, too. “I am coming as soon as I can. My love always. Cornelia Carmichael.”

The silence had lengthened, as if the mention of Alice had imposed it, like a finger at their lips. Richard was frowning, looking at the lilies of the valley without, Myra thought, seeing them. His mouth was straight and uncommunicative. She felt suddenly very tired; her lips were dry. She must leave. She must leave the house the next day, and the library and the talk with Richard immediately, for she could not bear it a moment longer.

She rose, and Barton entered with the papers and the mail on a tray. Richard whirled around abruptly to toss his cigarette in the fire and said, “Come for a walk with me, Myra. There's an hour or so before dinner. Barton, will you get Miss Lane's coat?”

She didn't want to go. She had to escape, but she did not. She stood still, a slender, straight figure in her light-gray country suit and sweater. Her face was rather white, and her eyes, in the mirror over the fireplace, were dark blue and troubled, but she did not see her own reflection. Barton came back with her loose scarlet coat which Richard took and placed round her shoulders. He opened one of the French windows—perhaps the window which Jack Manders had opened on a night nearly two years ago, strolling from the cottage he shared with Webb Manders—the small, comfortable cottage, suitable to two middle-aged bachelors, living alone—around the point to the Thorne House. Through the warm, quiet night, to chat and borrow a book, Alice had always said.

They went out on the terrace.

It had turned colder and the spring twilight was clear and chill. The dogwoods and lilacs were in bud but their bare branches still made a fine brown tracing against the pale sky. There was a golden haze around the forsythia. The air was cool and moist with a light smell of the sea and a bright star hung low on the horizon. The whistles of the peepers in the woods between the house and the road made a delicate, fluting fabric of sound through the tranquil dusk.

Richard closed the door behind them and they crossed the damp flagstones of the terrace toward the wide steps and thus did not hear the telephone which rang several times, loudly, at the extension in the hall. Barton, in the pantry, finally answered it.

A
S THE PATH CURVED
toward the pines, there was a view of the house, clear against the evening sky.

It stood on a point above the Sound.

It had no name, really, but it had always been called Thorne House. It had changed very little from the time old Phineas Thorne, having built the Thorne fortune, looked around for a site and built the Thorne House upon it. It was solidly and well built because Phineas would have been content with no other way of building; that it was also beautiful was due to the chance of securing a fine architect who, besides a knowledge of balance and proportion, had the wisdom to yield to Phineas' own innate sense of simplicity and grace.

The result was a happy one. The house was of no particular period; it escaped the cramped rooms and narrow halls of the typical New England house by borrowing the generous height of ceiling and spaciousness of the great Southern houses of the time. The Thornes were of English and Scottish descent; From England, perhaps, came the plan for the wide central hall, the numerous chimneys, the thickness of walls and the solid, but gracious lines of the house.

Also from England, perhaps, came much of the feeling for substantial materials, wood and stone that would last for generations. Phineas Thorne had felt that he was building a family as he had built a fortune. The house itself was brick, especially ordered, especially kilned; a mellow, pinkish brick, weathering through the years to the softness of a well-rippened peach; wistaria with trunks as thick as a man's wrist, and deep, dark-green ivy, brought from England, clung to the old bricks, the luxuriant growth clipped back from windows and doorways. The window frames themselves were cypress and, inside the house, the floors were teakwood, the stairways cypress, too, the balustrades mahogany, worn satin-smooth by the pressure of many hands.

Walls surrounded the estate on three sides, shutting out the world, enclosing the house with the sea. Even the walls evidenced Phineas Thorne's sturdy feeling for the substantial and the permanent; they were made of rough-hewn New England rocks which were now weathered with age, moss-grown and lined with great banks of laurel and hemlock and old whispering pines.

Somehow Thorne House had escaped rebuilding during the extravagant, halcyon days of the eighties and nineties when there was no stopping the tide of money flowing into the Thorne coffers. The Thorne shipping line boomed into popular favor; its ships, built as well and solidly as Thorne House, went all over the world; the Thorne banks waxed fat and bursting with prosperity and Northern capital.

But the period that saw monstrosities built all along the New England coast, a period that founded the fabulous and ridiculous houses of Newport and along Fifth Avenue, saw Thorne House already built and invulnerable. A wing was added in 1889, but it kept to the original dignified and generous line of the house; hothouses were built in 1893, but they glittered gently from beyond well-matured gardens and hedges which had been laid out at the time the house was built.

Inside, of course, there were changes. It was Alice who had finally weeded out the ugliness and had restored and collected damaged or hidden beauties. She was efficient; she had time for everything. Even the gardens had improved under her painstaking care, so now the whole place, inside and out, measured up to the standard of beauty set originally by Phineas Thorne.

A belt of woods lay inside the walls, between Thorne House and the public road; through it wound what had once been a narrow carriage drive, bordered with glossy banks of laurels. It was now wider and neatly graveled and emerged from the woods upon a sweep of green lawn, as smooth as the English turf old Phineas had admired.

The gardens with their velvety turf paths, their dense clipped hedges of privet and box, lay along the south and east. In summer there were masses of bloom, a succession of color marching through the balmy days of early June with white lilies and blue campanula and slender spikes of pink and purple lupin and foxglove, and, later, great festoons of crimson roses, on into the brilliant orange and red of the August annuals. Now, in early spring, there were blue and white hyacinths and yellow daffodils and the pungent, bitter odor of the dark box.

