Captains and The Kings (63 page)

her face agape and blank. Kevin had just returned from his ride. "Hey" he called to his sister. "What is all the hurry?" But Ann Marie, as if she did not see or hear him, was stammering to a stable boy. "Is my horse--Missy--is my horse ready?" She had begun to pant. Her nostrils were dilated and her eyes had a crazed expression. Kevin was suddenly frightened. He had never seen Ann Marie like this before, so distracted, so quietly frantic, so ghastly of color. He put his hand on her arm. She appeared not to be conscious of his presence. Her slight breast was rising and falling rapidly, as if she had been running for miles. "Ann Marie!" he almost shouted in her ear. She started away from him then, and cringed, but she did not look at him. The stable boy was bringing her horse and offering his hand to assist her. She sprang up into the saddle and Kevin was aghast at her face. He watched her wheel the horse and race off, her skirt billowing in the breeze she created. He said to the stable boy, "Quick! Bring out my horse again." Ann Marie was only a distant little cloud of dust now. Kevin leaped into his saddle and galloped after his sister, and he knew the first real fear of his somewhat stolid young life. Something had happened to his sister, and she had seemed out of her mind. Courtney Hennessey, riding to meet Ann Marie, had given long and wretched thought to what he must tell the girl. He held back his own pain, which would devour him if he let it, so that he could concentrate on the alleviation of pain in Ann Marie. He could only tell her the oldest story, or lie, of all, that he was interested in another girl now, whom he had met in Boston, and that he knew, at last, that his love for Ann Marie had been the love of a brother for a sister, and not real attachment. Banal, banal, he cursed to himself. Perhaps he could say that it would be "years" before they could, marry, and that she must not wait for him, and .then he would quit law school and go abroad for a year, thus putting him behind Rory and extending his studies. Then, abroad, he would not write to Ann Marie. He might even stay longer, until his acute grief and despair subsided. He might try to convince her he was a scoundrel, unfit to touch her hand. Very melodramatic, he told himself with contempt. He could dearly see her stricken face, her suffering eyes, and hear her stammered questions. He knew that above anyone else in the world, even her father, she loved him, dung to him like a child. He tried to tell himself that she was young, that his long absence would cure her of him, that she would meet some other man. But as for the truth, he could never tell her that. He knew how fastidious she was, how revolted she would be, how appalled. There was also his mother to consider who should not be shamed at this time in her life. It seemed incredible to him, and nightmarish, that he was in fact a true Hennessey, and not only by adoption. He had loved his father, but now he hated him. One conscienceless man could destroy numerous innocent lives in one heedless and lustful moment. Tom Hennessey had done this, to his wives, his son, his granddaughter. God knows how many others he had injured during his career. Hundreds, thousands, perhaps. Courtney knew much about politicians, and much about his father. He did not see the warm quiet pasturage he rode over, nor the green leaves of trees so brilliant that they appeared newly varnished, nor did he see the quail rising at his passage nor the way the grass bent and glistened nor the little pools of red and yellow and white wild flowers among the trees and in small hollows, nor did he hear the rustle of any wing or the cry of any bird. The hills beyond were radiant in the sun, green and violet and purple, and the small river that ran from them through the pastures trembled and rippled in silver splashed with blue and lemon shadows. Distant white farmhouses stood in an air so pure that they seemed built of shining marble, their red roofs glowing in the light. But Courtney saw none of this. It was irrelevant to his pain and had no meaning for him. The polished blue sky had no consolation; its very luster was a mockery, and alien. One small part of his consciousness remarked in bitter wonder why the world should be so lovely and the thoughts and circumstances of man so terrible, as if man were a dark intruder and rejected by every leaf and sound and petal, not only with contempt but with laughter and indifference. Now the green earth began to rise as the horse climbed up the side of the low hill towards the woods at its summit, and the sun heated Court- ney's face and shoulders and he felt nothing but the black coldness in himself. His head was bent. Over and over he considered various stories he should tell Ann Marie, and all of them were full of bathos and insincerity and sounded cruel. But, like his mother, she should be protected from the truth. Any lie was better than that. He could see