Dragonwyck (43 page)

It was only after a moment that she noticed in the room a bluish haze and a pungent odor.

'You smoke here?' she asked vaguely, conscious of a baffled disappointment. She had for so long romanticized this locked room, had been so sure that once she penetrated its secret, she would at the same time penetrate the wall that guarded her husband's soul.

He stared at her steadily, so that she turned and answered his gaze, noting with surprise that in his eyes the pupils had shrunk to pinpoints. The irises appeared to be a solid blue.

'I smoke here.' He repeated her puzzled question with a sarcastic inflection. He reached out and seized her right wrist. His fingers closed around it in a brutal grip. He pulled her over to the couch, and she saw then that on its far side, hitherto hidden, there stood a small charcoal brazier and a tabouret on which lay a carved silver box, some fine wires, and three strangely shaped pipes.

'Behold the diamond gateway to all beauty and all power!' he said in that curiously slow voice.

She stared at the little pipes and the glowing charcoal. 'What is it, Nicholas?'

He released her wrist and opening the silver box brought out a sticky black ball which he cupped in his hand. 'Opium, my love. The glorious fruit of the poppy!'

She looked from the sticky ball in his hand to his face.

'But that's a drug, isn't it?' she said uncertainly. She had never heard the word except once two years ago when she had skimmed through a newspaper editorial on the evils of the Chinese opium traffic.

Nicholas inserted one of the wires into the ball and twisting off a tiny bead began to toast it over the brazier. 'No drug for me—' he said, and his voice sank to a whisper. 'No drug, but a javelin to pierce the mist which separates us from reality. It is my servant. All things are my servants. For I am master of life and death. Don't you know that yet, Miranda?'

He turned his head and smiled through half-closed lids. Her heart began a slow pounding, but she managed to speak with calm.

'You're not well, Nicholas. I know that whatever this stuff is, it's bad for you. Come downstairs with me now—please.'

He laughed lazily and, placing the cooked pellet in the bowl of one of the pipes, he inhaled deeply, at the same time stretching himself upon the couch.

She began to edge cautiously away and his hand shot out fastening itself again on her wrist.

'Nicholas—' she said, looking down at him, 'I don't understand. What makes you do this?'

He did not answer her. He considered her question with an inward silent pleasure, viewing her and himself as through a translucent crystal. How delicious it was, this expanding of the faculties. His mind functioned by itself. It had withdrawn into cold star-spangled space, and out here in the vast infinity it gathered power until it became a flaming bail burning with an exquisite brilliance.

It had been on the visit to Poe's cottage that it had first occurred to him to try this instrument of power. Sometime after that he had gone down to a shuttered house on Mott Street. That experience had been distasteful, the poppy had not yet yielded to his mastery. He had not sought her again for a long time. There had been a reluctance. How shameful it now seemed!

He lay and contemplated that reluctance until it took form and he saw it as a small, creeping animal which must be crushed. Everything must be crushed which might obscure the flaming brilliance. He turned his head and looked up at Miranda. She too had taken on a luminous, fluid quality. In the dimming room her golden head was the only bright spot. His fingers tightened on her wrist until he could feel the small sinews move.

'Let me go,' she whispered. 'You hurt me.'

He saw that she trembled and that her long, beautiful lids were lowered to hide the fear behind them.

'Let me go—' she cried more loudly.

'Ah, but you don't want to go, my darling. Your soul and body are only a reflection of my will.' And he twisted her arm until she was forced down beside him on the couch. Her cries were stifled beneath his mouth. She shrank to a frozen stillness. The smell of the opium nauseated her.

At last his grip slackened. He pushed her from the couch, and reached for the silver box. 'Leave me alone,' he said dully. 'You weary me.'

He drew the key from his pocket and tossed it on the floor.

She bent to pick it up and gave an involuntary moan as pain shot through her swollen wrist.

Nicholas lay without moving, his eyes shut.

She unlocked the door and shutting it behind her walked slowly down the stairs to her bedroom.

Peggy, at her eternal task of putting away freshly laundered lingerie, uttered a sharp cry when she saw her mistress.