The terrace overlooked the Sound, which lay like a silver band below a slope of grassy lawn, more pines and then a sudden strip of rocky wilderness which descended sharply to the sand along the water's edge. Paths wound downward here and there; there was a small sandy bathing beach and a new and modern boathouse; there Richard Thorne kept his sailing boat, the small and now rarely used yacht which had belonged to his father, and one or two motor boats, slow and utilitarian and, as with the yacht, rarely used. During the war yacht and motor boats had been loaned to the Coast Guard; since the war no one in the household had cared to use any of the boats. Perhaps they had grown accustomed to their absence; perhaps nothing about the place had quite resumed its former tempo since the war and since the June night during the war when Alice Thorne, the law later said, had taken a revolver in her beautiful hands and shot a man to death.

Certainly there was something different. The routine, the gracious little forms and customs went on as smoothly and as carefully as if Alice herself was still there to supervise their performance with that astonishing efficiency of hers. The floors and the silver were as brightly polished, the linen closets as delicately scented with lavender, the flowers as beautifully arranged, the turf paths as green and closely clipped, the menus as neatly written out in Miss Cornelia's small, old-fashioned handwriting as when Alice had typed them, swiftly and precisely on the small machine in her bedroom. But the house was different. It was as if all the strength and sturdiness of old Phineas' building had not yet summoned the power to resist the memory of murder—and of Alice.

But that was comprehensible. Again Myra thought, it is still Alice's house.

She had not spoken to Richard, nor he to her. There was only the sound of their feet along the path, the shrill, faraway whistles of the peepers, the regular hum of an airplane distant in the evening sky.

They entered the pines.

“Mind the branch. I'll hold it back,” said Richard, and held the fragrant green boughs aside so she could enter the path. The house vanished. The soft dusk below the pine trees' closed around them. The path was narrow. Myra walked ahead of Richard, along the slippery brown pine needles, intensely aware of the man who followed her, the scent of the cigarette he carried and the sound of his footsteps. The pine needles gave way to sand and they came out beside the rocks, rough and white. The water lay directly below, soft and clear, reflecting a pink glow from the lingering band of pink in the sky. They crossed the sandy strip of beach and stopped. The boathouse lay at the right; it was so quiet they could hear the water lapping evenly at the piles, and its soft slap and murmur against the boats.

The distant shore of Long Island was gray; nearer were several small islands, faintly yellow with willows, but veiled, too, in the soft spring twilight. Far away the hum of the airplane diminished.

“We could be a thousand miles from New York,” said Richard suddenly, his hands in his pockets. “We could be on a different planet. Except it would have to have the same stars and the same moon and the same smell of spring and sea.”

Tomorrow she would be in what was equivalent to a different planet. Actually, New York was scarcely an hour's time distant, yet it might as well be in another world. She would visit Thorne house again; she would chat with Aunt Cornelia over the telephone. She would never live in Thorne House again; she would never again see Richard on the terms of the past months, daily, with the easy, friendly accustomedness of habit. There had been a warm domesticity about it—false, of course, but kind.

It had been dangerous, too, but she had not perceived its danger. Well, this was the last time. When she left Thorne House the next day she left Richard Thorne too, forever. Even if he wished to he could not see her—not often, that is, not unselfconsciously. She could hear the little comments: “I saw Dick Thorne in town the other night. He was with that girl of Miss Cornelia's—secretary, ward, whatever she is. Tim Lane's sister.”

Everyone knew Tim, of course. He'd spent most of his vacations at Thorne Hall all the time he was in school. It had been like a home to him, thanks to Richard (and Alice—she reminded herself—and Alice) then and later, while Myra and Miss Cornelia were caught by the war in England and Tim was in boot camp.

She could hear the replies, too. “Really! I wonder—but of course Dick can't marry.” “No. Too bad. But there's no way out for him.”

All of it kind, none of it malicious. But Richard would hear it and avoid her. Actually, Richard knew as well as Myra that if he dined with a woman in town too often or at all, if he talked more than a few moments to the same woman at a cocktail party—if in any possible way Dick Thorne showed any woman marked attention, such comment was inevitable. Up to then, so far as she knew, there had been no comment; where Cornelia Carmichael went Myra went; everyone, she thought, accepted that without question.

Once she left Aunt Cornelia, once she went to live with Tim, it would be different.

There was a scurry and rush of feet along the sand and a small Scotch terrier skidded to a stop at Richard's feet. His red tongue showed, his black eyes glittered, his whole small body waggled furiously. “Hello, Willie,” said Richard, and scooped up the dog who rolled his eyes in lavish disregard for his usual taciturnity and strove to lick Richard's face.

“He's been hunting.” Myra reached over to pull a burr from his shaggy stomach. “Usually he's waiting and listening for your car.”

Richard gave the dog a pat and put him down on the sand and took out cigarettes which he offered Myra. He said, holding his lighter for her, “I'm sorry you are going to leave.”

Perhaps because in her heart she so wanted other words said in a different way, it seemed flat and perfunctory. So her own reply sounded as flat and as perfunctory. “I'm sorry, too.”

He waited a moment, almost as if he were waiting for her to say more, then he turned. “Shall we walk?” he said, and picked up a piece of driftwood to throw for Willie.