her face, so poignant, so trustful, so timid, so fearful of hurt, so anxious to please. It was not a beautiful young face, but it had more than beauty for it was without malice or slyness and above all it was not stained by life. It had a certain angelic and dispassionate quality, without human experience to mark it. He could see her eyes, sherry eyes full of clarity and brightness, reflecting back her thoughts which were never murky. Now he must throw misery into that face and quench those eyes and he did not see as yet how he could do it. How could such a soul and such a face have been born of Bernadette and Joseph Armagh, and how could she, by God, have been descended from Tom Hennessey? Once Tom Hennessey had said of his dead wife, Katherine: "She was most unfortunate. She was a born fool." He had said this to Elizabeth in the hearing of her son and Elizabeth had not replied, to Courtney's memory, for he had been very young then. Now Courtney wondered about Katherine Hennessey and he considered that it was very possible that the young Ann Marie, in her innocence and trust, must resemble her grandmother, who had apparently not been able to stand fast in the world in which she had found herself and had had no protection. For such as Katherine and Ann Marie the world was a savage strange place full of monsters, and inevitably they were destroyed. He reached the top of the hill and it lay in a luminous silence with the deep low woods just beyond. Here and there on the rough ground lay small stones and small boulders and between them grew tiny pink flowers and green leaves, frail with life, and Courtney thought again of Ann Marie. They grew there in gentle courage, but he knew that their roots were feeble and once plucked they died almost immediately. He looked about him and he was all alone and below him lay the shining land from which, he knew now, every man was exiled and had been exiled since the beginning of time. The Garden was not really for man. His natural home was crepuscular and shadowy, full of stealthy footsteps, thorny ways and the glimpse of deadly enemies from behind every rock. It was a place of ambush, and flashes of distant fire and the rattling and roar of dead and blasted trees, and earth on which nothing living could grow and have its being. Man's natural habitat was hell, and not this world. Its voice was clangor and discord and shouts of hate, the thunder of arms and death, and its random illumination was lightning. No wonder that everything innocent ran from man as from a Fury, knowing it had been condemned, by an inexplicable God, to be dominated by this liar and this murderer for no fault of its own. Courtney was a skeptic, but now he found his spirit in revolt against a God who could have perpetrated the race which was a blasphemy and a curse under the sun. It was easier to believe in Lucifer than in a God, .and much more credible. tie knew that these thoughts came from the necessity to wound and destroy something innocent and good, but they seemed all the more filled with verity for that. The woods were deep and meshed and filled with old dead leaves and moss and vines, and some of the trees were virgin timber with low boughs tangled together. No sound came from the woods, and nothing except a scent of fecund decay and a cool aromatic breath of dampness. The trail Courtney and Ann Marie took bypassed the woods and wound about them, and then descended again to the land below. Sometimes Ann Marie would bring a basket for mushrooms growing in the woods, or arbutus in the spring, or glossy chestnuts in the autumn. Courtney bent his head almost to his horse's neck as if the weight of pain was too heavy for him. Nothing that his mother had told him had lessened his love for Ann Marie. In fact, it was heightened for now it was forbidden and he knew that never again would he come up this hill and never know again what he had known before. He heard the swift pounding of hoofs rising from the other trail which led up the hill and his heart pounded with torment in answer. He thought he heard following hoofs, but dismissed the idea as an echo. Then all at once Ann Marie and her young mare burst up before him, as if jumping from the ground, and Courtney tried to smile and he lifted his hand. But Ann Marie reined in her horse so suddenly that the mare half-reared then fell back, whinnying in indignation. Ann Marie sat straight and high in her saddle, and her habit was lifted by a light wind, but she had lost her hat. She sat there and looked at Courtney and then he said to himself with a kind of terror, She knows! He saw her face, convulsed, frightfully white and sunken, and he saw the horror in her eyes and the leaping despair and the agony. She looked down upon him and seemed to recognize him as something not of her world, not of her life, but threatening and indescribably catastrophic. It was a disastrous face that confronted Courtney. "Ann Marie!" he cried, and spurred his horse to approach her. But