'Whatever is it, mum!' She gazed horrified. The missis' hair was falling down her shoulders and all tangled, her pretty rose bodice was torn, worse than that were the great staring eyes of her and the trembling of her pretty mouth. 'Och, and ye've hurt yourself, poor darlin'—' cried Peggy, touching the discolored wrist. 'Did
he
do that—the varmint?' she cried in sudden enlightenment. ''Tis the drink after all then he's a-closeting himself with up there!'

Miranda shook her head. 'It's not drink.' She moved restlessly to the dressing-table, picked up her brush, put it down again. 'Peggy, I want to see Doctor Turner. Heaven grant that he's still in Hudson.'

'He is that, mum. 'Twas only yisterday they was a-talking in the kitchen about him and the fine cures he does. 'Twould be for your wrist you were thinking of him?'

Miranda looked at her arm. 'Yes, yes, of course. It should be bound. I don't dare go to Hudson. I must get a message to him somehow—I don't know...'

'Leave it all to me, mum,' said Peggy with instant comprehension and sympathy. 'Write a bit of a note to send to him. I'll see that he gets it by midnight for sure.'

'But how can you—?' whispered Miranda, looking up doubtfully. 'How can you without danger of—?' In this house nothing escaped Nicholas, no orders were given without his approval, not the most trivial episode took place without his knowledge.

Peggy smiled demurely. 'There's a lad in the village, mum, Hans Klopberg the smith's 'prentice, wouldn't boggle at doing me a bit of a favor. He's trusty enough, for all he's a great hulking Dutchy.'

'Peggy dear—you're not—in love!' cried Miranda, momentarily shaken out of her own distress by the little maid's expression.

She had come to take this fidelity and affection for granted. It had never occurred to her that Peggy might have a life of her own, might—and this thought filled her with desolation—want to leave and get married.

Peggy read her mistress's face, and her own sobered. 'I'll never be leaving you whilst you want me, missis dear,' she said earnestly. 'Never.'

But I can't keep her if she has a chance for happiness, thought Miranda passionately, a chance to get away from this. And I don't know how I'll live without her. She felt that she hated this Hans Klopberg, whoever he was, and at the same time she despised her selfishness. Yet there were only two people in the world of whose love she was certain—Peggy and Abigail.

And neither of them had she repaid in kind, for always between herself and them there had stood the shadow of Nicholas.

'Come, mum, write the note,' said Peggy with brisk tenderness. 'I'm thinking we dare not have the young doctor to the house, for there's no telling when
he'll
be abroad again, nor yet what he can see from his turret and all. You must meet the doctor outside.' She thought swiftly, seeing that the poor dear lady was too deep in misery to plan. 'By the old mill on the creek, mum, as soon as it's light. Ye can slip out. Tell him that in the writing.' And Holy Mother of God keep that one from coming downstairs beforehand, she added to herself.

Her prayers were answered. All night long there was no sound from the tower room. Miranda lay alone and sleepless in the great Van Ryn bed. Her sprained wrist throbbed incessantly. At five she rose and dressed with Peggy's help. The November morning was chilly; both women's fingers grew numb and fumbling as they buttoned Miranda into a high-necked blue merino, topped by a hooded gray traveling cape.

Everything was arranged, Peggy whispered. Hans had ridden his father's plow horse to Hudson, giving as excuse a sudden pain in the foot which needed doctoring. 'Though,' said Peggy irrepressibly, 'divil a pain or an ache he's had in his life, that one, may the blessed saints forgive him for his untruthfulness.—'Twas artful of him, however, ttaking it all in all.'

Miranda smiled sadly at the girl's obvious pride.

'Yes, very artful, and then what—?' she urged.

Jeff had been awakened and read the note. 'He looked for a moment as dumbfounded as a hen what's hatched a clutch of ducks,' said Peggy, quoting her admirer. 'Then he gives a bit of a start and a shake, and says he'll be there.'

Miranda leaned down and kissed Peggy. 'Thank you,' she whispered.

They stole together through the silent house, and on those thick rugs and carpets even the shuffle of Peggy's dragging foot was inaudible.

They had decided to use the little side door in the music room, which was at the farthest point of the house from the tower. The door was behind the grand piano, and Miranda, seeing the gilded instrument, was suddenly reminded of how long it had been since Nicholas had played on it. The keyboard was locked, and upon the painted garlands which decorated the lid there had gathered a thin powdering of dust. She saw him suddenly as he had been on her first night at Dragonwyck.