she swung her mare about and in an instant she had plunged wildly into the woods, the terrified mare crashing and stumbling, rising and falling in the uneven terrain. Before Courtney could even reach the edge of the woods the girl and the horse had disappeared, leaving only echoes behind them, and smashing sounds. She will be hurt in there, she will die in there, thought Courtney, and got off his horse and his legs shook under him. He could feel the blood driving to his heart, and cold sweat rushed out over him, and everything took on the sharp brightness and sharp shadows of nightmare and dread. He heard a shout; he hardly heard it as he ran for the woods, and then he heard his name called, and he halted. Kevin, on his own horse, had arrived. Kevin swung down and flung aside his reins, and ran to the other young man. "Where the hell is she? Where's Ann Marie?" he shouted. "I followed her up here. She was tiding like mad!" Even then Courtney could take thought. He said, "She just rode up, and then--then her mare bolted into the woods. She didn't say a word. Nothing." "Jesus," said Kevin, and they both listened for a moment to the distant breaking and tearing sounds. Kevin's face was horrified and desperately alarmed. Big though he was, and somewhat clumsy when in a house, he ran with Courtney to the woods and they pounded into them, and were immediately drenched with dank coolness and dimness. Kevin lurched like a great black bear, native to this element, apparently lumbering but moving with sure speed, dodging tree trunks and low hanging limbs, sometimes sinking into small natural pits, jumping over stones, wading through old pungent leaves, pushing aside brush, leaping over fallen trunks, and arousing, in his passage, cries of dismay and panic from the hidden creatures who had been stricken into voice and movement by this impetuous intrusion. Courtney, who had considered himself more agile than this bulky youth, found himself panting behind him, falling once in a while, tearing his clothing on brambles and thorns, bruising and ripping his flesh, staggering against an unseen trunk in the dimness, spraining muscles in his ankles and legs, and panting and sobbing aloud. Kevin wasted no breath on shouts and calls. His eye followed the crushed path of his sister's horse, and the branches which still swayed after her flight. He heard Courtney behind him but did not look back. tie was like a battering ram in that green and sullen dimness, that twilight of entwined trees. He splattered through a little rill, and then ran faster, as if gaining new strength and Courtney almost lost him. The smell of the woods, disturbed and aroused for the first time in years, flowed about the young men, acrid, bitter with fungus, and the effluvia of many things which had died in those hidden places and under those wet black leaves and in that watery moss. Something was shrilling and screaming at a distance, and Kevin stopped a moment to listen, and then ran in that direction, with Courtney fast upon him. Now Kevin's strength and speed increased. He plunged into thickets instead of pulling them aside with his hands, which were now bleeding. He stopped only once to call, .... Ann Marie! Where are you!" Only the awful shrilling answered him, a disembodied plea, and Courtney came abreast of him and he saw the young man's broad and deadly white face like a ghost in the duskiness and the fear in his dark brown and starting eyes. "It's her horse," he said to Courtney. And he ran on again, with Courtney at his heels. Then Kevin stopped so suddenly that Courtney fell against that big brown back, started to fall and had to catch the heavy muscular arm of the youth. There was a hot anguish in his right ankle, as if it were broken and his shoes were filled with water. He looked over Kevin's shoulder, and then it was as if everything deafened about him, and died. Missy, the mare, lay sprawled near a tree, which she had struck, her legs threshing the air, her long neck outstretched, her teeth glimmering in torture, her eyes rolled up. And near her lay the broken body of Ann Marie, almost lost in that obscurity, for her habit was nearly the color of it, and she did not move nor utter the slightest cry. Kevin saw all this. He saw that the writhing mare's hoofs would soon strike his sister and he ran to her and huddled down and pulled her free and safe. She was like a flaccid doll in his hands, her hair tumbled about her in a brown veil, her arms hanging loosely. Her habit was shredded and ripped. "O God, no," said Courtney aloud, and ran to Kevin, who was gently lowering his sister to the ground again. The fearful shrilling of the mare was louder; her screams sent wing echoes through the woods, and answering cries. The two young men bent over Ann Marie and Courtney brushed her hair from her face and for the first time he saw that the hair on her skull was matted and black and streaming with blood. They knelt on their hands and knees above the girl, their