Just here he had sat and played to her 'I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' and at her hesitant singing, he had smiled. A smile full of tenderness and indulgence. And back there in the Red Room, Johanna had been sitting alone, with her clumsy botched monograms. What had she been thinking of alone in there, while Miranda and Nicholas sang and played together 'I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls'?

'Hurry, mum,' whispered Peggy, and Miranda started. She had forgotten the miserable present, forgotten even Jeff in the reconstruction of that scene of five years ago.

As Peggy stationed herself to wait by the door, Miranda slipped out. She kept close to the protection of the house, then ran ten yards across the lawn to the nearest hemlocks. From there she hurried shivering through the woods toward the mill creek. Her kid boots made little crunching sounds on the frozen ground. Ahead of her through the distant oaks and chestnuts a lurid red sun slid above the horizon.

Jeff arrived at the mill first. He tethered his horse and entered the deserted stone building. It stood on the edge of the Van Ryn estate proper, and Mrs. Farmer Gebhard's rueful prophecy had been correct. As soon as the tenants had started the long-drawn-out proceedings against Nicholas for their rights to the lands, they had been deprived of the mill, and the shad runs, and the threshing barns, and the market boat—all the perquisites that they had formerly enjoyed. Nicholas would not negotiate, he ignored their proposals to rent these conveniences—to share produce. In fact during the last year he had come to ignore his tenants. If he saw them in church or in the village, he looked the other way.

The bailiff had after all decided to remain, and it was he who collected the rents from those whose titles were not yet cleared; these rents he now forwarded direct to the Van Ryn agent in New York. The situation was pleasing, for since the patroon no longer bothered to check or supervise there were many agreeable opportunities for Duyckman to feather his own nest.

Jeff, knowing these things, looked at the mossy millstones, the machinery already corroded with rust, and sighed. The tenants had won but a Pyrrhic and inconclusive victory after all. They were ground, as the grains of wheat used to be ground between these millstones, by the ponderous slowness of the new laws, and by Nicholas' refusal to co-operate.

Jeff blew on his fingers and stamped his feet to warm them. The cold made his old shoulder wound ache, though that and the thin line of scar on his cheek were the only mementoes still left him of the Mexican campaign.

His life had been full and interesting of late. He had been tremendously excited by the new use of ether as an anesthetic. The famous operation at the Massachusetts General which publicly introduced it had taken place while Jeff was still in Mexico, and it was not until the following year that he journeyed to Boston to learn the technique of administering this miracle-worker. Since then he had used ir enthusiastically, and discovered complete joy in surgery now that one no longer had to inflict agony on the patient.

Yes, the past two years had been pleasant enough. He had refused either to mourn or pine for Miranda, and by all accounts she had been involved with her husband in a giddy social whirl, so he had put her out of his mind.

He had, however, not married Faith, and that young lady, finally vanquished, settled down with a solid young lawyer who seemed to satisfy her very well. Jeff resigned himself to bachelorhood, though resignation was too strong a word for a circumstance to which he seldom gave a thought. And his was no monkish life. On his occasional holidays he could relax as well as the next man, could hugely enjoy a pint of good Barbados rum, and there had been a lusty adventure or two in Boston and New York.

When, last night, the brawny young blacksmith had delivered Miranda's note, Jeff had first read it with no reaction but astonished dismay. This summons to a secret rendezvous seemed to him melodramatic and ridiculous. When he re-read the note, he saw in the jerky writing and incoherent sentences signs of mental strain bordering on hysteria. He who never refused anyone who needed him could hardly deny Miranda, but he did feel a strong reluctance to subjecting himself again to the upsetting emotions which she invoked.

Still, here he was, cold, hungry for his breakfast, and certainly in no romantic mood.

He saw her slender gray figure come toward him through the bare tree-trunks. Despite her hurry and the tingling of her chilled feet, she moved with her own particular grace. He went to meet her, and she stretched out her left hand to him in a gesture half greeting, half supplication. 'Jeff—thank you for coming. I had to see you—talk to someone—it's about Nicholas.'